Integrated 9s (i9s from here on out) has its roots in the late 1990s, when the two of us began work on what are now referred to as MLEs (Major League Equivalencies) for players who were barred from baseball due to its long-standing, officially sanctioned racism.
i9s is an attempt to answer the question: what if those barriers didn’t exist?
Over time, we’ll write some about the methodology and the assumptions that go into this work. The summary is that we’re trying to create what can be thought of as carefully hand-crafted MLEs.
What exactly does that mean?
It’s an attempt to take what we know about performance in the Negro Leagues, in the Cuban Leagues, in the various formal and semi-formal structures that predated and ran parallel to those leagues; combine that with, after running it through a fairly strict filter, the various subjective data we have; mix in our understanding of how baseball itself changed decade by decade (roughly); fold in the data we have about post-integration demographics in the game, and sprinkle on top some generosity towards the whole process. The result of all that should be year-by-year statistical records that feel reliable, plausible, nuanced, and defensible.
That’s sort of an initial step. It’s a huge step–it’s most of the work. But it’s incomplete.
Those stats will then be fed through a simulation engine (way back when we started this, it was Strat-O-Matic, now it’s OOTP), fine-tuned and tweaked further, and eventually we’ll be able to replay baseball from … well, sometime in the 19th century (the mid 1880s seem probable, but there are issues we’ll discuss later).
This step is of interest because it will help show what the overall impact of integration could have been: what “established” players never make the big leagues? What is the impact of higher quality players (if you think about it, any injection of talent should nudge the “worst” player in the league out of the league; adding hundreds of players should have a sizable impact).
There is so much to discuss. Future posts will tackle topics like
- Historical Assumptions I – Roster Composition
- Why You Need More than Math
- Where We’re Starting
- Refining the MLEs
- What About the Babe?
- The Sample Size Elephant in the Room
- General Guidelines
- Two Way Players
- Fiction I – DoBs
- Fiction II – Early Careers & Missing Years
And more …