Outside the Box

Compare Nomar and Donnie Baseball at Baseball-Reference.com

I've got the product similarity implemented that I describe below under tout wars. I use the same similarity algorithm that I've been using for the last few years for Iowa Farm Report. Note that it adjust everyone to a 600 PA season and then compares them from that baseline. There is a penalty as well for differences in at bats. I'll have to write it up better if I utilize it on this site or elsewhere.

Anyways, I ran it on Nomar's four full seasons and removed the positional adjustment and guess who came up as Nomar's best comp? That's right, Mattingly. If you match up their age 23-26 seasons they map really well. You just have to hope that Nomar's career doesn't flame out quite like Mattingly's did. Dimaggio and Mize are in his top ten as well.

With defense, Ron Santo is Nomar's #1. And the top ten are:
Santo
Ernie Banks,
Joe Gordon
Cal Ripken
Travis Jackson
Tony Lazzeri
Don Mattingly
Chipper Jones
Edgardo Alfonso
Derek Jeter

Right now, I'm only looking at the ages where Nomar had 200+ plate appearances, so if a player debuted at age 24, they had a pretty big penalty for the first year. If the player debuted prior to age 23 as Jeter did, then there isn't any penalty added and we still only compare Nomar's age 23-26 to Jeter's age 23-26. Jeter's age 22 is disregarded in generating these values. Is this the most illuminative way to do things? I don't know.