Journalistic Malpractice

I often encounter people who defend the baseball media's c0verage of the game. They don't know or understand anything about the gains made over the years in analyzing player and team performance, they don't understand or want to acknowledge the tremendous impact of luck on the game and they're unwilling to let go of the comforting old shibboleths that attend the sport.

I understand this. Change must happen slowly and incrementally. In many ways, this is already happening. OBP and SLG are now regularly displayed in some newspapers, on some game broadcasts and on ballpark scoreboards.

Today I refer you to an article in my hometown paper, the Charleston Post and Courier, about the struggles of Kelly Johnson and Jeff Francouer. Specifically with respect to Francouer, the article makes repeated references to his batting averages, but not a single reference to walks, batting eye, pitch selection or OBP, the very nub of Francouer's problem. This is, quite frankly, journalistic malpractice.

Francouer swings at everything, which leads to a cascade of problems. Pitchers don't have to hit their spots to get him out. He never walks, so his OBP has never topped .336, even when he batted .300. He's making too many outs, particularly for a corner outfielder, even when he hits for average, which he hasn't done in two years.

Many sportswriters, and others who weren't paying attention, were impressed with Francouer's early performance. In his first full year, he batted .260, smacked 29 homers and drove in 103. Add his rifle arm in right field and the cogniscenti were agog. But the seeds of his decline were plainly evident even then. He drew just 23 walks and posted a pathetic .293 OBP. Not only is that unsustainable, pitchers picked up on it and are now exploiting his lack of selectivity. This year, he's neither walking nor hitting for average, leaving him with a line of .248/.282/.346. That's Rey Ordonez territory, but without the shortstop's glove.

The story I reference -- half of which is on the travails of Kelly Johnson -- runs 48 column inches, quotes the GM, manager, hitting coach and both players, and required at least one road trip from Charleston to Atlanta. Yet it utterly fails to inform its readers about Francouer's basic problem because the writer is still using performance analysis tools popular in 1970.

Imagine going to your doctor today and getting 1970s treatment for heart problems or cancer. Many of us would be dead today with that level of care. Or imagine your car mechanic giving a 1970s tune-up to the computer system in your Accord. That's intuitively unnacceptable. Yet sports journalism consumers have not begun demanding that sportswriters stop employing statistics proven innacurate 30 years ago and instead raise their level of performance analysis to standards developed since then and recognized as far superior.
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