28 March 2009

A Net Loss In the Knowledge Column

At this late moment in spring training, the Atlanta Braves (17-8) lead the Milwaukee Brewers (14-9) by two games in the exhibition season standings. I know this is utterly irrelevant, but bear with me.

Were this the regular season, and the two teams played in the same division, you can count on the Brewers' announcers (not to pick on them; I'm using them as an example) to note that they're only one game behind in the loss column.

That there would remain 135 games in the season aside, the rampant use of this datum reveals yet more ignorance on the part of many baseball observers. The use of "loss column" measurement is a late-season insight. Using it anytime other than the last 20 games is a perversion of this insight, like pondering the effect of a basketball player's weakness in transition on his performance at the foul line.

The reason the loss gap matters late in the season is that the trailing team can't make up defeats. Let's say your nine, the Macon Whoopie (82-70), trail the Buffalo Chips (87-69) by three games. If the Whoopie get hot, they only need Buffalo to lose once more in order to catch them. They can erase the Chips' five win advantage on their own.

Conversely, the Crawford Bushes' (82-74) three-game deficit to the East Wenatchee Apples (83-69) is much more dire because they're five behind in the loss column. The Washington contingent would have to drop five of their last 10 games for the Texas side to have any chance, no matter how hot they get.

With 60 games left in the season, parsing the gap this finely leaves you less -- not more -- informed. It's the reason our two-year election campaign leaves voters less informed about the candidates than if they just had six weeks to gather the few key pieces of information they need to make an intelligent decision. This is the underpinning of Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink, which has many applications to sports.

All this will be good to keep in mind after Opening Day, when a rival team wins before yours plays. You'll be in the middle of the division standings, but tied in the loss column.

Yankee Ingenuity

Word from Yankee spring training camp is that Joe Girardi will flip Derek Jeter and Johnny Damon in the lineup, moving his shortstop up to leadoff. Jeter's response was that he doesn't care, telling the Associated Press, "You hit 60 seconds earlier than you normally do."

One of the things that great players often demonstrate is an intuitive feel for the game that had never been borne out by the numbers, or even by conventional wisdom. I'm reminded of Greg Maddux and Roger Clemens, both correctly attributing statistical declines in their mid-career performance to bad luck and weak defense respectively. Each went on to win subsequent Cy Youngs.

Jeter's flippancy about his place in the batting order demonstrates that he understands how irrelevant it is. Batting order is largely immaterial beyond a few rudimentary concepts. As long as your best hitters bat at the top of the order, and you maximize the effects of handedness, there's little to be gained by sweating the exact order. About the only egregious error that managers regularly commit is to bat a weak-hitting speedster in the leadoff spot. Simply put, that strategy gives a weak hitter 50 extra plate appearances a year.

Being similar kinds of hitters, either Jeter or Damon would be a reasonable choice to lead off. Both get on base and around the bases, but are unlikely to waste a lot of home runs to start the game.

So why bother? My guess is that Girardi exploited Damon's .375 OBP last year and expects him to regress closer to his career average of .354 this year, while recognizing that Jeter's .363 OBP in 2008 was the second lowest of his career and is more like to edge closer to his lifetime .383 pace this year. If so, it demonstrates that Girardi also understands something about baseball.

15 March 2009

Good WBC News

I've got good news for Derek Jeter, Kevin Youklis and Jake Peavy. You're not playing for me, my honor or my pride. I don't care if you cough it up in the World Baseball Classic to Puerto Rico, the Netherlands or Guinea Bissau. Take it easy guys: the future of our country is not on the line.

Frankly, I don't care about the WBC in the first place. Coming as it does during Spring Training and missing so many top players gives it the essence of pre-season irrelevance in the first place. The exhibition-style rules that limit play -- e.g., pitching limits and mercy rules -- reinforce that. There's no way that's going to compete with my anticipation about the start of the season.

In a larger sense, these nation vs. nation sports exhibitions like the Ryder Cup, Davis Cup, Olympics, etc. designed to inflame nationalistic passions have always bemused me. Why do I care whether a collection of American professionals defeats a collection of Angolan amateurs in basketball? Athletes who are implored to "represent their country" should tell those urging them to shut the fuck up. They don't owe any of us anything, and nothing they do in those contests accrues to your advantage or mine in any way.

I'd feel a lot more national pride if we could reinvent our health care system so it worked, show some national restraint on energy use, treat the rest of the world a little better, balance our books, educate our children, feed our poor. But even without these things, and regardless of whether we outpitch Venezuela in the WBC, I feel pretty lucky to have been born in the freest, richest country the planet's ever produced.

11 March 2009

The Stats Fallacy: #5 In A Series

"Stats don't show a guy's guts. They can't tell you the human side, help you recognize fear, or figure out who is having a good day or a bad day. I look at the numbers all the time, but people who play fantasy games don't have to look a guy in the eye or try to help restore his confidence." --Dusty Baker

This is a familiar refrain from managers, who after all, are paid to make personnel decisions about guys they spend a lot of time with. Is it right or wrong?

Neither. It's a false dichotomy.

The question isn't, and never was, stats versus scouts. It's a fantasy of Michael Lewis that drove tradition-bound observers batty. The truth is and always has been that mathematical analysis and the softer human arts complement each other, and any team relying on just one or the other is doomed to failure. Numbers can enlighten us objectively about players' past results, but only a human eye, brain and heart can make observations about their physical, emotional and psychological health going forward.

In fact, the truthful dichotomy is: stats versus stats. Is Dusty making decisions based on batting average and saves and pitching wins and home runs or is he dialing up stats that actually matter, like on-base percentage, batting average on balls in play (BABIP), slugging average, etc?

If Neifi Perez bats .372 in the first half of the season, has he suddenly transformed into a hitting machine? The human brain tends to try to make sense of the unexpected, so it concocts explanations: Perez is squaring his hips or seeing the ball better or swinging through the zone. Perhaps, but if his BABIP has suddenly skyrocketed, particularly in the absence of a change in the types of balls he's hitting, (i.e., grounders, line drives, flies, etc.) it really tells you he's just been lucky and can expect a big ol' bag of return-to-earth in the second half. The same calculation works for pitchers: if a guy's BABIP-against spikes, the seeing-eye grounders have been getting through and he's primed for "improvement" as the year progresses.

Fans who dismiss sabermetrics "because numbers don't tell us everything" make me laugh. If any analytical system told us everything -- or anywhere near it -- the game would be soulless, stultifying and utterly predictable. The beauty of baseball is that it's the opposite, and that while a good mix of human evaluation and advanced analytics can improve a team's decision-making, it will nonetheless have to endure a great deal of failure. The best teams, after all, still lose 60 games.

01 March 2009

For What It's Worth

As I was saying yesterday, it's fun and futile to make pre-season predictions. Here we go again.

This is the work of Baseball Prospectus, which uses a slightly different method than Fangraphs to make its projections. After projecting individual player performances and aggregating them by team, BP runs a million simulated seasons to give us a range of possibilities. So while the averages say the Pirates will win just 65 games, a sufficient number of things break right for them in about two percent of cases that would get them into the playoffs.
                       Div.     Wild    Total
NL East W L Title % Card % Postseason %

Mets 92.2 69.8 39.1 11.8 50.9
Phillies 87.1 74.9 23.9 10.7 34.7
Braves 87.0 75.0 23.7 10.7 34.4
Nationals 78.5 83.5 9.5 5.5 15.0
Marlins 71.6 90.4 3.8 2.5 6.3
                        Div.     Wild    Total
NL Central W L Title % Card % Postseason %

Cubs 95.3 66.7 52.0 10.0 62.0
Brewers 86.4 75.6 22.9 10.4 33.3
Cardinals 80.1 81.9 11.6 6.5 18.1
Reds 79.4 82.6 10.4 6.1 16.4
Astros 66.6 95.4 1.9 1.2 3.1
Pirates 64.5 97.5 1.3 0.8 2.1
                        Div.     Wild    Total
NL West W L Title % Card % Postseason %

D'backs 91.6 70.4 46.7 6.9 53.6
Dodgers 83.7 78.3 22.5 6.4 28.9
Giants 77.9 84.1 12.1 4.1 16.3
Rockies 77.1 84.9 11.0 3.7 14.7
Padres 74.0 88.0 7.6 2.6 10.3
                        Div.     Wild    Total
AL East W L Title % Card % Postseason %

Red Sox 98.0 64.0 38.9 24.0 62.0
Yankees 95.9 66.1 32.1 24.5 56.5
Rays 91.3 70.7 20.3 21.1 41.4
Blue Jays 81.2 80.8 6.4 10.1 16.5
Orioles 73.9 88.1 2.3 4.5 6.8

                        Div.     Wild    Total
AL Central W L Title % Card % Postseason %

Indians 83.0 79.0 32.3 2.6 34.8
Twins 79.4 82.6 22.6 2.2 24.8
Tigers 78.3 83.7 20.2 2.1 22.2
Royals 74.7 87.3 13.8 1.5 15.3
White Sox 73.0 89.0 11.2 1.2 12.4
                        Div.     Wild    Total
AL West W L Title % Card % Postseason %

Angels 84.3 77.7 42.1 2.2 44.3
Athletics 82.3 79.7 35.4 2.3 37.6
Rangers 71.9 90.1 12.5 1.0 13.5
Mariners 70.0 92.0 10.1 0.8 10.9

Again, this is as of Feb.19 when Manny and others remained unsigned. Should the Dodgers ink him, that would close the gap some with the Diamondbacks, who seem awfully well-regarded for a team lacking a power bat. BP has little faith in the White Sox, who last year vastly outperformed their projections.

This whole thing will be settled with two words: Play ball!