30 December 2016

You Can't Fool Players or Coaches

What do Gregg Popovich, Leonard Fournette and all of Major League Baseball have in common?

They're not buying the hype.

Popovich is the championship-winning San Antonio Spurs coach who regularly flouts NBA rules by resting his best players for whole games, despite outrage from league brass and ticket-buying fans. Recently, LeBron James absorbed blowback for similarly agreeing not to make a trip to Memphis for the second half of a home-and-home series between the Cavaliers and the Grizzlies.


Fournette is the star running back at LSU who has chosen to skip his team's bowl game -- an advertising platform for Hyundai -- in order to prepare for his Major League career in the NFL, which will actually pay him a salary. The sporting public lit up Twitter and the radio and TV commentary universe with brick-a-brats for Fournette, Christian McCaffrey and others making the same decision.

All of Major League Baseball regularly sits its star players from time to time in order to rest them for the grueling six-month, 162-game schedule. No one comments.

Their Own Best Interest
The common thread is this: the people involved recognize, even if their hypocritical overseers don't want to acknowledge it, that their best interests don't dovetail with those of the money counters in their sport. Contrary to the Association's best efforts to bamboozle fans about the abject irrelevance of its interminable regular season, Popovich understands that his team will cruise into the over-stuffed playoff field regardless of its lineup in any given game. He knows that seeding is, as Harry Truman famously quipped about the vice presidency, as relevant as the fifth teat on a cow. And he knows that championships are won on fresh legs, not on victories in Game 26 of an 82-game season against an out-of-conference opponent. And finally, he is well aware that he answers to the owner of the San Antonio Spurs, not the commissioner of the NBA.

Fournette, McCaffrey, et. al. are unmoved by the NCAA's best efforts to befuddle them about their "amateur" status. They are professional revenue generators for their schools, no more so than during bowl season, when a single game kicks back a multi-million dollar payout, even if it is the desultory Buffalo Wild Wings Sun Bowl to which McCaffrey's Stanford squad has been relegated. Each of them is acting in his own best interest. The swami of the NCAA, whatever irrelevant personage that is today, won't reimburse these NFL prospects if they get injured or fall in the draft because they offered their talents for free to the university's capital engine for one more game.

Some of the derision aimed at Fournette, McCaffrey and their ilk has centered around their "abandonment" of teammates. This is hysterical. Both are leaving school after their junior year, a well-worn tradition against which no one has ever railed for "abandoning" teammates. Coaches regularly "abandon" recruits for better-paying jobs at bigger football programs. That die was cast long ago.

A Base Hit for Baseball
Once again, baseball gets it right like no other sport. It's commonly understood that in a long season players need occasional rest in order to perform at their best for the most games. Fans purchase tickets aware that their favorite player might play spectator that day. Ironically, unlike the NBA, MLB's regular season actually does matter. One game can and often does cost teams an opportunity to earn a playoff spot that can lead to a championship. Yet everyone involved readily accepts the notion that resting players is a long-term investment.

What really separates baseball from college football and the NBA is that the latter two sports are built on foundations of hypocrisy, inevitably propping up a precarious structure prone to a collapse of logic. For all its warts, Major League Baseball at least is what it says it is, which is why no one complains when its athletes skip a meaningless game.

28 December 2016

The Projections System Got It All -- Right?!!

Remember this?



And this?

 
They were Baseball Prospectus's projected standings for 2016 last March. At the time, I made sport of the sabermetric community for continuing to expose themselves to ridicule. BP can no more predict next season's results than can any nominally educated fan .

Want proof? Look at that very first line. They have the 68-94 Tampa Bay Rays winning the East, while tabbing the Baltimore Orioles, a Wild Card entry, as the worst team in the AL. With projection systems like this, why not just throw darts, right?

But Wait, There's More...
Well, keep looking. BP pretty much nailed the rest of Baseball. Sure, the Rangers won the West, but there's lots of evidence that their level of play was much more like a lucky .500 team. The rest of the AL is dead on. As projected, the World Champion Royals did stumble. The Indians did indeed run away with the Central. The Angels, with Mike Trout and Albert Pujols, did in fact stink.

Take a gander at their NL projections. Nationals, Mets, Cubs, Dodgers and Giants in the playoffs. Spot on, but for the Nats and Mets switching places. The new and improved Dbacks? Correctly unimpressed. The 98-win Pirates? Stumbled even worse than projected. The Braves' tear down? BP nailed their record.

PECOTA's High BABIP
We could analyze what happened in the game that led to this unlikely result. The big spending teams in Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles delivered. The bad teams lived down to expectations. There's no evidence that the projection system, called PECOTA, learned any new tricks.

If you were projecting BP's projections for 2017, you would regress them to the mean and peg them for largely on target but for some big misses. But BP had a high BABIP last year and avoided the injury bug. They outplayed their third-order Pythagorean record.  I project that BP's 2017 projections -- and everyone else's -- will stumble about like Andy Capp, with some home runs and some big whiffs, no better than a semi-educated fan's best guesses. They won't nail all the playoff teams in either league, but they'll get the Cubs and Dodgers right, maybe the Astros too.

Next year this time, we can review my projection of BP's projection and determine who the bigger dope is. I'm betting that baseball's unpredictability vindicates me.