Blowing Smoak at Reporters

Let's engage in a little hypothetical hijinks.

Let's suppose your friend complained to you that he didn't understand why Oriole backstop Matt Wieters is selected to the All-Star squad while Mariner first-sacker Justin Smoak is considered a flop. The two are contemporaries from the Charleston, SC area and former first round picks in the MLB draft. Consequently they get compared 'round these parts.

After all. your companion notes, Smoak's 162-game average for the first four years of his career is a .223 BA with 21 HR and 71 RBI. Wieters' performance during the same period is .260, 21 & 79. It's a red pubic hair's difference, right?

Knowing the progressive sort that you are, no doubt you would patiently explain to your unenlightened friend that Smoak has managed to stay on the field more than 130 games in a season just once while Wieters has done so three times. You would point out that Triple Crown stats were demonstrated 33 years ago to be woefully inadequate to the storytelling task and that the difference in OPS, .749-.683 in favor of Wieters, is not insubstantial. 

You would further mention that Smoak is a lumbering first baseman, the lowest form of defensive player this side of the DH, and Wieters is a Gold Glove catcher, the most grueling position on the field. More to the point, the two should be compared to hitters at opposite ends of the offensive spectrum -- Wieters to catchers and Smoak to first basemen. Viewed against their position-mates, Wieters has been worth eight-and-a-half wins compared to a replacement level catcher while Smoak IS a replacement level first baseman. 

And that's just the offensive side of the equation. Accounting for their glovework takes the former to 14.7 wins against replacement in four years and the latter down to 2.7 wins BELOW replacement. In other words, an All-Star and a bust.


Sadly, you were not around to apprise the author of this story in my local paper of such considerations. And so, a professional journalist, whose area of expertise is supposedly sports, managed to pen this stunning piece of ignorance. He will not be fired or reprimanded or even educated because no one at his paper has the slightest awareness that they are living in the Dark Ages. 

And none of his knowledge-challenged colleagues or editors will be fired, reprimanded or educated themselves because neither their colleagues at other newspapers in South Carolina, or in the Southeast, or nearly anywhere, nor their TV or radio counterparts, nor virtually anyone else who is considered a sports reporter or commentator or analyst has the slightest idea about the advances in their field since they stopped learning anything new back in 1974.

And so they continue to peck out tripe like this on their IBM Selectrics, completely oblivious to the development in the interim of the IBM Wheelwriter, word processor, personal computer,  smartphone and tablet. They are the Amish of journalism, refusing to adopt advancements of science and technology, continuing to view the game as their great-grandfathers did with horses and buggy metrics.

Thirty-three years since Bill James's first Baseball Abstract. It'll be 34 years in March.

Addendum to Previous Piece

Read the previous post before looking here. Then...

I wrote an abridged version of the previous post's critique in the comment section of the Post and Courier website. This is the response I got from the writer:

Spell his name correctly, then criticize.

(His name is spelled Francoeur.)

I think this perfectly illustrates the level of responsibility being taken by mainstream sports media for understanding the changes in baseball. This particular reporter wrote a long piece based on a false premise, and the reason is that he doesn't understand changes in the sport that began 30 years ago. Now, rather than commit himself to updating his reporting skills, he got defensive.

It's really pathetic.
b

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.
b