What Happened To Baseball This Year?

As the first strains of Commissioner Bud's swan song begin to play, ESPN, FOX and other media outlets have been wondering aloud what happened to baseball. Why, they've asked, has the game receded from our consciousness this year?

There's some truth to the question. The pennant races are heating up and all the chatter is about NFL exhibition games, NFL fantasy leagues, the upcoming NFL season, colege football, the college football playoffs, football, football and football. LeBron and the World Cup dominated the middle part of the baseball season and the NBA playoffs and NFL draft stole the early season's thunder.

So what happened to baseball?

What's happened to baseball is ESPN, Fox and other media outlets. Four networks broadcast every NFL game played. But baseball games are broadcast almost exclusively by local networks. ESPN, the 800-pound gorilla of sports, has a big stake in the NFL and nearly none in baseball. Consequently, they spend more time talking NFL exhibition games than they spend talking baseball. 

They've probably mentioned the name of a quarterback who has yet to play a minute of professional football more times than they've mentioned all baseball players combined.

And when it's not the NFL it's college football. ESPN carries hundreds of college football games. Because, as Marshall McLuhan observed 50 years ago, baseball is best enjoyed at the park; football on the tube.

Well, ESPN doesn't care about the park. They're on the tube. They make their money from TV ratings, not from full ballparks. And they set the sports agenda, along with Fox, CBS Sports and their ilk, so the agenda is all football all the time.

Meantime, baseball fans have enjoyed an overflow of drama. Clayton Kershaw is making his Hall of Fame case while Derek Jeter tops off his. Yasiel Puig and Mike Trout have continued their antics while rookies Jose Abreu and Billy Hamilton are banging them out and tearing them up, respectively. Kansas City has ambushed Detroit while Seattle and Baltimore are elbowing the Yankees out of the playoffs. Milwaukee and Pittsburgh -- two of the smallest markets in baseball -- are challenging St. Louis for Central supremacy. And much of it is coming down to the wire.

And the national sports media are all missing it.

So nothing's happened to baseball. Something's happened to your television.

WAR! What Is It Good For?

In another sign that the apocalypse may be delayed, ESPN has officially adopted Wins Against Replacement, Baseball-Reference.com's all encompassing measure of a player's value compared to a whatever his team might be able to find trolling the waiver wire or Triple-A. 

WAR is a simple concept, trenchantly summarized here by David Schoenfield at ESPN. It's nice to see that the people who are adopting the statistic understand what it means and how it's used.

If you just skipped the link, I encourage you to go back and click it. Schoenfield both describes and demonstrates how WAR can be useful. He also employs it to illustrate what a spectacular rookie year Mike Trout is having at age 20. Of the seven players on the list of best 20-year-olds whose careers are complete, six are all-time greats. The other is Vada Pinson, who was a terrific player in his 20s but tailed off severely thereafter. 

Schoenfield also describes the limits of WAR, and while generally on target, he misses the mark in two places.

First, he is right that WAR is not the be all and end all statistic. It is comprehensive, but imperfect. Some have used this as a knock against sabermetrics, this inability to produce a statistical singularity. But it comes a lot closer than anything that preceded it, and no doubt it will improve.

On the other hand, WAR strips out all the noise -- era, field effects, position -- and helps us make comparisons that standard statistics miss. Schoenfield describes how right fielder Josh Reddick and his .880 OPS for Oakland has been twice as valuable to his team as Prince Fielder and his .888 OPS has been to Detroit.

Schoenfield makes an interesting observation, but also stubs his toe here: 

One, it's my opinion that WAR shortchanges pitchers with durability...take, for example, Roy Halladay. When figuring his WAR, you're calculating his value over a replacement-level pitcher, maybe a pitcher with a 5.00 ERA or whatever that level is these days. But a Triple-A pitcher isn't going to give you seven or eight innings every start like Halladay does, and certainly not 233 innings like Halladay gave the Phillies in 2011. But WAR, the way I understand it, sort of assumes that's the case.

He is right that Halladay, by taking the ball every fifth day and pitching deep into games, provides added value to the rest of the pitching staff beyond the strong results he produces. WAR doesn't calculate the value of keeping relief arms fresh, anymore than it figures the cost that a DH imposes on his team's lineup by forcing the manager to play a lesser hitter in order to cover the defensive position the DH vacates. But WAR does account for Halladay's continued excellence over 233 innings. Compared to a pitcher of exactly equal performance over 117 innings, Halladay's WAR is double.

The core weakness of WAR is the weakness of its constituent parts. Most salient is the defensive component, which is still a mere approximation of actual defensive ability. Indeed, Baseball Reference, Baseball Prospectus and Fangraphs all have their own proprietary defensive metrics and they often vary widely on the same player. (One vivid exception is the glovework of Derek Jeter, upon which they all similarly cast aspersions.) Because we have so little confidence in those defensive formulae, it makes a goodly chunk of WAR highly suspect.

Consequently, you will rarely see WAR (or its Baseball Prospectus equivalent, WARP) quoted here.  Defensive calculations will one day provide more insight, but today, they are still too unsteady to lean on. I prefer VORP or oWAR, which calculate only offensive value over a replacement player.

Still, it's another advance for the general understanding of the game that the corporate behemoth agenda setter in sports coverage sees the value in, and offers to the public, a new and revealing tool in player evaluation.

(Thanks to Dick in Charlotte for bringing this to my attention.)

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The Worldwide Leader In Drivel

I teach my college students that there is precious little partisan political bias in network news, and anyone who says otherwise is just revealing their own personal partisan political bias. (I exempt Fox News, which is pretty overt in its bias, and therefore somewhat insulated from the criticism. I hear MSNBC tilts in the other direction, but I've never seen it.) Most reporters have professional pride and the ability to be fair, if not to cover all facets of every issue.

The major bias in news, I tell them, is in favor of news. Duh.

The major bias in non-news networks is for profit, and nowhere has that been more egregiously demonstrated than by ESPN in its lunatic ramblings about LeBron James.

I wondered how the network could become so unhinged that for three weeks it spent 60% of its radio programming -- I mean 60% of the 40% that's not commercials -- endlessly conjecturing about James's intentions. Considering that no "reporter" or "analyst" had a shred of information useful to the story, it seemed inconceivable that ESPN could dedicate such endless drivel to this non-story. I was especially amused by the "predictions" that were being dealt like poker cards, predictions based on wisps of air, as if parsing the intentions of the Soviet-era Kremlin. Only one person knew LeBron's heart and that person wasn't telling.

My musings came to a head on Tuesday, when ESPN radio's morning show literally chucked its coverage of baseball, World Cup and all else sporting to dedicate its airwaves to non-stop dead-horse beatings for the entire show. I understand the occasional Chris Berman and Dick Vitale, but had an entire network checked into Bellevue?

Then it all became clear. It turns out that James had convinced station brass to run a prime time one-hour extravaganza during which he would reveal his destination (and God knows what else for 60 whole minutes. Well, 32 minutes, after commercials.) In fact, ESPN hadn't been covering a story; it had been promoting an upcoming special on its own network.

Which makes me wonder, how much Connecticut spittle would have been projected over this issue had Fox Sports televised it instead. In other words, what was the real news value of LeBron's free agency. Maybe I'm just a hopeless Association-hater, but it's hard for me to imagine that even 25% of the actual airtime wasted would have been so dedicated, and I think something more like 8% is more accurate. It would be a shocking indictment of this infuriating network, if only it weren't shocking at all.

Word is that the proceeds from sponsorships for that hour were going to charity, but even if true, ESPN reaped copious benefit from LeBron's largess, pumping the airwaves with its station promos, reinforcing its brand, etc., etc. So it turns out that I was just a prop in the scenery during the three-week run-up, not a customer to be entertained. Good thing I began switching to public radio to hear actual news instead.

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