The Silly Time

It's that time of the baseball schedule when every team is undefeated and shiny like a minted dime.  When every day is March perfection in Florida or Arizona, as opposed to  early April dreck in Chicago or Cleveland or Boston or, God Almighty, Toronto.

Every region's representative is a contender, even Phoenix's and Philadelphia's. No one's manager requires a vote of confidence.

So when Madison Bumgarner appeared on an ESPN radio show today (where the hosts pronounced that every baseball analyst in their stable considers him the best pitcher in baseball; let's hope that it is two hosts, not 20 baseball experts, who are morons) he declared that he felt great about his team and liked the moves they had made this off-season.

We could, charitably, assume that MadBum was referring only to the moves the team made, rather than the moves that former players made away from the team. Michael Morse took his power bat to Baltimore. Pablo Sandoval waddled off to Boston. That's 32 homers and 4.3 WAR to replace.

What were the Giants' giant moves? They brought fourth outfielder Nori Aoki aboard and traded a farmhand for cornerman Casey McGehee. That recoups five homers and two WAR, less if both fill reserve roles as expected.

In the meantime, star outfielder Hunter Pence broke his arm. Jake Peavy's arm is "dead." And the competition got meaner. The Padres rebuilt a contender. The Dodgers purchased excess firepower.

Heavy weighs the crown in San Francisco, as it did in 2011 and 2013. And Madison Bumgarner knows that as well as anyone. (Even better than two ESPN hosts.)

Dissecting a Common Fallacy

In the practice of rhetoric, deductive logic makes two demands:

1. Deductive validity. 
2. Truthful premises. 

That is, an if/then arrangement requires that the "if" statements be true and that the "then" statement flow naturally and inevitably from the combination of "if" statements.

For example: 

Mike Trout is the best player in the American League this year.

Mike Trout is a rookie.

Therefore Mike Trout is the Rookie of the Year.

It's valid and true. Although true, this isn't deductively valid:

Mike Trout is a rookie.

Mike Trout has the highest batting average in the league.

Therefore Mike Trout is the Rookie of the Year.

Many sports radio talk show hosts are inadequately schooled in logic.  Consider this segment paraphrased from a recent ESPN radio broadcast:

"Who are the managers of the year in the AL and NL? How about Davey Johnson? The Washington Nationals have the best record in baseball, three great starters and a different hitting star everyday. Even if they shut down Strasburg, they're looking good."

"The Reds have won five in a row even without their star Joey Votto. Dusty Baker is a veteran manager with a World Series on his resume. How about Clint Hurdle? He has the Pirates primed for their first winning season in 20 years."

"Bruce Bochy has kept the Giants atop the West. Maybe he's the guy."

"In the American League, the Yankees will win the East despite a rash of injuries, but before you crown Joe Girardi, Ron Washington has the Rangers ahead in the West."

This segment was based on several unstated fallacies:

1. The manager of the year is the skipper of the most surprisingly good team.

2. The manager is responsible for his players' performances.
3. You can measure how good a manager is by how often his team wins.

4. That the manager has guided a team to a pennant in the past has some bearing on his performance this year.

5. No actual data, anecdotes, research, knowledge or information is necessary to determine a manager's value.

Baseball writers have singularly relied on the first fallacy to elect their Manager of the Year each season, but there isn't a shred of evidence that there's any connection. Indeed, in every other sport we measure managers/head coaches by the sustained success of their teams, not by their episodic improvement from poor performances. Bill Belichick, Bobby Bowden, Mike Krzyzewski, Phil Jackson, Scotty Bowman and their ilk are admired not because their teams have outperformed expectations but because they set the expectations high each year and met them.

Beyond that, notice that the radio host, by failing to recite a single observation to support her arguments, unintentionally acknowledged that she toils in total ignorance of the actual work these men do. For all the host knows, one or more of them is reviled or disrespected by his players. 

The unfortunate fact for those attempting to parse managing performance is that the vast majority of a manager's role eludes the public lens: managing personalities, inspiring greatness, promoting teamwork, keeping a steady hand on the till from the first buds of spring through the changing of the leaves. Team performance on the field is a woeful proxy for that.

A small function of a manager's job is the In-game tactics. What little we can see suggests neither Baker nor Washington is even adequate. (After 50 years in the business, Dusty still thinks the quintessential leadoff hitter swipes 30 bases and makes outs 70% of the time.)

It got worse. Behold this matrix of convolution:

"But how about thinking outside the box? Sure, the Angels have Albert Pujols, but they're getting production from guys you don't expect, like Mike Trout and Mark Trumbo. Mike Scioscia deserves some attention."

The cupboard is so bare of rational thought here as to boggle the mind. Primarily, the talk show host decided to abandon the core fallacy -- absolving the manager for taking  a team of loaded dice and rolling craps -- and instead credit him for coaxing performance out of unexpected places (but failing to do so out of the big stars.) That particular pretzel logic is the perfect coda on an argument that captures, in one four-minute segment, why sports talk radio is a barren desert, and why Manager of the Year votes are completely, utterly, hopelessly irrelevant.