Ninety Years of Doing It Wrong

During a quick perusal of the Sunday sports section -- yeah, I still take a gander at that old relic -- the team batting and pitching summaries leaped off the page and sucker-punched my eyeballs. Down at the bottom of the hitting stats were the Houston Astros, the very charlatans occupying first place in the AL West after winning a weekend series against the behemoths of Detroit.

There they were, the team known previously as the A-A-Astros, dwelling in the hitting cellar. Yet they are living large in the division penthouse. In fact, with a .228 batting average, Houston would seem to be batting in the sub-basement.

Of course, this compilation comes courtesy of the Associated Press, that venerable organization that voted Jimmy Foxx to last year's All Star team.

Thing is, the Astros have done something the Associated Press evidently has difficulty conceiving. They score runs by other means than compiling hits. Huh! Can they do that?

Houston has walked fifth most in the AL and leads the Majors in home runs. They are third in the league in runs scored. (As of the weekend.) That would be runs scored, the purpose of hitting.

So the Associated Press, and by extension newspapers across America, list the Astros as worst in their league at something when in fact they are third best. There is a word for this kind of journalism. That word is: Wrong.

The AP has been doing it wrong for 90 years, but since they've been doing it that way for 90 years they will continue doing it that way. When it comes to covering baseball, the Associated Press, which provides information to nearly every major news operation in America, has the credibility of Bernie Madoff's stock picks. That they are misinforming their readers seems not to make much difference to them. That informing readers is the very purpose of journalism seems to have equal impact.

This is a practice at the Associated Press. It's a policy. This is the way they list team batting statistics -- the way they've always done it.

Here's what should happen instead: Someone in a position of authority should take one look at this summary and determine, much as a third-rate spare-time blogger in Charleston, SC has done, that the formula is archaic, asinine and wrong. And he (or she) should deduce that wrong is bad and immediately declare that henceforth and without hesitation, it should be done right. This policy shift should come to pass without delay because doing it wrong is dumb and doing it right is smart. And smart is better than dumb.

Who could argue with that?

Well, I'm willing to bet it would generate much heat among the Neanderthals of baseball coverage and would take 17 months of review to alter a policy that pre-dates your grandfather. Meanwhile, when I look up the batting statistics in Baseball Reference the default is alphabetical, with Arizona first and Washington last. But clicking on any statistic will re-order the list in descending order of that stat, so if you want to determine the best hitting team, you just click on runs to see the Astros up near the top.

That's smart, which as you know, is better than the Associated Press.

And it didn't take Baseball Reference 90 years to figure it out.

Best & Worst New Metrics Part III: OPS

The days of explaining why batting average, home runs and RBIs don't adequately capture an everyday player's performance are long gone. Even the retrogrades who cling tenaciously to the old numbers recognize in their hearts why on-base percentage and slugging percentage are more comprehensive and why RBIs don't tell a useful story.

Adding on base and slugging gave us OPS, the shorthand statistic of choice to seamheads in the seamheady early days of the sabremetric movement. But analysts cannot live by OPS alone; indeed, OPS and its close relations, like OPS+, now long in the tooth, have become something of an anachronism, rarely used to make anything but the crudest point. 

The reason is simple: not all OPS is equal. Seamheads have long known that OBP is more important than slugging, about 20% more when talking about run creation. So simply adding the two numbers devalues on-base percentage.

OPS is not park-adjusted, position-adjusted or competition-adjusted. The narrative it creates doesn't describe whether a batter hits same-handed pitchers or has to be platooned. It's also largely irrelevant when discussing leadoff hitters, whose OBP is invaluable and whose slugging is not very valuable at all.

OPS was good to the analysis community in its prime, but has lost a step and is now little more than a veteran presence off the bench, backing up starters TAv, WAR/WARP and their ilk. We thank OPS for its contributions, particularly for introducing fans to better ways to measure players. and wish it the best of luck in its future endeavors.

A Tale of Two Sluggers

It was the best of starts. It was the worst of starts. Two all-or-nothing sluggers are providing their teams with a bit of all and a bit of nothing, and the contrast is instructive.

Mark Reynolds is now donning Indian garb, swinging his Three True Outcomes stick in Cleveland.  Reynolds is the owner of three 204+ strikeout seasons, four 74+ walk seasons and three 32+ home run seasons. 

He's following in the gigantic footsteps of 285-pound Adam Dunn, he of 409 lifetime home runs, 2055 whiffs and 1173 free passes. The Big Donkey is coming off a season in which he batted just .204 but gave the White Sox 105 walks and 41 home runs.

For both these players, it's really all about batting average. Even amassing big piles of walks and long balls, they're not real valuable without a few other hits sprinkled in. Dunn's hitting was 12% above average last year; add in his utter lack of baserunning or defensive value and he was pretty close to replacement level despite leaving the yard 41 times. With Reynolds, it's the same equation with a little more defensive and baserunning prowess, but fewer jogs to first.

With one-tenth of the season in the books, Reynolds is getting it done for the Tribe, collecting seven homers and an 1.128 OPS. Dunn is coming undone: three homers and a .454 OPS. One other detail is worth noting:

Mark Reynolds .298/391/.737, 8BB/15K, 7HR
Adam Dunn .108/.159/.295  3BB/26K, 3HR

Dunn is fanning in nearly half his plate appearances, which leaves little opportunity to be productive. Reynolds is making more contact, which leads to more of everything good.

This bodes very poorly for the White Sox, who are paying Dunn for his prodigious Big Fly tendencies accompanied by tolerable batting averages in the .230s. Since he arrived on the South Side in 2011, he's averaged .179/.307/.374, 28 homers, 95 BB and 219 K per 150 games. Not only is Chicago not getting its $15 million worth, it's not getting roster spot value. And the small sample size excuse doesn't work here because it's 289 games of data.

It's very early in 2013 and sluggers are notoriously streaky, so there's hope for Adam Dunn. The tables have turned and now Mark Reynolds is Dunn's guide. But he'll have to dig back to 2010 to turn things around.

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.