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.

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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