Ever since Lou Piniella took the helm of the then-putrid Tampa Bay Then-Devil Rays, the baseball universe has become pretty savvy about the lack of impact a manager can have on his team. Despite unreasonable expectations of their 55-win franchise going into the 2003 season -- which is to say, any -- Sweet Lou guided his squads to 99, 91 and 95 losses before he stalked off to the golf course.
There is no managing wizardry that can transform a team starting Toby Hall, Damian Rolls and Al Martin (at DH!) into a contender. And now most baseball fans recognize that.
So excitement was muted, but still detectable, when Joe Maddon took the reins of the Cubs this year. Maddon is a perennial All-Star at his craft, both on the field and in the clubhouse, and he's bringing that deft touch to the North side, alongside a whip-smart front office of team president Theo Epstein and general manager Jed Hoyer.
That enthusiasm around Wrigley was vindicated this week when Maddon got his publicly stated wish to land a leadoff batter who first and foremost gets on base. The Cubs traded spare parts for outfielder Dexter Fowler and his .366 on base percentage.
There are still managers, say, Ned Yost and Dusty Baker, who aren't sold on this simple formula. They're still locked in on the 1937 model of leadoff hitter -- a powerless speed merchant regardless of his ability to get aboard. That's the guy they want getting the most at bats on the team. And 1937-mentality managers don't lobby their superiors for 2015 assets, the way Joe Maddon does.
Not only does Maddon know better, so do the people who hired him. When Hoyer reels in a legitimate fire-starter, he knows that Maddon has a plan to exploit that asset. Ironically, while Fowler is a road runner, he steals bases only occasionally and, generally, at an unproductive rate. His value is entirely in the 189 occasions last season he reached base safely for the batter following him, in 505 opportunities.
So for Dexter Fowler, and the dozens of other small advantages that Maddon appears to accumulate over a season, Cubs fans have the right to feel a little quiver. Their time is yet nigh, but it is coming.
Showing posts with label Dusty Baker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dusty Baker. Show all posts
23 January 2015
04 October 2013
The Firing of Dusty Baker
Current Cincinnati GM Walt Jocketty, who served for 14 sparkling years in the same position with St. Louis, has forgotten more about baseball than the entire membership of Rho Beta Iota fraternity will ever know. So if he actually did fire Dusty Baker today after six seasons because the Reds skidded to six consecutive losses to end the season, he should be rushed to the hospital for an emergency brain scan.
Jocketty has been too successful for too long to make a move so utterly lacking in sense that even a Kardashian should know better. Even great teams endure winning lulls during the course of a long season. Judging a field general's 972-game performance with the club by one bad week (against a formidable and highly-motivated opponent) is like demoting a star player because he's oh-for his last five games.
The silliness is even more fundamental than that. Evaluating a manager based on his team's record is like appraising an movie actor based on the screenplay. In each case, their performance has some impact on the final product, but it's vastly less important than other considerations.
In reporting Baker's firing, many sports news outlets examined his managerial won-loss record, as if that would reveal something about his managerial acumen. It hardly needs to be explained that managers are entirely dependent on their teams' talent; Moe, Larry and Curly could have skippered the 1998 Yankees to the World Series while this year's Astros were beyond the help of Jimmy Dugan himself.
Like an iceberg, much of a manager's value is accrued out of view. But after 20 years in the position with the Giants, Cubs and Reds, two things are clear about him: 1. players love playing for him and 2. he might be the worst tactician in the history of the sport.
If a team values stubborn intransigence in their chief on-field strategist, Dusty is their man. He refuses to acknowledge the importance of on-base percentage, despite its objective truth. He cost the Reds dozens of runs over six years by leading off speedsters with abysmal OBP and he cost an impressive list of top-shelf pitchers (notably Kerry Wood and Mark Prior) significant portions of their careers by almost-literally working their arms off.
Which makes his firing all the more puzzling. Dusty's entire managerial career is a miracle, a 20-year exaltation of rampant ignorance, validated three times by the very lords of ignorance -- baseball writers -- with Manager of the Year awards. The truth is, Dusty should never have been hired, but once in place never ceased being what he was hired to be.
As is often the case, all this is much more an indictment of the people paid to analyze the game than the people who perform on the field. They will continue to use won-loss records as a proxy for real evaluation tools without ever acknowledging their utter futility. As for Dusty Baker, his teams won 90+ games three of the last four years. Some desperate front office, like Seattle's, will be sufficiently bamboozled to hire him so that he can bat Neifi Perez leadoff.
Jocketty has been too successful for too long to make a move so utterly lacking in sense that even a Kardashian should know better. Even great teams endure winning lulls during the course of a long season. Judging a field general's 972-game performance with the club by one bad week (against a formidable and highly-motivated opponent) is like demoting a star player because he's oh-for his last five games.
The silliness is even more fundamental than that. Evaluating a manager based on his team's record is like appraising an movie actor based on the screenplay. In each case, their performance has some impact on the final product, but it's vastly less important than other considerations.
In reporting Baker's firing, many sports news outlets examined his managerial won-loss record, as if that would reveal something about his managerial acumen. It hardly needs to be explained that managers are entirely dependent on their teams' talent; Moe, Larry and Curly could have skippered the 1998 Yankees to the World Series while this year's Astros were beyond the help of Jimmy Dugan himself.
Like an iceberg, much of a manager's value is accrued out of view. But after 20 years in the position with the Giants, Cubs and Reds, two things are clear about him: 1. players love playing for him and 2. he might be the worst tactician in the history of the sport.
If a team values stubborn intransigence in their chief on-field strategist, Dusty is their man. He refuses to acknowledge the importance of on-base percentage, despite its objective truth. He cost the Reds dozens of runs over six years by leading off speedsters with abysmal OBP and he cost an impressive list of top-shelf pitchers (notably Kerry Wood and Mark Prior) significant portions of their careers by almost-literally working their arms off.
Which makes his firing all the more puzzling. Dusty's entire managerial career is a miracle, a 20-year exaltation of rampant ignorance, validated three times by the very lords of ignorance -- baseball writers -- with Manager of the Year awards. The truth is, Dusty should never have been hired, but once in place never ceased being what he was hired to be.
As is often the case, all this is much more an indictment of the people paid to analyze the game than the people who perform on the field. They will continue to use won-loss records as a proxy for real evaluation tools without ever acknowledging their utter futility. As for Dusty Baker, his teams won 90+ games three of the last four years. Some desperate front office, like Seattle's, will be sufficiently bamboozled to hire him so that he can bat Neifi Perez leadoff.
12 August 2012
Dissecting a Common Fallacy
In the practice of rhetoric, deductive logic makes two demands:
- Deductive validity.
- Truthful premises.
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.
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."
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.
11 March 2009
The Stats Fallacy: #5 In A Series
"Stats don't show a guy's guts. They can't tell you the human side, help you recognize fear, or figure out who is having a good day or a bad day. I look at the numbers all the time, but people who play fantasy games don't have to look a guy in the eye or try to help restore his confidence." --Dusty Baker
This is a familiar refrain from managers, who after all, are paid to make personnel decisions about guys they spend a lot of time with. Is it right or wrong?
Neither. It's a false dichotomy.
The question isn't, and never was, stats versus scouts. It's a fantasy of Michael Lewis that drove tradition-bound observers batty. The truth is and always has been that mathematical analysis and the softer human arts complement each other, and any team relying on just one or the other is doomed to failure. Numbers can enlighten us objectively about players' past results, but only a human eye, brain and heart can make observations about their physical, emotional and psychological health going forward.
In fact, the truthful dichotomy is: stats versus stats. Is Dusty making decisions based on batting average and saves and pitching wins and home runs or is he dialing up stats that actually matter, like on-base percentage, batting average on balls in play (BABIP), slugging average, etc?
If Neifi Perez bats .372 in the first half of the season, has he suddenly transformed into a hitting machine? The human brain tends to try to make sense of the unexpected, so it concocts explanations: Perez is squaring his hips or seeing the ball better or swinging through the zone. Perhaps, but if his BABIP has suddenly skyrocketed, particularly in the absence of a change in the types of balls he's hitting, (i.e., grounders, line drives, flies, etc.) it really tells you he's just been lucky and can expect a big ol' bag of return-to-earth in the second half. The same calculation works for pitchers: if a guy's BABIP-against spikes, the seeing-eye grounders have been getting through and he's primed for "improvement" as the year progresses.
Fans who dismiss sabermetrics "because numbers don't tell us everything" make me laugh. If any analytical system told us everything -- or anywhere near it -- the game would be soulless, stultifying and utterly predictable. The beauty of baseball is that it's the opposite, and that while a good mix of human evaluation and advanced analytics can improve a team's decision-making, it will nonetheless have to endure a great deal of failure. The best teams, after all, still lose 60 games.
This is a familiar refrain from managers, who after all, are paid to make personnel decisions about guys they spend a lot of time with. Is it right or wrong?
Neither. It's a false dichotomy.
The question isn't, and never was, stats versus scouts. It's a fantasy of Michael Lewis that drove tradition-bound observers batty. The truth is and always has been that mathematical analysis and the softer human arts complement each other, and any team relying on just one or the other is doomed to failure. Numbers can enlighten us objectively about players' past results, but only a human eye, brain and heart can make observations about their physical, emotional and psychological health going forward.
In fact, the truthful dichotomy is: stats versus stats. Is Dusty making decisions based on batting average and saves and pitching wins and home runs or is he dialing up stats that actually matter, like on-base percentage, batting average on balls in play (BABIP), slugging average, etc?
If Neifi Perez bats .372 in the first half of the season, has he suddenly transformed into a hitting machine? The human brain tends to try to make sense of the unexpected, so it concocts explanations: Perez is squaring his hips or seeing the ball better or swinging through the zone. Perhaps, but if his BABIP has suddenly skyrocketed, particularly in the absence of a change in the types of balls he's hitting, (i.e., grounders, line drives, flies, etc.) it really tells you he's just been lucky and can expect a big ol' bag of return-to-earth in the second half. The same calculation works for pitchers: if a guy's BABIP-against spikes, the seeing-eye grounders have been getting through and he's primed for "improvement" as the year progresses.
Fans who dismiss sabermetrics "because numbers don't tell us everything" make me laugh. If any analytical system told us everything -- or anywhere near it -- the game would be soulless, stultifying and utterly predictable. The beauty of baseball is that it's the opposite, and that while a good mix of human evaluation and advanced analytics can improve a team's decision-making, it will nonetheless have to endure a great deal of failure. The best teams, after all, still lose 60 games.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)