The Dying Gasp of the Luddites

If you're wondering what kind of impact new analytics are having on the baseball landscape, I commend to your attention this dying gasp of Luddite literature from Paul Daugherty of the Cincinnati Enquirer. His half-hearted attempt to wish away knowledge is an ode to new analysis in its way. So tepid and conditional are his objections that we're left to conclude the argument may finally be over.

You can read his diatribe yourself, but I'll summarize it here:

• Baseball stats can't measure professionalism. No, they measure results.
• Some new stats, like Deserved Run Average, are complicated and I don't understand them, so they must be useless. When's the last time you measured ERA yourself?
• The number crunchers think digits can replace eyeballs. Show us the guy.
• A new measuring tool only measures what it measures, so it must be useless. There go all stats.
• If a new measuring tool tells you what you already believe, who needs it. If it contradicted what you believed you'd similarly scoff.

This is now the state of discourse from the hidebound. Notice that Daugherty admits new numbers have their place. Notice that he recognizes all front offices have had to adopt advanced metrics or preside over withering franchises.

But also notice that old false dichotomy between measuring performance and watching games. Would the seamhead who disputes the value of visiting the ballpark please identify himself, because I can't find him. This straw man argument forms the bedrock of most anti-progress rants, as if SABR rattlers are walking the countryside like Johnny Saberseed planting the notion that numbers can capture all the nuance of the game.

But numbers can tell you this: for all his professionalism, Marlon Byrd is batting .212 and playing a low-value defensive position (left field). We could watch Byrd and agree that he's a good guy, a hard worker and a positive influence on his teammates. But we'd also notice that Father Time has taken a chisel to his skills, and left the Reds with an out machine.

His objections amount to a surrender, really. It's like the last wail of an infant before they go back to sleep. The innumerate want to register their discomfort one last time before the next BABIP discussion.

Sorry, Paul, to burden you with added insight into the game, with better predictive tools, with interesting information about plays and players. You're free to ignore all that while you watch a .212 hitter hustle. Say hi to Fred and Wilma for us back in Bedrock.

DH: I Love You Just the Way You Are

I need to know that you will always be
The same old someone that I knew
Ah, what will it take till you believe in me?
The way that I believe in you?
I said I love you and that's forever
And this I promise from the heart
But I couldn't love you any better
I love you just the way you are 

Billy Joel, Just the Way You Are, 1977

Adam Wainwright's unfortunate injury while running out a ground ball has given rise to the flipside of the more common argument to abolish the designated hitter. The worm has turned, for the moment at least, and now the loudest voices are decrying the travesty of forcing people  to attempt to hit baseballs who are trained to throw them.

It's like, the argument goes, asking the magician's assistant to become the knife thrower.

Moreover, they've co-opted the argument of their opposites that the two leagues should hew to a single policy. They note that NL teams suffer a decided disadvantage during inter-league play (and the World Series) because their rosters aren't constructed to supply an extra hitter.

And now that offense is sagging, to the (theoretical) detriment of fan interest, replacing pitcher at-bats with real hitters would counter that regretful trend.

I don't buy it.

For the record, I love the DH. It keeps luminaries -- particularly the eminences grises -- in the game. Without it, Paul Molitor's not in the Hall of Fame. David Ortiz has no position. Frank Thomas plays five fewer years. And Edgar Martinez's knees deny us of his amazing career.

The DH makes every at bat meaningful. There's no automatic out, no automatic sacrifice bunt attempt.

The DH allows injured players to return faster. They can take a few cuts a game while they heal without the rigors of on-field exertions.

The main argument against the DH falls flat in places where brains drizzle. Deciding when to hit for the pitcher is such a cookie-cutter choice that a single monkey with a typewriter could correctly discern it  90% of the time without a SABR card or Tony LaRussa whispering in his ear. The cosmic complexities of the double switch might have challenged the intellect of Ron Washington, but they don't amount to game-deciding strategies.

That said, I like having it both ways. I'm enjoying Alex Rodriguez resurrecting the final chapter of his career and completing his assault on the record books. But maybe that doesn't move you. As it stands now, hooray for both of us.

If you don't buy my pro-DH arguments, fine, there's a league for you. If you like to see Mike Leake helping himself with the stick, you can. If the spectacle of Bartolo Colon swizzle-sticking at the plate amuses you, content yourself. Sometimes you feel like a nut; sometimes you don't.

The split in the leagues causes some slight disruption, sure, but on balance it's better that way. The current set-up makes everyone happy, which is part of the problem. Because some people hate it when that's the case.

The Truth About Seamheads

A visit to New York gave me an opportunity to watch the terrific Met TV broadcast team of Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling for the first time.

(Full disclosure: Cohen was a college broadcast partner and is a longtime friend. Darling was a subject of a couple of those broadcasts. My friend Mitch has a brother named Keith.)

They talk constantly of on base percentage. Hernandez stresses plate discipline. They seem to understand the massive role of luck. And yet even they -- Hernandez particularly -- (sorry, Mitch's brother) repeated constantly some old shibboleths about new analysis.

Here are some common misconceptions, some of which gained currency on the telecast I saw and others that I hear regularly.

1. "Moneyball" represents stat guys.

Moneyball was a book written by Michael Lewis (not Billy Beane) and a movie sort-of depicting the book. It's about the GM of the small-market A's exploiting inefficiencies in the baseball labor market, particularly with respect to on base percentage. Beyond that, the book and movie (which took the kinds of liberties with the facts that get new head football coaches fired) have no relationship with new baseball analytics.  Calling the work of new analysis "Moneyball" suggests ignorance right from the get-go.

2. Seamheads don't care about batting average.

Batting average is the apple in apple pie. The pie is on-base percentage, which includes other important ingredients, like walks, the crust of the pie.  Carlos Pena can bat .198 and have the same on base percentage as Ichiro, batting .320. In that case, batting average isn't very telling. But if Pena could hit .250, he'd be a star. When Ichiro hits .280, he's a scrub. You need the apples and the crust to make a good pie, and if you ignore the crust, you're not getting the full pie.

3. Stat guys don't like stolen bases.

How can anyone not like stolen bases? Moving a runner from first to second is precious. Stat guys don't like caught stealings. Giving up an out is way more precious. So if you're going to break for second, make sure you've first paid homage to the patron saint of thievery.

Beyond that, even stat guys realize that always playing by the book makes a team predictable, assuming the other team has the same book. (They do. It's on their Nook.) Teams have to bluff ocassionally lest they become transparent.

4. Sabermetricians think they have all the answers.

All the seamheads I read recognize that most of the game is invisible. Hell, R.A. Dickey is 10-1. Dodger backstop A.J. Ellis has a .436 on base percentage. Twins rookie Scott Diamond from Binghamton University has a 2.13 ERA and a 5-1 K/BB ratio. Who had that parlay?

5. The new analysts think the whole game can be reduced to numbers.

What new analysis has shown us is exactly what can and what can't be quantified. Many old schoolers believe RBIs demonstrate how "clutch" a player is. The new analysis proved that "clutchness" is hard to quantify, and however it might be, RBIs are completely unsuited to the task.
 
6. Stat dufuses (the plural of dufus) think they can measure fielding even when their conclusions are contradicted by observation.

Hidebound traditionalists don't realize when they are observing with their hearts. Sometimes the new defensive measures help us to see that. But in 2012, that area of research is still in its adolescence and should not be trusted with the car keys. Right now, the defensive metrics are a tool to help us check our work, but they can't completely replace our eyes, even with all our inherent bias.

7. Seamheads never played the game. They can't possibly know as much as guys who did.

You've obviously never listened to the profound insights of Rob Dibble. Why should a monosyllabic cretin with a live arm see the inner workings of the game more clearly than someone who studies it?

8. The stat goobers don't understand the value of team chemistry.

Maybe the traditionalists can quantify it for the rest of us. Maybe they can explain how the squabbling 1972 A's won the World Series. And then repeated in '73. While they're at it, they might want to do the same for Billy Martin's dysfunctional '77 Yankees and the same primadonnas under Bob Lemon in '78. Those '62 Mets and 2003 Tigers had more good chemistry than Brad Pitt's high school reunion. How'd that work out for them? (NY and Detroit, not the reunion.)

No workplace functions as well when employees prefer splenectomies to each other's company. I wouldn't sign Manny Ramirez to my team with Jamie Dimon's money. But chemistry doesn't replace talent. If you want Veteran Presence and Clubhouse Leadership, hire good coaches.

9. Even with all their numbers, the sabermetrics numbskulls aren't any better at predicting who will succed in the Majors than the teams themselves.

That's because the sabermetrics numbskulls and the teams are one and the same. Every team in the league uses sabermetrics (in addition to scouting) to evaluate talent and avoid losing ground to everyone else using sabermetrics.

10. SABR monkeys don't put much stock in saves, pitching wins, RBIs and other traditional statistics.

Whoops, that one's true. Research shows those statistics correlate poorly with what they are attempting to measure.

There are almost certainly more of these, but I'm on the way to a Met game.
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Pitcher, Deconstructed

In the first wave of sabermetrics, back in the days when pencil-necks with bad skin and no friends wiled away their solitary existences knee deep in notebooks, calculators and newspaper sports sections, the emphasis was on deconstructing the statistics we were familiar with -- e.g., RBIs, batting average and pitcher wins -- and demonstrating their unworthiness.

In the next wave, a growing cadre of socially-adjusting statheads examined context, recognizing that a home run hit in Dodger Stadium, or in 1968, or in a tie game, is worth more than a home run hit in Denver, or in 2002, or in a six-run game.

The third sabermetric epoch, which persists, is focused on the deconstruction of each individual play, which is now recorded for posterity in atomized detail for everyone to see instantly and simultaneously, in order to assess credit and blame for every result. How much responsibility do the batter, the pitcher, the shortstop, the centerfielder and dumb luck have for a given play. Clearly, the two fielders bear no responsibility for a home run, walk, strikeout or hit by pitch. But even those bear scrutiny between the hurler and hitter.

For years, we assigned blame to pitchers for walks and offered little, if any, kudos to the batter, who after all, simply lallygagged at the plate with the bat on his shoulders. We have since discovered that batters have very different abilities in that area and deserve vastly more credit for "earning" a free pass. (We've also come to realize that walks are enormously important.)

What about other kinds of plays that involve base runners and multiple fielders? Except for recording errors, the box score gives little notice to the defensive unit, and makes no effort at all to acknowledge luck. But recent research has demonstrated that defense and luck are big parts of the game. In fact, this generation of statheads -- Ivy League literature majors who run marathons and gather around the nation by the hundreds -- has found methods of analyzing every kind of batted ball (e.g., fly balls, line drives, grounders, pop-ups, etc.) and applying 100 years of past performance to determine how many of them should, on average and adjusted for ballpark and era, turn into hits. They then compare defensive units to the average and compute their defensive efficiency. 

Here's where it gets fun. Consider a ground ball hit with medium velocity between first and second. If the second-sacker is a slacker, the ball trickles into right field and the batter gets a hit that the pitcher surrenders. Suppose instead that the keystoner reads the swing and breaks to the ball, snares it, and flips to first for the out. Lousy at-bat, good pitching, even though the interaction was exactly the same.

Over the course of a game, and certainly a season, some infields will turn more of those grounders into outs than other will. Some outfields will run down more apparent gappers than others will. And some pitchers will be the beneficiaries while others will watch their ERAs balloon. Hence a recent development: defense-independent pitching statistics. Sabermetricians have attempted to glean the pitchers' responsibility from things like defense.

We still haven't accounted for luck. If the ground ball is six feet to the left, any second baseman makes the play. Three feet to the right, none does. Batters generally can't (absent the occasional Ichiro) so finely deliver their hits and pitchers are simply passive actors in those sorts of plays.

The recently discovered truth is that pitchers have a limited amount of control over what happens to balls put into play (that does not include fly balls that clear the fences), which is another way of saying that defense and luck are vastly under-appreciated (by the fans, but no longer by front offices, which have teams of SABR members crunching these sorts of numbers into nubby granules.) They've also discovered that since pitchers control home runs, walks and strikeouts (and HBP, for what little it's worth), that measuring those occurrences only is often more descriptive of a pitcher's performance. The math is stultifying, particularly if you're flummoxed by the profound complexities of single-digit addition, but suffice to say that if you want to predict which starter will pitch well this year, find a guy with a high strikeout-walk ratio and few home runs allowed last year, and ignore his W-L record and even his ERA.

Let's take the example of Tim Hudson's five and two-third inning outing against San Diego for the victorious Braves last night. The veteran righty recorded the win, surrendering just two runs, for an ERA of a 3.18. Bobby Cox is happy, no? Well, Hudson walked five batters, fanned no one and served up a dinger. He also got relief help from Kris Medlen when he ran into trouble in the sixth inning, and more bullpen support over the last three innings to preserve the win. He certainly wasn't fooling anyone, and Padre batters managed to hit safely at just a .261 rate on balls in play, much lower than the league average of .300 or so.

It's likely that Hudson benefited from some combination of strong defense behind him and good luck. He allowed 11 baserunners, including a double and home run, and probably should have relinquished another safety or two. The five free passes and the inability to strike anyone out has got to agitate Cox's digestive juices; he certainly can't be counting on a season of .261 BABIP against Hudson.

So? We still haven't completely divorced pitching results from all the extraneous factors at work in a game or a season, and much of the defensive measuring is still guesswork's second cousin. But scientific gains are made slowly and incrementally, and the information we have now about pitcher value is more illuminating than wins and ERA ever were.

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