The End of Ryan Howard and the Evolution of Baseball Analysis

By the end of 2009, Ryan Howard had won a Rookie of the Year, an MVP and a World Series. He had smashed 45+ home runs and knocked home 136+ runners each of the past four seasons. Many was the number of fans who believed Howard, with the gaudy RBI totals, was Batman to Albert Pujols' Robin.

We laugh at that now, but it wasn't generally recognized as lunacy back then. Most fans were still swimming in the shallow end of the analysis pool, and because they didn't understand the new analysis that was transforming how we measured performance, they discounted it. Most baseball observers -- including baseball writers -- were still drinking the BA-HR-RBI Kool Aid, and treating fielding ability as nothing more than a tie-breaker.

A two-headed monster made us realize our folly. First, Howard's limited skills turned tail and abandoned him. After age 31, he never managed 30 home runs, 100 RBI or even a middling .320 OBP. Over the past five seasons, Howard has cost the Phillies 4.5 wins against replacement and led their slide into irrelevance.

After this season, the Phillies will pay Ryan Howard $10 million to go away. Thirty-seven-year-olds who can't hit for average or power, run, or play the field don't have many baseball suitors. If they did, I'd be getting Qualifying Offers.

We're On Board With TAv
And now, many baseball fans -- and even some writers -- speak the language of TAv, BABIP, OPS, WAR and their ilk. They understand that a walk is often as good as a hit, that fat helpings of luck can distort ordinary stats, and all the other new ideas that have infected the game.

Looking back, Baseball Reference reports that Howard was worth just 14 WAR over his four best seasons, partly because his glovework was so stony, and partly because he played home games in a launching pad. During that time, Pujols earned 28 WAR -- twice as much -- not only because he was a Gold Glove first baseman, but because he hit for a higher OBP than Howard and -- get this -- led the league in slugging three of the four seasons. A few extra home runs and RBIs on Howard's part couldn't make up for, well, everything else.

In that 2006 season when Howard took home Pujols' MVP award, Albert had a higher batting average, on base percentage and slugging average. He ran the bases better, struck out a third as often and caught 1.2 more balls hit per nine innings than Howard. (In case you're wondering, that's a seismic difference, like winning a 100 yard dash by 1.2 seconds.) Pujols was superior at everything -- except coming to bat with RBI opportunities.

As Ryan Howard bows out, we'll remember his big smile and the big bat he once wielded. And we'll remember some of the ridiculous things we believed about baseball but now better understand.

Wouldn't It Be Great...

Dreaming of the upcoming season. Wouldn't it be great if...

Someone did a home run dance in the sixth inning of a 7-2 game . . . and no once paid any attention? You want to stop gratuitous celebrations? The sound of one hand clapping would do it.

A batter laid down a bunt to break up a no-hitter in the ninth inning of a 3-0 game, invoking the ire of the opposing team and leading to a plunking, a two-base error and a double that tied the game and unwrote the unwritten rule?

Ken "Hawk" Harrelson retired and someone who knew something about baseball in the 21st century replaced him? Then fans on Chicago's South Side would have at least one thing to celebrate this year.

Umpires ordered batters to stop fooling around and get in the box and demanded that pitchers serve up the ball within 20 seconds as required by the rules? And games started moving along?

Jake Arrieta really is as good as the second half of last season? Because that would mean that in 2016 he'd allow a .409 OPS and an ERA of 0.75. He'd allow four home runs all season.

A fan bopped by a batted ball admitted it was their own damn fault for not paying attention?

The players on a last place squad began extolling the team's chemistry? Funny, you never hear that.

Someone connected to a club 10 games under .500 announced that his team had just acquired "momentum" and then they went out and won 13 of the next 15 games? Then we

would finally have one verifiable example of the spirit magic that gives rise to that term.

Baseball writers and announcers all had to take a course and pass an exam on new analysis and be able to explain triple-slash stats, Fielding Independent Pitching, True Average, BABIP and Wins Against Replacement? That way fans would learn about them and we would all better understand the game.

Baseball announcers, particularly play-by-play guys (as opposed to analysts) had to pass an oral communication exam? Then we would stop hearing idiotic phrases like "controlling their own destiny," grounds rule double, and "second-chance opportunities."  (Destiny cannot be controlled and chances are opportunities.) Announcers would understand basic sentence structure, common idioms, proper usage and diction, and generally sound like experts in communication rather than like Norm Crosby.

Mike Trout did it again, and then again and again through age 30?  He'd have 96 WAR with half his career ahead of him.

Thirty-three Years Behind and Counting

“It won’t be long before we get the first wave of nonsense from stat-crazed dunces claiming there’s nothing to be learned from a batting average, won-loss record or RBI total. Listen, just go back to bed, OK? Strip down to those fourth-day undies, head downstairs (to “your mother’s basement and your mother’s computer,” as Chipper Jones so aptly describes it) and churn out some more crap. For more than a century, .220 meant something. So did .278, .301, .350, an 18-4 record, or 118 RBIs. Now it all means nothing because a bunch of nonathletes are trying to reinvent the game?”
– San Francisco Chronicle columnist Bruce Jenkins

Whenever someone fires off ad hominem attacks it's a sure sign they're out of rhetorical ammunition. What's especially regrettable is how hackneyed is this particular shibboleth about stat guys. I'd like to assume that in order to achieve columnist status at a major newspaper like the San Francisco Chronicle, Bruce Jenkins must occasionally evince some intellect and creativity. It's striking then that he could find no more clever, insightful or florid metaphors to describe seamheads than the old cliches of homelessness, poor hygiene and geekdom.

I haven't read this particular gentleman before, but I'm guessing, from this small sample size, that  crooked politicians, hoodlum basketball players and accountants with green eye-shades also comprise his diatribe repertoire. Oh, and Mother Teresa was good. What novel ideas, and so revealing!

That's besides the point, of course, because what's really so daft about his blog post in particular and the many daily expressions of similar sentiments from around the horsehide universe in general is the way he (and everyone he's representing) uses statistics to complain about the use of statistics. It's as if opponents of capital punishment objected to lethal injection by preferring firing squad.

Clearly, Jenkins doesn't object to using statistics to describe baseball, he objects only to the upgrade that better statistics provide. This is a pretty thinly-veiled plea to stop making a guy think. He's got a tenuous grasp on batting average, won-loss record and RBIs and doesn't want to have to learn something new, even if it's vastly superior. That his understanding of those statistics often mislead him into believing untruths is of no consequence to him as long as they provided ballast for certainty without possibility of contradiction.

"For more than a century," a horse drawn carriage "meant something," until cars came along and improved transportation. The 19th century Bruce Jenkins and his ilk would be lambasting non-equestrians for their insistence on replacing horse power with horsepower, and like the modern-day version, would be on the wrong side of technology, the free market and history. The free market's funny about better ideas: it prefers them.

If you're reading this blog, you already know the specifics about those stats, but here's a thumbnail sketch. First, all three mean something, just not very much. RBIs are a team event. Win-loss record is a function of many things having nothing to do with pitching ability. One man's .250 batting average can be far more valuable than another man's .300 batting average. Smart people doing real research have discovered shortcomings in these measurements and proposed vast upgrades to quantify the same thing. These new creations are objectively superior: they correlate more highly with individual performance, better predict future events, more fully describe a body of work. There really isn't any room for debate on those points.

Here's another interesting development: Bruce Jenkins stated his case in a blog. On a website. Using a computer. These were all upgrades from the world as it existed when he began his journalism career, and yet he seems to have embraced that change. Perhaps that embrace was reluctant but required by his desire to continue collecting a paycheck.

It would advance the craft of sports journalism if his employers at the Chronicle demanded the same willingness to change and grow from his baseball coverage. They should not accept from him, nor any other writer on their staff, a level of ignorance about the game that he has not just revealed, but flaunted. They certainly would not allow their White House correspondent to continue discussing the latest developments involving President Taft. They wouldn't allow their health reporter to refuse to discuss arthroscopy because cutting people open worked perfectly well for decades. Why is this retrograde attitude tolerated on the sports pages?

Bruce Jenkins has done a marvelous service to the baseball world. He has given full-throat to the many voices of unreason -- the scared, the hidebound, the illogical -- and accidentally shined a light on their shortcomings. There has already been significant blowback in the blogosphere, and I hope it all works out for the reformation of sports journalism. Because ultimately, Bruce Jenkins' tirade against sabermetrics isn't about baseball, or statistics, or even Bruce Jenkins; it's about the narrow, sclerotic minds that control much of sports journalism today.

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Statheads on Crack

Sabermetrics have transformed baseball analysis and helped regular fans like us understand the game differently and better. Computer-fueled statistical analysis has punched holes in old shibboleths and established new, research-supported truths. Often, they tell us that our eyes deceive us.

The stat geeks, spreadsheet-munchers and number nerds responsible for this revolution deserve our appreciation not just for devising new ways to measure things, but to continue to devise better ways. Ten years ago, when seamheads were gestating the concept of dissociating pitching from defense, the results were often best left ignored. They have improved steadily, thanks to MLB's ability to catalog every single pitch, to the point where we could, in broad strokes, predict the decline of Ubaldo Jimenez in the second half of the season.

Sometimes, however, seamheads forget that their work is a journey and not a destination.They are beguiled by half-conceived statistical formulae whose rough edges have yet been smoothed by years of inquiry, testing and polishing. They treat the results as gospel, rather than as suggestions tempered by the adolescent state of the art.

Two years ago, Oriole farmhand Matt Wieters was touted by Baseball Prospectus as the greatest catching prospect since Zeus. (Lightning bolt for an arm, immense two-strike power.) Using their proprietary projection system to examine Wieters' minor league and college careers, it projected him to hit .311/.395/.544 with 31 home runs in 2009 and be worth 60 runs more than a replacement-level catcher. Their system, called PECOTA, compares player performance to similar players of the past and sets upper and lower boundaries on expected future results. What I've listed is the weighted mean -- or most likely -- projected rookie numbers for Wieters.

What seemed obvious to me at the time, and what you've no doubt realized, is that such expectations for any rookie are patently absurd. They fail the smell test. While we should all be open to revealed truths, we must trust our eyes until the contradictory facts congeal into a proof.

In fact, Wieters showed great promise as a 23-year-old in 2009 with a .288/.340/.412 line and nine home runs in half a season. That's still above average for a receiver, but a far cry from the projection that BP writers defended as if it were the 11th commandment. (Honor they PECOTA projection and have no other conjurings before me.) Wieters has sagged even further from that unwarranted esteem this year to .253/.326/.385 and 11 home runs in full-time duty.

I love Baseball Prospectus enough to pay good money for it and read it everyday. But they treat PECOTA as destiny and use it to project team performance -- via a Monte Carlo simulation of a million permutations -- at the start of each season. Then they update their projections as the season unfolds.

The opening season projections amount to on-screen enlightenment. Often, BP sees things I don't. They correctly projected declines for the Dodgers, White Sox, Tigers and Angels. They're a good guide to the upcoming season.

It's when Dr. Jekyll starts reading his own press releases that he becomes Mr. Hyde. Entering the 2010 campaign, BP projected that the Cardinals had something like an 80% chance of making the playoffs. My reaction then was, how could that possibly be? I understand that the Redbirds were favorites, but no non-Yankee contingent can ever be an 80% lock before a pitch is thrown. Imagine a season in which Albert Pujols and Chris Carpenter are cut down by injuries and you can see that such a projection is patent nonsense. But the BP brain trust wrote as if October in St. Louis was a fait accompli.

Two weeks ago, BP had the Braves as an 89.6% lock to play in mid-October, despite a three-game deficit to the surging Phils and just a two game cushion over San Francisco for the Wild Card. Once again my olfactory nerves shuddered. Atlanta took three pops to the chin from their division rival and fell into a flat-footed tie for the Wild Card with nine or 10 games left. BP was still offering nearly 3-1 that the Braves would take the fourth playoff spot. (Their remaining schedule is weaker than San Diego's and San Francisco's.)

I understand why BP thinks the Braves should be favored, but I doubt Atlanta residents are booking their playoff tickets quite yet. As I write this, Chief Nakahoma's nine is a game back of San Diego in the loss column with six to play, having just lost two of three to execrable Washington. How is it possible for a team to be a 90% lock for the playoffs if a 4-6 stretch puts them on the outside looking in?

Perhaps some day the statxperts at Baseball Prospectus will improve their tools and better project playoff odds. Or (more likely, in my view) predicting the future will continue to fall outside the purview of mere humans, regardless of their statistical acumen. In any case, I'll continue to treat sabermetrics as a toolbox necessary to understanding the game I love, not as perfection itself.

So I'll be watching the games this last week and ignoring the predictions.
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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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Boog, Will You Marry Me?

I suspect this is somehow illegal, but it's done with love. This was a guest column for Baseball Prospectus.

Building a Better Broadcast

by Jon Sciambi

Jon Sciambi, who does play-by-play of Major League Baseball games for ESPN, has been kind enough to grace the Baseball Prospectus site with a guest column.

Let me tell you about an argument I had with Chipper Jones. Last year, I came across an interesting nugget on Fangraphs while doing pre-game prep: Besides Albert Pujols, Chipper sees the fewest first-pitch strikes in the majors.

Chipper is open-minded when discussing hitting, even when he disagrees, so I decided to present him this information prior to the game. He was really surprised. He didn't believe the facts, even though the numbers were inarguable. Or, more to the point, he believed in what he knew (and himself) more than my stupid, never-played-the-game facts.

Chipper was so surprised that he went around the clubhouse asking teammates, one by one, if they were surprised. None of them were. Everyone saw it but him, the guy with ostensibly the best view. Chipper has great eyes, obviously, and great belief in those eyes, but those eyes can also occasionally lie to even one of the best hitters in the game.

I went on to ask why he'd swing at so many first pitches when the numbers suggest it's not a great play. Chipper explained that the first pitch is often the only time he'll get a "heater" the entire at-bat. "OK," I say, "but clearly, mathematically, factually, you’re not getting a ton of strikes." We go round and round for a bit without concession on either side and eventually I go upstairs to broadcast the game.

Fast forward to the top of the first. San Diego’s Tim Stauffer on the mound. Chipper digs in… and takes a 91-mph fastball right down the middle. He steps out of the box, finds our broadcast booth with those great eyes and, well, here’s what follows:

Chipper Jones 1, Stats 0. But Chipper, sample size!

Will Carroll’s "Be Stupider" post got me thinking: How can the broadcast world do a better job of delivering sabermetrics to the masses? And, more importantly, how do we make it "illuminating" instead of "coma-inducing?" Additionally, how do I get Chipper to understand I'm not a moron?

Like Will, I’m "mathematically challenged" and find lots of BP, Fangraphs, Tango, etc., tough to digest. I am somewhat "tentative" to push SABR-type stuff on air because of the aforementioned coma potential. That's not an excuse, just reality. But it's also on me to do better. During my years doing Braves games, I had the good fortune of working with a crew that was open to new ideas. All our player stat lines included OBP (not earth-shattering) and the bulk of our graphics were presented in rate-stat form. But the thing that made it work was my broadcast partner, Joe Simpson. If I dug up a non-mainstream stat somewhere online, I'd say, "You know, Joe, I was looking at 'I live in my mom’s basement.com,' and I found this note on Javy Vazquez…" He would giggle and poke fun, but he would always listen. You know what else? He would change his mind sometimes. Joe is very old school. But he’s fun enough to spitball in one of the classrooms of that old school. What's the line from Mr. Baseball? "I bet you didn’t start playing baseball as a kid because you wanted to work?" That’s right, Magnum P.I., I just quoted Mr. Baseball.

So how do we make a better broadcast? It's gotta be fun. Entertaining. To us. Yes. But, by extension, to the audience.

What else? Well, it's as much about eliminating certain stats from the lexicon as it is about adding them. We need to slowly erase the "noise." Stop mentioning and graphically supporting with stats like RBI and wins because that stuff doesn't make people smarter.


Let's not forget "it's the search for objective knowledge about baseball." The goal is not unveiling newfangled stats; it's about getting people to understand basic ideas and concepts. To achieve that, we can't just slap stats up on the screen and explain them. Understanding has to come in the form of analysis. We have to use the stat and explain it. Sometimes it needs to be the PBP guy playing analyst and getting the color guy to react:

If Ryan Howard is up, I can talk about RBI and why dependent stats don't evaluate individual performance well; RBI aren’t what reflects Howard’s greatness, his SLG does. I can mention that Howard's massive RBI totals may be due to the fact that no player has hit with more total men on base than Howard since 1492 (I believe this is a fact but didn't feel like looking it up). Point is, there are dead people who could knock in 80 runs hitting fourth in that Phillies lineup. (OK, I probably wouldn't say that on-air.)

The metrics are getting so advanced that we're in danger of getting further away from the masses instead of closer. We, as broadcasters, have to find better and entertaining ways of explaining the math in bite-sized terms. Simplified, we need to explain that one of the problems with batting average, as opposed to slugging percentage, is that batting average values a single and a home run equally. We can't assume that's understood just because we understand it. And the only way it gets embedded is to keep beating the audience with it so that it becomes ingrained the way ERA eventually did, even though that once passed for advanced math. That, and we should all wear blue blazers with an emblem that reads, "OBP is life."

I also believe, as it relates to the masses, the PBP guys can’t move the analysis needle much. The masses will always find former players more credible, period, and the BP base needs to be more open to that—if the goal is indeed to inform the masses and not be "right."

The average fan wants the analysis from McCarver, not Buck. Joe Morgan may not be popular in these parts, but last year I worked a Tigers/Angels game with him in Anaheim. At one point, I mentioned UZR, UZR/150, and other defensive metrics. As we were going to commercial, Joe said that he'd like to talk about defensive metrics when we got back. What followed was a pretty straightforward, simple discussion about defensive metrics without disdain or dismissal on his part.

Look, there's still a ways to go. We need a former player to look into the camera and explain properly why this guy:

.250/.380/.475

is a better offensive player than this guy:

.300/.320/.475

We need to get to where the masses understand there is no choice. This isn't subjective. I evaluate offense with OBP and SLG while you like RBI and runs scored is not the same as "I like strawberry, and you like vanilla." It’s "strawberry is better than vanilla." More accurate and, therefore, more delicious. To be clear, I don't speak for ESPN here, just me, but I think we have a responsibility to inform correctly. If a majority of teams are using advanced metrics to inform decisions, then we should do some of the same in analyzing those decisions.

In 2008, Dick Cheney was informed that two-thirds of Americans thought the war in Iraq was not worth fighting. Cheney’s response? "So?" We need a little bit more of that 'tude. This isn’t to say I agree with his politics. Or the war. Why am I even going here? Eject!

I'd liken this task to how The New York Times operates. The Times places the stories it deems most important above the fold and to the right. The majority of other papers go with what they think we think are the most important. The goal is to be the Times. If we eliminate the noise of RBI, runs, etc., keep it basic and utilize the slash stats, I believe that, slowly, the desert masses will drink the sand. The BP base must understand: VORP, EqA, WAR, and Robert Parish are not walking through that door. Not for a while. But it can only help if the broadcasters are a team, too—in uniformity (together, I mean, not wearing those blazers) while patiently holding that door open.

Running of the Sports Media Bulls

On Sunday, Bill Belichick eschewed a punt on fourth and two from his 29 yard line with 2:03 on the clock and a six point lead. The tactic failed and the Colts scored the winning touchdown with 13 seconds left. On Monday, not to mention Tuesday through Friday, the recriminations flew.

This is a baseball post: I promise.

You can imagine the blowback from a coaching decision that defies conventional wisdom and then backfires. What particularly bemuses me is how the sports media has infused this decision with a moral characteristic. Repeatedly the decision is being called "arrogant."

This is a baseball post: I promise.

The advanced analysis of sabermetrics have been around for 30 years. But in the football universe, this kind of research is new. It'll be 20 years, at least, before the sports media figures it out. But here's what is already known about situations like this: If his goal was to win the game, Belichick's decision was easily defensible.

I won't crunch all the numbers for you, but on average, teams make fourth and two about 60% of the time. They prevent teams from entering the end zone from 30 yards out about 30% of the time. From 70 yards out, that number increases to about 70%. So on average, going for it could be expected to yield success 72% of the time (60% + [30%x40%]), about the same as punting.

It's important here to note that these are facts, not matters of opinion. People will argue against the above with "logic," but they are dueling with spirits. Conventional wisdom has been proven wrong by the experience of thousands of NFL games.

Of course, these are not "average"teams. The Boy Horses had scored touchdowns on their last two possessions and have this special Peyton tool they use to carve up defenses in the final minutes. The Patriots spin fourth and two into gold like Rumpelstiltskin. There was more reward and less risk than usual to going for it. It was a much better decision than "on average."

Aside: In fact, teams punt way too much in general. There should be virtually no punting at all between the 40s, because the real estate gain does little to decrease the odds of the opponent scoring. But giving up the ball reduces the chances of your team scoring nearly to zero. New research has found this to be fact. It's not debatable.

This is a baseball post: I promise.

Not content to be ignorant about football, the sports media feels the need to demonstrate ignorance about psychology. They've decided that because Bill Belichick appears arrogant, his decision must have been borne of arrogance. How else could he knuckle up his head so badly? I don't know how a decision designed to advance your team's interests can be "arrogant" or "humble." I don't know how it could be "generous" or "miserly." Or "weak" or "strong" or "tall" or "short" or "happy" or "sad." Calculations like his are either made with good information or not, either well-considered or not, and turn out either well or poorly. It's just another effort of the sports media to explain away what it doesn't understand by applying tags that are impossible to disprove.

So how is this a baseball post? The running of the football bull is perfectly analogous to the baseball kingdom, where most of the sports media still, 30 years after the proofs were written, doesn't understand that some conventional wisdom is wrong. Bunting is often a bad strategy. RBI are a team event. Pitcher wins are so close to meaningless that no one believes they're just friends. Great players go through cold streaks and hangers-on can get hot.

Adding character overtones doesn't shed any light on the subject. If, for example, Barry Bonds hits under .200 in a couple of playoff series, concluding that he "chokes" or "isn't a big game guy" or "hasn't stepped up" doesn't make you an analyst, it makes you a phony. Barry Bonds hit under .200 over a dozen games hundreds of times in his career, but no one noticed because they hadn't viewed those dozen games distinctly from others. (It's worth noting that Bonds hit like Manny Pacquiao in the Giants' 2005 World Series run.)

So the reaction to Belichick was a microcosm of how sports media covers baseball and explains it to fans. It is, in short, a fraud, a daily series of malpractice cases for which no one has ever been held accountable, and people who commit this malpractice are lauded for their perspicacity and insight regularly. But as maybe the greatest coach in NFL history can tell you, they don't know what they're talking about.

The Myopia of Statheads

Sabermetricians have taught us new and better ways to analyze the game of baseball. Sometimes, however, they fall victim to the allure of their own imperfect theories.

For example, there are various sabermetric player projection systems out there that are marginally better at predicting player performance than the average well-informed baseball fan. These systems know a few things that you might not; e.g., that a player was particularly lucky or unlucky last year (mostly a result of his BABIP -- batting average on balls in play) or how players tend to change as they age, or what happens to hitters following anomalous seasons. But baseball is too unpredictable to...well... predict, even with a computer.

Nonetheless, some sabermetricians make judgements about players as if their systems are infallible and know more than the coaches, managers and GMs who are acquainted with the players personally and watch them play everyday. These stat geeks express shock when something occurs that's outside their projection systems.

Last week Joe Sheehan, a highly respected writer for Sports Illustrated and Baseball Prospectus, asserted that the Braves should flip Jair Jurrjens to another team next year as the Braves deal with an abundance of starting pitching (Jurrjens, promising rookie Tommy Hanson, aces Derek Lowe and Javier Vazquez, Japanese import Kenshin Kawakami and rehabbed star Tim Hudson.) Sheehan observed that Jurrjens has outperformed the pitching indicators and could yield a return beyond his actual value.

Before I disassemble this leap of logic, those indicators merit some discussion. Statheads have noticed that pitcher ERA and won-loss records fluctuate wildly from year to year, but pitchers are much more predictable in their ability to walk and strike out batters, which, after all, are outcomes over which they have total control. Statheads have further noticed that pitchers who aren't fooling hitters, i.e., striking them out, tend not to be very successful. That doesn't mean pitchers have to throw heat, just that whatever they're serving up has hitters confounded sufficiently to keep them in the park and prevent large numbers of screaming liners.

This isn't a foolproof formula: there are pitchers who regularly succeed or fail despite walk/strikeout totals that suggest the opposite, and there are pitchers whose performance fluctuates wildly even though their walk/strikeout rates remain constant. Instead, it gives rise to some guidelines that prevent analysts from jumping to conclusions about pitchers who've been lucky or unlucky.

It's worth noting that for his career, Jurrjens has been the beneficiary of a very low BABIP. Pitchers with low one-year BABIPs often have either great defense behind them or serendipity smiling upon them. Either one suggests the pitcher is less accomplished than he appears.

So back to Sheehan, Jurrjens and the Braves surfeit of arms. First, haven't we learned anything from the '09 Red Sox? There is no such thing as an abundance of pitching. A blow up here, a tired arm there, a couple of Tommy Johns and before you know it, your six starters have melted away. The Braves should try to sign a couple of outfield/first base bats in the offseason, but they should definitely not trade any of the most valuable commodities in baseball.

Moreover, Jair Jurrjens' walk/strikeout and BABIP numbers are irrelevant, at least to the extent that they presage future accomplishments. Sure, Jurrjens has walked 140 batters against 272 strikeouts in his 383 innings of major league work, a sub 2-1 K/BB ratio that is often an indicator of future trouble. And his .310 BABIP is about 20 points lower than normal.

But Jair Jurrjens has been doing this for two-and-a-half years. In 2008 and 2009, he's been one of the 15 best starters in baseball, with a lifetime ERA of 3.43. He's relinquished less than a hit an inning and a brilliant 0.63 home runs per game. Jurrjens hurls in The Ted, not a particularly HR-averse field. He's also kept up this low BABIP, which suggests that he's enticing batters to put balls in play weakly.

The Braves traded for the Curacao native in the '08 off-season because they saw something they liked. Would you agree that that particular franchise might know a little something about good young pitchers? In short, he has proven that he is a superb pitcher despite a tepid walk-strikeout ratio and low BABIP.

The question has never been whether statistics are helpful to analyzing baseball games and players, just whether we understand the stats and use them appropriately. Sometimes even the stat guys forget that.
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Inroads

This space has documented a lot of ignorance, particularly in sports media, of the updated methods, improved analysis and new stats that shine brighter illumination on the game, its teams and its players.

But the overall trend is excellent. Sports Illustrated turns over a full page to Baseball Prospectus writer Joe Sheehan for insight otherwise not found in mainstream media. They also reference the latest research in baseball articles, including a nifty piece on base running in the July edition.

ESPN employs Rob Neyer, a direct descendant -- sabermetrically -- of Bill James. Keith Law, another Jamesian scholar, former front office executive and current Scouts Inc. guy, makes regular appearances on ESPN radio. Others, Peter Gammons most notably, regularly mention players' OPS -- on base plus slugging percentage -- a vastly better measure than triple crown stats.

Last week I heard former Cincinnati Post and Sporting News baseball writer Jerry Crasnick mention the Verducci efect -- the negative effect on young pitchers, discovered by writer Tom Verducci, that an increase of 30% in innings pitched from one year to the next produces.

I was watching a game on TV at Citi Field and noticed that they post hitters' OBP. So when Pablo Sandoval and Bengie Molina bat for the Giants, you can see their impressive batting averages but also note their unimpressive on base percentages and realize that they're really not very productive hitters.

Of course, some broadcasters have been on board for years. Jon Sciambi is on the mountain top there and I've gleefully overheard complaints about Gary Cohen for referencing VORP and BABIP, simple concepts that measure (respectively) a player's value compared to replacement player at his position and his batting average on balls in play, which can suggest whether a hitter has been particularly lucky or unlucky over a short period.

It's good. We're moving in the right direction. Now I would like to see the beat writers, broadcasters, MVP voters and Hall of Fame voters understand and use these concepts. Once they do, they will be common currency among fans. Then, we'll all know the game better and I can shut up and close down this blog.

What could be better than that?
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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.