Baseball fans, of whom I’m one, sometimes like to state that they enjoy the game but don’t enjoy the statistical outlook on the game. I’m fine with that–you can enjoy anything you like, including sniffing the peanut shells beneath the seats, and I have no problem with you whatsoever. Live and let live!
But sometimes these fans tell me that they understand the game more keenly (and therefore speak with much sounder authority) than I do BECAUSE they are proudly innocent of any exposure to the statistical analysis I like to indulge myself in.
First place, who says that you actually watch more games than I do, or that you watch them more carefully, or better, or anything?
I have to say, since I became a stat-head, I’ve come to root less for MY team and appreciate both sides a little better. I’m no longer so wedded to defending the stupid shit that MY team does, and no longer feel obliged to argue that MY player is better or that MY manager is smarter. To the extent that these things are even knowable, I now prefer to examine the evidence and see the results of that examination. If my player turns out to be the best, great. If he turns out to be the sixth-best, great. I have no special stake in making false claims just because I’m a fan of one special team. I’m a fan of the truth and of knowledge, first and foremost.
But arguing with these anti-stathead partisans is just too much for me anymore. The self-righteousness, the imbecilic positions fans will take just to argue that THEIR player is superior to mine–I just can’t take it anymore. I wish someone would build them a special stadium so I don’t even have to sit near them anymore. It’s like the Siren Song of the Morons, when they start yapping their specious canary-shit, I can resist telling them why they’re totally wrong for only so long.
I blame Joe Morgan and Tim McCarver for people like that, and Morgan especially. Joe Morgan was the perfect second baseman according to sabermetrics, but he refuses to accept that statistics can be more accurate than “guys who played the game.” That’s why he thinks Dave Concepcion was the greatest shortstop who ever played, despite no one agreeing with him.
Morgan refuses to read Moneyball, and he and McCarver agree that, strangely, having runners on base is a bad thing if they take walks. I can remember Morgan laying into Frank Thomas for taking a walk and “clogging up the basepaths” because he’s a slugger who should have driven runs in. It’s almost as though he doesn’t realize that it’s easier to score when there are runners on base.
And when it comes to ridiculous arguments about “my player’s better than yours,” I heard someone honestly argue that Roy Halladay was a better Cy Young candidate than Francisco Liriano, because Halladay is somehow more important to his team.
James had a great expression for that. He wrote that if you want to know which is the tallest tree in the forest, do you ask a tree which one is taller, or do you measure the trees? Morgan’s a tree (and a pretty short one).
When somebody tries to put me down
and says his team is big
I say, wait a minute, ain’t you heard of my team
it’s number one in the league
So be true to your team
just like you would to your girl or guy…
For what it’s worth, pseudotriton ruber ruber, I didn’t think you were at all out of line in the CS thread, so I would have liked to see all this continued over there.
That said, I think a lot of the cause for the divide between the old guard baseball guys and the new school statheads is ego. It’s like, if I’ve been playing, coaching and commenting upon baseball my entire life, how the fuck is some geek with a pen and paper going to tell me whether or not I should bunt this guy over to second? There’s a certain amount of pride that goes along with being really devoted to a game, and especially in baseball, with being a purist. It’s hard to resist that kind of feeling if you think you have really earned some insight into the game – even for me, and I love what sabermetrics has brought to my enjoyment of the game. I’m the type who used to sit at my dining room table during the summer with a Baseball Encyclopedia and a calculator figuring out my own formulas to “prove” that Lou Gehrig was the greatest infielder of all time.
Still, even though I was preconditioned by my geekiness to eat stuff like VORP up anyway, it took me awhile to accept some of the counter-baseball-intuitive conclusions of statistical analyses, because I had already learned it the other way around, damn it… I was part of the club! So I can definitely see how a Joe Morgan would bristle at the notion that a group of statistics majors in an office somewhere have worked out on a computer that there’s no such thing as protection, when he’s “known” damn well all his life that protection exists. Once you’ve given into the notion that the numbers are going to dictate decision-making, you’ve given up your baseball “self,” in a way, because you’re accepting that anybody could make the right decisions if they had access to the right numbers.
I don’t know that just having the numbers means anyone can manage a team. Statistics may tell you that a guy hits better against the starter than the reliever you have loosening in the bullpen, but if your starter’s cruising through a 1-hitter, lifting him may not be the right move. There’s a place for being able to read players and how they’re performing at that particular moment, and a place for trusting the numbers.
Case in point: if the Astros are leading the Cardinals in the 9th, stats would tell you that putting Brad Lidge in is probably the best move. But if Albert Pujols is going to be coming to the plate with RISP, it may not be the smartest move, since Albert has destroyed Lidge’s mental state thanks to that majestic, soul-crushing home run last fall (and I don’t doubt for a second that all Lidge’s problems this year can be traced back to that fly ball soaring into the Houston night.)
Yes, it really bugged Sparky Anderson that Bill James was in effect telling him that he was managing wrong. The funny part was Anderson described James as some little guy, when James is 6’4" and Anderson is about 5’8", But little as in “this asshole never played the game.”
The thing the anecdotal folks don’t get is how much of the statheads’ wisdom they accept, once everyone else accepts it. Then it’s a holy relic of the game. Take OBP. James rightly points out that in the 1960s, no one thought walks were valuable at all, people thought Mickey Mantle was doing his team harm by walking a lot, if they thought his walks were anything other than a coincidence. But now every MLB manager knows to look for OBP in a front of the order guy, even as they retain their hostility to the statheads who insisted (against their vehement arguments) that of course OBP is critical. Nowadays you’d never have a Ralph Houk leading off with Bobby Richardson, who looks like a leadoff guy (small, light hitting, low strikeout, good bunter, middle infielder) except that he had an OBP of about .310, utterly inadequate for a leadoff hitter. Houk would get hooted out of the league with that shit these days. But when James criticized Houk for that blunder, and others, people asked “Who is this asshole to presume he knows morethan Ralph Houk?” People are still calling James and his followers assholes, but they’ve switched to other reasons for doing so, reasons that they will, in 10 or 20 years, be parroting proudly as accepted baseball wisdom.
Players still need to accept their manager’s credentials, and for the foreseeable future, they’re mostly interested in old school standrads, whether the manager has played MLB ball. They’re suspicious of even longtime minor league managers who didnt play MLB (though Lasorda and McKeon and others give the lie to that.) So that’s not changing any time soon, but statheads’ theories are making their way into MLB dugouts, because they’re all about the edges that go to a team that uses them, and thus ultimately about smart managing and winning.
Eh. What’s important is what wins you ballgames. The manager who wins with stats and the one who wins with intuition are equivalent IMO. Frankly, pseuditriton ruber ruber, you sound a bit biased and bitter yourself.
I don’t really know what point you’re trying to make by quoting half a sentence that was preceded by “I don’t know that just having the numbers means…” but I agree that players like having managers who have been on the field at some point. Just look at the number of light-hitting catchers who have become managers.
I’m waiting for some manager to try some of James’s more radical ideas, like using the closer in the 7th. Although really, that’s going back toward the idea of the “stopper” who comes in to kill a potential rally when the starter falters.
FWIW, I would advocate for putting the closer in in the 7th. Putting them in in the 9th is abusing the save stat, which rewards the guy who comes on in the 6th just as well. Then again, I’ve always thought using any non-closer relief pitcher for less than two innings (assuming they don’t get lit up before then) was ridiculous. What if the game goes into the 18th inning and you burned three pitchers before it was even tied?
Well,that’s why I opened this thread in the Pit. I am embittered by dealing with vapid and meaningless (but quite snotty) remarks like “What’s important is what wins you ballgames”–DUH! The things I’m talking about DO win ballgames, but not all managers have the brains or the balls to use theories that some other manager hasn’t tried out for them. What Houk and his generation was doing with leadoff men was simply stupid beyond belief, but they got away with that crap because Bill James and his stats hadn’t come along to tell them which way was up. Now that everybody and his sister understand s the imprtance of OBP, they’re all “Of course–it’s all about winning” like they had a clue how to win before a stathead told them.
The save rule is all about salary and zero about winning games.
Well, maybe not zero, since it does save some wear and tear by not getting your best relief pitcher into some games where he has no business, but other than that it’s a useless bit of fluff that wags that dog.
I’d guess the Yankees could have won three or four more games per year if Torre were allowed to put Rivera into games at a point where they’re veering out of control–when a starter in the 6th starts walking guys, and now it’s a one-run game with the bases loaded and Torre has to (because it’s not the 9th inning) bring in Kyle Farnsworth or Molly Putz who promptly blows the game sky-high. Meanwhile he saves Mariano for the next night, when he has a three-run lead and no one on at the start of the 9th inning, a situation where I could probably get a save or two.
The stat exists so closers have some basis for salary negotiations, and I think that if some manager can find the guts it takes to reject using his closer to accrue saves, he might steal a pennant or three against hidebound managers who don’t get what I’m saying.
Isn’t managing by statistics already “tried out”? Are you suggesting that every manager needs to come up with some unique theory to validate themself as a manager?
I don’;t get what you mean by “managing by statistics”–are you implying that one statistically-based strategy is the whole ball of wax? You look for a zillion edges, some which may be counter-intuitive or counter-historical. You use the most plausible ones, and you experiement with others in low-risk situations to see if there’s an edge using some of them in high-risk situations.
Stat-heads have loads of ideas. It takes a gutsy manager to read through them, and see which ones sound promising. Most managers don’t even know these theses exist. Take Rick Jay’s idea about the left-handed catcher–is it really that hard for a manager to stick a lefty-throwing catcher into a blowout game to see what the downside would be?
Personaly, I’d stock my bench with players who are willing to learn how to catch, since often your backup catcher is prevented from getting into the game because you need him if your frontline catcher gets hurt, which shortens your bench. Why can’t a few backup infielders learn the rudiments of catching? I’d insist that they do, and then I’d play them in blowout losses so they get crucial ingame experience, and then when they’re competent, I’d feel free to use my backup catcher as a pinch-hitter before there are two outs in the 9th inning once in a while.
I’d also have middle relievers who routinely pitch 3 or 4 innings at a stretch. For some reason, it’s a rule these days that no reliever can pitch more than two innings in relief. Fuck that noise. if my team is losing 10 to 2 in the fourth inning, I’m not blowing my whole bullpen on this game, I’m handing the ball to some kid who wants to break into the starting rotation and say, “Here. Show me what you’ve got.” But almost no manager wants to do that anymore.
There are a million strategies that statheads come up with, and I’m appalled at how few of them even get a chance in MLB games.
First, I certainly do agree about the inordinate importance of the save stat, its distortion of the game, and its tendency to cost the occasional win. I have the same view of the home run stat, the stolen bases stat, and essentially *every * personal stat. Any time a player has an incentive for his goals to diverge from his team’s it costs wins. This is nothing new in sports, not at all.
But you do seem to dismiss a couple of considerations peremptorily. Players are not machines, or simply statistical number generators whose ability to perform in a given situation can be most accurately predicted by their performance over time. They’re humans. They think and react and work on their game in many ways. They get injured, or have bad days. Unlike dice, they do go on hot streaks and cold streaks. The manager knows that, and why, and realize that that’s the heart of their jobs. You, as a mere fan, don’t have access to major parts of the relevant information, and no set of numbers can provide it to you either. You can dismiss what a good manager does that seems to contradict what your spreadsheet seemd to demand as mere “intuition”, but it’s really knowledge and judgment - knowledge that you don’t have and judgment that you haven’t developed.
You also don’t seem aware of much of what’s at the heart of the fun for many, even most, fans - admiring and enjoying the players demonstrating their skills, just being in the moment, anticipation, even dread. When David Ortiz comes to the plate in the 9th with a man on and Boston down by 1, is it really more fun to call up the numbers on how he hit this pitcher 2 years ago, or to sit back and wonder if he can stay hot and jack another walkoff, and just give yourself over to celebration when he does? You may disagree with Jimmy Breslin that “Baseball is not statistics”, when obviously they do play a major part in fandom, but if you disagree with his next sentence, “Baseball is DiMaggio rounding second”, you’re missing its soul.
Alternatively, why not stock three catchers like the Padres do this year? Every talks about how awful it is, but it works. No worries–you can put a catcher into the game without worrying about having a backup left if your starter gets hurt. That said, I think Bruce Bochy overuses his catching bench–it’s fine that each guy gets starts, but once you’ve started someone, leave them in the damn game. Mike Piazza can’t buy a fourth at-bat in a game anymore.
But as I alluded to earlier I don’t think too highly of Bochy’s lovefest for middle relievers, either. The bullpen is great, but that doesn’t mean you need to use every single damn pitcher in it every single night. I bet he’d get even better performance out of them if he used each one for three innings every three nights instead of two-thirds or one inning every game. (I see you agree with me, on preview.)
Back to the catchers, though–it’s somewhat unusual to have two catchers who hit well. San Diego is blessed in that area, but how many backup catchers would make decent pinch-hitters anyway? Why shorten your utility infielders’ careers just so you can pinch-hit some unweildy, lumbering dude who’s just gonna strike out?
Managing a baseball team is, obviously, about a lot more than playing Strat-O-Matic with living humans. In fact, I would suggest it’s MOSTLY about other things. The truth is that in-game strategic differences between managers don’t really make a whole lot of difference in the grand scheme of things; a team’s fortunes are far more dependent upon personnel selection, which is long decided before the ump says “play.” If you’ve got Babe Ruth, Willie Mays and Ty Cobb and I have Buddy Biancalana, Duane Kuiper and Eddie Gaedel, you’re going to kick my ass even if you lead the wrong guy off.
Where sabermetrics has criticized field managers it’s mostly been in terms of large-scale role assignment, like leading off the guy who can’t get on base because he runs well, every single day. Giving Jim Slugger the day off and playing Tim Lighthitter a start isn’t cause for concern in the eyes of anyone with three or more brain cells.
Similarly, a lot of behind the scenes stuff is basically beyond the reach of any sort of analysis, positive or negative.
This is exactly the kind of stupid bullshit straw man argument the OP is railing against, for Christ’s sake.
Do you REALLY think that because I read the “Baseball Prospectus” that I don’t understand what it’s like to be in the moment of a baseball game? Of course I do; I’m as devoted a baseball fan as there’s ever been. I know about anticipation; I’ve seen my team fail spectacularly and I’ve seen them win the World Series twice. Man, I can’t begin to describe those feelings. When the Braves tied it up in the bottom of the ninth of Game 6 in 1992, I actually barfed. The one and only time I’ve ever vomited since I was a baby.
I’ve never met an admirer of sabermetrics who understood the numbers but did not love the game for what it was. Never, not once, ever. I do not believe such a person exists. It’s a pure myth cooked up by nitwits.
I’ve long suspected that it’s the nitwits who are laziest and most rigid who drive this position. They don’t enjoy analysis, with its difficulties and subtleties, which is their right as Americans (and Canadians, I’m sure) and Yahoos, so they deride those who do. I liken them to people with strong but ignorant views on politics who loudly insist on their positions without being able to make a shred of rational sense in supporting them, or who adhere to the most ridiculous religious beliefs, the nonsense of which they smugly claim to be justified by “God’s mysterious ways” or by their faith in those mysterious ways. There’s just no talking to these people because, as idiotic as their positions are, they’re certainly entitled to hold them. Somehow, such tolerence on my part is perceived as some kind of justification of these extremist know-nothing views. Because you MAY hold any dumb belief is NOT a justification for the sheer dumbth of that belief.
I find that it increases my enjoyment of the tension immeasurably, for example, to be informed as to the pitching matchup and the history when Big Papi is up with the tying run on base in the bottom of the ninth. You may enjoy screaming mindlessly regardless of the matchups (like the woman who proclaimed her undying love for Johnny Damon in my ear the whole damn game at Fenway last season, I’d prefer you sit far from me) but to me it’s thrilling to know that Papi has gone 16-for-27 lifetime against this particular pitcher, or to know he’s gone 6-for-27. Neither stat represents a big enough sample to guarantee the outcome (no sample is big enough for that) but those are both exciting bits of information to me, and they jazz me up in different ways.
I suspect further that if a non-stathead were to be aware of either stat, they’d find it added to their viewing pleasure as well. But generally speaking, they’re lazy slobs who dislike the inconvenience of having to update such figures, or to embellish them with subtleties (Is Papi’s .593 average lessened by knowing he’s got only one extra base-hit in those 16 hits?) No, it’s much easier to hoot and grunt your uninformed opinions at ear-busting decibel levels, guzzle your beer, and generally have a terrific time. That’s all part of the game. But imposing yor ignorance on me, and claiming it to be somehow superior to my enjoyment of the game, is truly offensive.