Of course there are “styles of play” in baseball. Some teams specialize in “small ball,” manufacturing runs out of walks, stolen bases, infield hits, bunts, and so forth. Other teams are station-to-station, getting a men on base and advancing them mainly through hits. Some teams are built on pitching and defense, others on heavy hitting.
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It should also be noted that of the 4 major sports, baseball seems to be the one that hires people that never played the sport, at a notable level at least, the most often as GMs. Many GMs are math wizards who couldn’t swing a wiffle ball bat if their lives depended on it. Ironically, the trend towards sabermetrics was popularized by a MLB draft washout, Billy Beane,
Ironically, its the one sport that can bite you in the ass harder than any other if you simply coach by the numbers. Pitch count is one classic example. There is ample evidence that its best to pull a pitcher after he has reached his maximum pitch count per game, or as in the case of Steve Strasburg, for a season; how many times then have we seen then the starter get pulled once they met or exceeded their PC and the reliever give up a 3 run homer on the very next pitch?
The 1960 World Series is a classic example way before computers reared their ugly shadow over the game. The book “Bottom of the Ninth” describes in detail how Casey Stengel out-thought himself (to the point of pinch-hitting one of his starters at his first turn at bat!) and tried to outsmart baseball and how it helped the Pirates win the World Series.
This adds another dimension to the “thinking man’s game argument”: at what point does a manager or a player throw away the stat book, and take a gamble? Thats what makes baseball a fun, if not always action-packed, game.
Billy Beane actually played major league baseball, an accmplishment most draft picks can’t put on their resume. He wasn’t very good by MLB standards but that hardly makes him someone who never played the sport.
Indeed, I believe your statement is the exact opposite of the truth. More than any other major sport, baseball managers and GMs are likely to have been successful players. There is the odd stat geek but most did play pro baseball, and at the managerial level there are two examples I can think of in my life who’ve managed a team who didn’t play pro ball.
“You’re a left-hander and so is the pitcher. If I send up a right-handed batter it’s called playing the percentages. It’s what smart managers do to win ball games.”
-Montgomery Burns to Daryl Strawberry, explaining why he’s being replaced by Homer Simpson
I’ve never bought the “constant strategising” aspect of baseball. For most games, the first five or six innings and pitch-hit-run and nothing else. Many players would have only touched the ball 4 or five times, some many zero.
It’s not deep strategy to move five meters to the left for this batter, it’s common sense. In fact, because you have time to remember (or someone tells you) is the opposite of a TMG. In football (soccer) you contantly have to rethink because the same players will vary what they do every time they have the ball.
90% of the time you’re standing in the same spot waiting for someone else to hit the ball and the react.
Sacrifices don’t happen four or five times a game. Real WTF! moments, those magic Messi/Ronaldo/Zlatan out-of-the-blue plays are rare. In fact I don’t think WTF! plays are even possible except in a very few trick moments. Need a home run? It’s difficult, but I’ve never seen the magic.
Also, the concept of the TMG is alien to most countries where neither baseball nor cricket are played. Chess is the “science sport”.
Have to disagree with that analysis. You’re only considering uncommon plays to be strategizing, like sacrifices or lineup changes. Pitchers are applying real time strategy throughout the entire game.
Incidentally, is this even true?
So called “Billy ball” as practised by Billy Martin was so practiced when Martin had personnel who were good at that sort of thing. Of course if you have Rickey Henderson on your team you’re going to let him steal bases. But in 1977, when he had a team that could hit the bejeezus out of the ball, the Yankees did not steal very many bases or bunt very much (by the standards of the time; these days, NOBODY bunts very much.) Martin’s propensity for using small ball tactics was correlated with the resources he had available to him and was not at all disproportionate to other managers of the time.
Billy Beane, as a GM, has also deployed a variety of different kinds of team. He’s most famous for the walks-and-dingers A’s that were in the movie, but the A’s stopped emphasizing that quite a few years ago now and have been more focused on cheap pitching and solid defense, simply because Beane’s resource limitation is money. Once other teams went after high-OBP guys the A’s couldn’t just get them for cheap anymore, so they had to find other ways of acquiring low cost advantages.
In MLB teams will tend to behave in a way consistent with the talent they have, and the talent they have is going to be whatever the hell they can get that stays healthy. Last year
I don’t disagree with you here, but how is baseball any more “thinking” than any other sport? Anyone who is passionate about any sport will suggest there is more going on than meets the eye. Baseball is no more or less “thinking” than chess, curling, bowling, football, skiing, auto racing, fishing, etc., etc.
IMHO, people calling baseball the “thinking man’s sport” are just seeking something to counter when someone says “…but it’s so slow and boring!”. “Ah, grasshopper, but this is the thinking man’s sport!”.
Yes…? That supports my intended point; that there are many different possible “looks” to a baseball team in play. It’s not just a matter of being good or bad or better than the other guy at a fixed set of tasks; teams can win in almost completely different ways.
Also, it’s not just a matter of strictly what athletic pieces you have, but what your baseball culture dictates.
Another thing to add…until relatively recently “Experts” didn’t understand what makes teams good. Even today leading SABR experts get it wrong.
Boston is supposed to be a leading proponent of SABR analytics. They came in last three of the last four years. YES, water spontaneously turned to gold in 2013, but that just further illustrates my point that a team that at best should have been competitive Boston Stronged and bearded themselves into a championship.
Almost every player on that team excelled his career average to win a championship. The next year they all turned back into pumpkins. Which ALSO statistically should not happen
How did the Royals of all teams get into the last two WS? By putting the ball in play, and striking out and having a shut-down bullpen. Attributes SABR experts mostly discounted.
This is why its a thinking mans game. Its constantly evolving.
Didn’t Billy Martin work his pitching staffs to death? I thought that was one characteristic.
Bah, that’s easy!
What makes teams good is scoring more runs per game than their opponents, more often than the other teams in their division do.
As to *how *they manage to do that…that’s left as an exercise for the reader.
That’s the flaw in Sabermetrics: they concentrate on getting on base. They’re right that the team that gets on base more in a game is more likely to win. But the team the scores the most runs always wins.
But your example was to contrast the approach of Billy Martin’s teams with Billy Beane’s. Leaving aside the fact one was a manager and the other a GM, as I pointed out, Martin’s teams did not have an approach unique to Martin. His style of managing, tactically speaking, was consistent with the fashion of managers of his time and the players he happened to have available to him.
This is interesting, but Japanese baseball as played in the field is pretty similar to the way it’s played in North America.
[QUOTE=RealityChuck]
That’s the flaw in Sabermetrics: they concentrate on getting on base.
[/QUOTE]
What a strange statement. It’s like saying the flaw with physics is it concentrates on atoms and never thinks about the effect of energy.
“Sabermetrics” is simply the study of baseball through the use of objective facts. If you think sabermetrics is spending a lot of time studying on base percentage right now, you are quite literally twenty to twenty-five years behind the times. The importance of getting more men on base than your opponents is a matter long since put to bed. The cutting edge of sabermetrics is looking at other stuff now.
Besides, if you focus on Runs per Game, KC wasn’t on top of the AL there either. They were 6th (7th in OBP). KC won by great pitching (3rd in the AL in ERA+) and defense (which is Sabermetrics’ focus right now)
I don’t think anyone would suggest Kansas City in 2015 was a great team on par with the 1927 Yankees or the Big Red Machine. They were, however, good at scoring runs and REALLY good at preventing them.
To return to the point, though, the manner in which the Royals were constructed and managed was entirely a conventional one. I’m sure they would have loved to hit more homers but Eric Hosmer has never quite developed into the huge threat they hoped and Alex Rios was terrible. They got rid of Billy Butler and replaced him with Kendrys Morales specifically to get more homers (a pretty good move.) They got Ben Zobrist because Omar Infante wasn’t hitting. They sure TRIED to find more homers, but Plan B worked well enough. You take what you can get. If you can find a guy who doesn’t run great but can hit like Miguel Cabrera, you get him and enjoy it when he crushes the ball. If you can’t find a slugger but can find a terrific fielder who runs well, like Kevin Kiermaier, you get him, and enjoy it when he robs the other team of seemingly certain hits. Every team would love to have guys like Mike Trout who do it all; nobody would turn down a 40-40 Gold Glove man, a Barry Bonds with a good personality at every position. But it never works out that way. It would be nice to have a lineup that does *everything *well, like Toronto’s did, and then the Royals would have won 110 games and maybe more and been one of the greatest teams ever assembled (conversely, had Toronto had great pitching, THEY would have blown the AL apart) but having everything work right is luck you’re not often gonna get.
In MLB, once handed a lineup, all managers basically manage the same way. Thinking man’s sport or not, very little thinking goes into how teams are managed, tactically speaking. The way Ned Yost managed the World Champion Royals was not really very different from the way Bob Melvin managed the 68-94 A’s; the reason KC won way more games is that their players stayed healthy and played well, while Oakland’s got hurt and played shitty.
Wasn’t the point that OBP was vastly underrated, not that it was the end-all be-all? Sounds like a failing in understanding sabermetrics rather than a failing of sabermetrics.
And they looked different, right? If I showed you a game between their respective teams (and you were somehow acquainted with the styles but not any of the players), you wouldn’t have to watch many innings to say which was which.
You should watch more besuboru. It’s more similar in some ways now than it was in the '80s, but it’s still very distinctive, to my eye.
Yep.
There is a lot of truth to this, but I see it as a weakness of the current culture, not a function of yhe immutable dynamics of the game itself. We know much of current MLB conventional practice is non-ideal.