Name 17 current GMs that were “successful” baseball players.
I don’t want to put you on the spot like that so straight from Wikipedia, here are the stats:
Only TWO GMs have had MLB experience; Arizona’s David Stewart the only one I ever head of.
3 with Minor League experience.
10 with college baseball experience.
THIRTEEN with no baseball experience.
(two teams currently dont list GMs)
23 out of 28 current GMs played in or went to college or hey, maybe neither. Baseball not a “Thinking Man’s Game” my ass.
You’re right, it’s higher than I expected.
Incidentally, Miami’s GM is Michael Hill, although his official title is President. Kind of a weird situation there.
IMHO…sorry to derail the thread more…SABR weaknesses right now are in concentrating too much on ‘alternate reality stats’.
“IF that pitcher had a good defense he’d be great”. That’s why Porcello is making 20 million a year now despite having only ONE year with an above average ERA. (ERA+)
Well, Rick Porcello is making $20 million a year because the Boston Red Sox decided to give him a big contract, in part because they are rich and choose to throw money at problems. I’m not precisely sure what that has to do with sabermetrics having a “problem.”
Again, sabermetrics is simply the scientific examination of baseball. Signing Rick Porcello to a big contract is a team exchanging money it has lots of for a pitcher it thinks will adequately fill a rotation hole (and in fairness to Boston, Porcello did pitch well in 2014 and is young; hey, not everything works out.) Saying the latter means the former has a “problem” is like saying that an aviation disaster proves that there’s a problem with physics. Anyway, who says Porcello would be great with a good defense? I’m sure Boston’s terrible defense hurt him but even the most generous sabermetric measures of his performance say he kinda sucked. It’s not Hanley Ramirez’s fault Porcello gave up 25 home runs. The most well-regarded sabermetric projection methods all say Porcello will probably continue to be, at best, mediocre.
The reason some teams win and some teams lose is that no matter how much thought you put into this, the performance of athletes is subject to variance. It is very like that the best players in 2016 will be the likes of Mike Trout, Andrew McCutchen, and Bryce Harper. I think almost all baseball fans would agree with me that those men are good bets to play very well in 2016, and they would do so based on objective evidence - the fact that those men have in past years amassed many hits and homers and fielded their positions well. But there are no guarantees; maybe Mike Trout will get hurt, or Andrew McCutchen will develop a problem with his swing he can’t correct. Maybe Jake Arrieta will suddenly develop Steve Blass Disease. It seems unlikely that these things will happen, but they are possible.
The point of delving into the study of baseball to find new areas of information is simply to improve one’s ability to understand baseball. You can’t know everything, though, and even with a really solid grasp of the most current insights sabermetrics will provide, MLB teams will make mistakes, either because shit happens, or because they make decisions based on PR or personalities or politics or whatever.
RickJay, that comparison is ridiculous. Sabermetrics is not physics, it’s a model/collection of models. If a plane crashes because the aerodynamic model didn’t correctly predict reality then you absolutely can blame the model!
If the model that the Red Sox used to predict Procello’s performance said he’s worth $20 million a year, and then he underperforms, why would you not blame the model?
That isn’t to say that you can extrapolate and say all attempts to model baseball are futile, but to criticize the current trends? Absolutely.
If a plane crashes you don’t blame physics at all. You blame the engineer.
If Rick Porcello doesnt live up to his contract, I don’t blame sabermetrics, I blame Rick Porcello, the GM, and the coaches.
Well, I’ve no idea what Boston’s “model” for signing Porcello was. Nor do I know why Porcello pitched as badly as he did in 2015. Evidence-based decision making in any field of endeavour gives you a better chance of doing well but is no guarantee.
If you had told me prior to the 2015 season that the Blue Jays were going to have to use Kevin Pillar as their everyday center fielder I’d have panicked. But Pillar was sensational. Who knew? If life was entirely predictable it wouldn’t be fun.
What current “trend” is wrong, then? Rick Porcello is not a “trend,” he’s one guy. Poor free agent signings have been a thing since there were free agents. What’s the bad trend, in your opinion, being caused by sabermetrics?
I admit I am struggling to figure out how knowing more about baseball would be a bad thing for people making baseball decisions, but I’m open to examples. If anything, counter-productive trends in baseball are ones that sabermetricians are raising questions about. Lots of sabermetricians are saying “you know, this whole thing where you use your best relief pitcher to pitch just the ninth inning with a lead is kinda stupid,” but the trend continues despite the research saying it’s stupid. There are a variety of reasons why teams do that, but it’s not because Bill James and Rany Jazayerli say it’s a good idea.
The “trend” i was referring to was overly relying on ‘alt reality’ stats like FIP.
Another model the Sox over relied on in the past three years* (IMHO) was driving up the pitch count to get to the BP. So I’d see Napoli (who already is K-likely) take a meatball down the middle of the plate on the first pitch from a scrub. That’s the first problem, taking that meatball.
The second is trying to get a scrub starting pitcher out of the game on pitch count to get to…a superior pitcher in the BP
But lets say that scenario didn’t play out much. Okay, how about trying to get a good SP out to get to a mediocre BP, fine. Until the 7th or 8th when they get rid of the middle relievers and bring out the setup and closers. Sure hope you took the lead in the sixth or seventh.
*Yes it worked like gangbusters 2003-2011…then the game evolved.
** And yes the Sox sucked for a myriad of reasons. I’m pointing out what i think are weaknesses in models, not failures in models.
And I’m not anti-SABR at all, I lean that way but I like to view all things with a skeptical eye. Heh…at least we didn’t see a debate on what “Moneyball” is and how its NOT OBP.
If the GM signs him based on the recommendations of an engineer, why not blame the engineer?
Analogously, why blame the engineer for the airplane disaster and not higher ups that approved the design or bought it or whatever?
Is there evidence this is resulting in a surge of bad free agent signings? And it’s not like Rick Porcello was leading the AL in FIP every year.
Well, logically, you certainly don’t want to NOT kill the starting pitcher. Either you knock him out or you don’t knock him out. If you knock him out maybe the relief pitcher is great, but if you don’t knock him out… well, you must be letting him get most of your guys out, right? There is no logical reason you DON’T want to beat the SP as badly as possible. I mean, look at it from the opposite end; if I told you tomorrow Boston’s starter will go seven innings, and the day after the starter will go three and two thirds, and you have to bet on which game Boston won based only on that information, which would you bet on? And in the long term, just how often do you want to have to use your bullpen?
The approach in MLB of being selective and waiting for a hittable pitch works. It has always worked, and barring a fundemental change in the rules it will continue working. If Boston has adopted a different “model” they would not have been better, they would have been worse. If they’d bunted 130 times instead of 30, they would have scored fewer runs than they did. Of course taking a guy who thrives on contract, like Xander Bogaerts, and making him radically change his approach is likely to fail, just because MLB is so hard that radical changes usually fail. But the Red Sox didn’t do that with Bogaerts, did they? They let him play to his strengths and he was terrific. He doesn’t walk a lot but I’d kill to have him on my team. Bogaerts played basically the way he always has (in his short career) and did well. Napoli played basically the way he always has and was pretty terrible. That’s how it goes.
Mike Napoli, God bless him, was 33 last year. Guys who are old start to fall apart. Whaddya gonna do? Sometimes this is the year they fall apart and sometimes it’s next year. Napoli was always a reasonably patient hitter.
[quote=“RickJay, post:70, topic:749492”]
Is there evidence this is resulting in a surge of bad free agent signings? And it’s not like Rick Porcello was leading the AL in FIP every year.
I can really only speak to the Sox and my feelings of over relying on certain things and ignoring certain things.
And as you point out, its all complicated as hell. I’ve heard rumors that the pitching coaches wanted this groundball pitcher (Porcello) to throw his sinker less.
You keep picking on FIP, but I see no evidence that reliance on FIP (for example) has led to a larger number of bad free-agent signings than relying on any other stat (can we even count all the awful signings of guys who lucked into 17-18 wins with mediocre peripheral stats? I’m not sure we can).
If all I had was FIP - if I literally had no other statistics with which to work - I’d guess that the five best starting pitchers in the American League last season were Chris Sale, David Price, Carlos Carrasco, Chris Archer, and Dallas Keuchel, and that C.C. Sabathia, John Danks, and Alfredo Simon were basically the three worst. If you’re going to criticize the stat as essentially valueless, you’ll have to contend with the fact that those things turn out to be, more or less, true.
And if i did criticize FIP as essentially valueless we might have a debate…but I came nowhere close to saying that.
Well, it’s not totally clear to me what you are saying, then. You are suggesting that reliance on the statistic leads to bad decision making. My position is that the statistic by and large leads to (especially if used in conjunction with other statistics and information) good decision making. Not in every case, surely - no method of evaluation will ever produce a 100% success rate - but in a higher percentage of cases than were the statistic not employed. So we are in fundamental disagreement, but I can’t see the evidence that your position is correct.
That is, if reliance on FIP (and I do realize this is just an example) leads to poor decisions, we would expect that the statistic is poorly correlated with real-life outcomes. But this does not appear to be true; it’s actually pretty well correlated with real-life outcomes - more so than most statistics, actually - and I am curious how you account for that in your figuring.
Baseball comes down to a pitcher and a batter. The pitcher is basically playing a glorified version of Rock-paper-scissors. The batter, if he’s good, is still only hitting .300. He can try to pull the ball or go to the opposite field but in reality he’s still only getting a hit a third of the time. A fielder can move a few steps either way based on scouting but in reality it’s only going to matter a fraction of that.
Not enough people have enough control over the outcome to develop or implement any meaningful strategy. Their is nothing “thinking” about it.
I could off the top of my head think of dozens.
In '89 the Orioles got 18 wins out of Jeff Ballard, who was hailed as a terrific young ace, finished sixth in Cy Young voting. He struck out just 62 men all year, and the sabermetricians said he wouldn’t last. Boy, were they right. Ballard just wasn’t really fooling anyone. He got lucky.
Or you have Allan Anderson, who at 24 won the ERA title for the Twins striking out 83 men in over 200 innings, and at 28 might have won the Salesman of the Year at Lancaster Hyundai, because he wasn’t in the major leagues anymore.
I can’t really think of any starting pitchers in my life who were way below average in strikeouts who lasted very long at all. (Greg Maddux is often so cited, but he struck out a lot more guys than people seem to remember.)
I mean, sometimes things don’t go your way, like with Rick Porcello. But generally speaking, a pitcher’s K/W rate tells you a hell of a lot about him, and going deeper, FIP tells you more still.
I’m a Blue Jays fan but I’ll tell you right now I don’t think Marco Estrada has one chance in ten of being nearly as successful as he was last year. Now, the sabermetric stats all say that; his FIP was 4.40 against his 3.13 ERA, his K/W ratio was good but not great, he gives up a lot of home runs and he’s 32 years old. The thing is, though, that those statistics precisely match my perception of him; I thought he was getting lucky just watching him pitch, but Kevin Pillar and Josh Donaldson would pick a few liners and he’d wiggle out of it. Conversely, I really don’t think Drew Hutchison is as bad as people say he is. I would rather have Hutchison in the rotation over Estrada, but they gave Estrada millions of dollars and a guaranteed spot.
Now, Toronto has access to the same stats I do and then some, so why’d they do that? The truth is I do not know; they may know things about Estrada and Hutchison I do not. They may know Estrada has made a mechanical change that substantially increases the effectiveness of his changeup. They may have access to batted ball data that shows Estrada was not as lucky as I believe him to be, and that Hutchison is in fact prone to giving up hard-hit baseballs. They may know Estrada’s velocity is up and Hutchison’s is down. They may know Estrada was lazy when he p[layed for the Brewers but being traded changed his outlook, while Hutchison lacks self confidence. Or maybe they felt public pressure, knowing David Price was not going to be re-signed, to show the fans they were bringing back some of the parts of the 2015 squad. I don’t have the inside info. But I would be willing to construct a betting plan where I laid a bet for or against every pitcher in MLB with a lot of innings and an FIP way above or below their ERA as to how they’ll do in 2016, and I bet I’d win a lot of money.
(Just to make sure you realize this, I agree with you. I meant that we can’t count them because there are too many instances of teams giving bad contracts to guys with deceptive win totals, though I realize the wording might have been confusing).
Indeed. I also don’t understand this “alt reality” thing - FIP is based on actual things that have occurred. It measures pitchers based on things that they don’t require their defense for (namely strikeouts, walks, HBP, and HRs). You can use that tool for whatever purposes you’d like.
FWIW, Porcello has NEVER been in the Top 10 in the American League in FIP. If Boston was using his FIP numbers to predict he was going to be better than he was in Detroit, they were complete idiots. Most people really had no idea what Boston was doing giving him $20mil a year.
So I think your ire at FIP is completely misplaced.
To give the Red Sox at least a little bit of credit,
- $20 million to them is not $20 million to most teams,
- They needed a starting pitcher pretty bad, and
- Porcello was an unusual free agent in that he was very young when he signed.
So they were getting a guy coming off what looked like a breakout year - 4.0 WAR from a 25-year old is nothing to sneeze at - at a price that for Boston was a reasonably affordable risk. Porcello then went a bit sideways, but I don’t know how that could have been predicted from the stats. 25-year-olds who pitch pretty well will generally continue to pitch pretty well, if not better, and he didn’t. I don’t know why. If what Dale Sams says is accurate about the coaching staff telling Porcello not to throw the sinker as much, it might have just been coaching stupidity.
I mean, if they put me in charge of the Blue Jays and Boston came to me and offered me Porcello is exchange for Marco Estrada or JA Happ, or hell, both, I’d take them up on it in a heartbeat. I’m not saying Porcello is Walter Johnson, but he’s still young, healthy, and probably a better pitcher than 2015 would suggest. He’d be a pitcher who puts the ball in play a lot going from a team that had some pretty questionable defense to a team with rather excellent defense - an advantage that is greater for such a pitcher than it is for a strikeout artist. There are no guarantees in life but that’s a chance I’d take in a New York minute.
Now, for a different team it’d be a different story. The Cleveland Indians would be insane to acquire Porcello; they don’t have Red Sox money, and they already have a bunch of good young starters, so the risk/reward is a totally different equation for them.
Just a couple of things real quick. Porcello wasn’t a FA. He was traded by the Tigers to the Sox for Yoenis Cespedes (narf).
Then mid-season the Sox extended Porcello for 4/82.
I’ve resisted commenting so far the last few posts cause I don’t 100% disagree with what’s been presented and I love talking baseball and don’t want to get into the minutiae of FIP…etc…
BUT…you’d give me a real player AND take all of Porcello’s contract?? I’d make that deal in a heartbeat.
Edit: Boston signed him to an extension because they thought his FIP suggested he was better than he was. Because the cost of FA has gone up and they thought he’d make MORE if he hit FA and they thought they had a GOOD defense.