THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Friday, February 25, 2011

Angels into sabermetrics?

David Forst of the A’s thinks they’re leaning there:

“Moving from Stoney to Tony, my sense is they’re using more of the statistical-based information,” said David Forst, assistant GM of the Oakland Athletics, one of baseball’s more stats-savvy clubs. “Tony seems more open to it in the GM chair than Bill was.”
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But four years ago they hired law-school graduate Justin Hollander as an assistant for player development and scouting, and his primary job is to evaluate and analyze statistics for Reagins and the coaching staff.

“We use it for base-running, offense, defense, everything out there, we use,” said Hollander, 33. “If Tony asks me to look at a guy in terms of a long-term contract, trade, free-agent signing, minor leaguer, he will know what I’m thinking and assign a value to it.”

A pre-requisite of sabermetrics is that you are open to new ideas.  The impact of sabermetrics is if you can educate the decision-maker.  This article at least should give the Angels fan hope that sabermetrics may be a variable in the equation, given that Justin’s been there for several years.

And Scioscia is right:

But Scioscia argues that the data or formulas are flawed because they don’t consider advance scouting reports and spray charts that affect the positioning of players.

“I couldn’t tell you if Derek Jeter is a plus player because I don’t know where their spray charts tell him to play,” Scioscia said. “We understand it when Aybar doesn’t get to a slow roller up the middle because he was shaded so far toward third base. No shortstop would get to that ball, but if you’re grading it, it’s a minus.”

That’s all part of the assumption of things like UZR, that positioning belongs to a player’s skillset.  That may be an assumption that is far too big for Scioscia to take, and he’d be right to then dismiss things like UZR on that basis.

But then he talks out of ignorance:

“What criteria did they use?” he said. “How about stopping a team from running first to third? Did [strong-armed right fielder] Ellis Valentine ever throw out a runner? No. Why? Because no one even thought about making the turn at second. …

Well, we DO handle that particular issue.  Why would Scioscia asked a media person what criteria saberists use, when he can ask us directly?

And then the writer of the article, while not speaking out of ignorance, but maybe not enough education when he says:

Some of the numbers don’t seem to add up. For instance, Torii Hunter’s UZR (minus-3.8) in center field last season was only slightly better than Juan Rivera’s (minus-4.5) in left. Anyone who watched the Angels would say Hunter was far superior to Rivera.

Well, UZR *is* saying that Hunter was superior (or at least had superior numbers in such a limited amount of time… sample size prevents us from saying who actually is superior based on the quoted numbers).  That’s because the writer needs to apply the positional adjustment to compare a CF to a LF.  But, plenty of people who follows the analytics don’t do it, so I’m not going to get on the writer’s case here at all.

I’m suspicious of this:

Scioscia, the former Dodgers catcher, leans heavily on stats to determine which pitcher-catcher pairings work best.

Overall, a pretty good article on Angels and sabermetrics.
Glove-slap: Neyer.