from Amazon
Thursday, July 24, 2008
The Science of Fielding, a Century Ago
I love these old articles, and I mean really old articles, that shows how little we’ve come.
What is great about this article is that it gives you a true model. Not all the mathematical gymnastics that gives sabermetrics a (much deserved) black eye. No. The author watches the baseball game like a baseball fan, or baseball expert. SME, or subject matter expert, in the real business world. He observes, and he tries to construct a model around those observations. Once you have that, you can try to construct, and deconstruct, a real-life baseball world.
In one small part, one can do this for the “clogging the bases” theory. It’s all fine and dandy to say that a slow runner will clog the bases for a fast runner. But, now you have to sit down and actually observe things, create a model. Once you do that, once you look at it like an SME, and not a gasbag on parade, you realize how almost entirely foolish the clogging theory is.
So, when trying to analyze fielding, model the baseball world first. The author, a hundred years ago, wrote:
In scoring, I place a small “T” above hits I believe too hard to handle, and a small “D” over hits which are doubtful either through bad bounding of the ball or other cause. Of the 424 hits through the infield, 162 were marked “T” and 49 were marked “D.” So the players reached the ball 211 times and failed to field it; and of the 213 times the ball went through untouched 46 were plain hit and run plays in which fielders were going the wrong way, in other words, blundering or being outgeneraled by the batsmen.
I think the current scorekeepers (STATS, BIS, MLB.com) fail us in some respect. They obviously love baseball, but for whatever reason, don’t treat themselves as SMEs. There is tons that they are not recording, things that a hundred years ago, they thought of, and actually recorded (in an unofficial, yet clearly with great care, capacity).
Look at the images at the end of that article, like this one, and tell me why the heck are we so behind the times in 2008, and yet so far ahead of our time in 1910?
