from Amazon
Friday, March 20, 2009
Changing the qualities of players
Pizza Cutter wants us to think-inside-the-head. He talks in part about game theory, which MGL gave it a good once over in The Book. Pizza says:
Consider the now-famous post on U.S.S. Mariner concerning Felix Hernandez’s pitch selection. To simply say that King Felix likes to throw a lot of fastballs early in the game is descriptive (and true). To point out the obvious that hitters were going to eventually pick up on it is changing the pitcher himself. Now, his past behavior doesn’t predict his future behavior because of the awareness of the past behavior itself. I have to wonder how many other pitchers fall into patterns (fastball-then-slider) without thinking about it, patterns that could be uncovered with just a little sleuthing through the data. Make a pitcher aware of his pattern, and you break the pattern. Suddenly, he’s a different pitcher. If you know the answer to the question, it changes the question.
I’ll disagree with his point here:
If there’s one mistake that the Sabermetric movement has made over the past few years (perhaps not intentionally, but certainly, it’s been made) is that we’ve reduced players to glorified, if quite advanced, Strat-o-matic cards.
I think that’s the best thing we could have done. It’s taken me a long while to get to where I am in terms of understanding how to use the numbers. It’s not for lack of effort or inspiration. It’s more in terms of exploration. Bill James and Pete Palmer had to do their Columbus. Then the next group of us came along and did our Magellan. It was all part of the growing pains. Eventually, someone else will be our Neil Armstrong (and Zefram Cochrane). But, the road had to be paved for them.
I think by doing the work we did as coldly as we did, we’ve set the landscape. And I agree that the next step is the warm-hearted work, the game theory, the tendencies, physical characteristics, and behaviour of humans. But, we needed to get past our numeric stage. I think we’re close to making the jump.
All of the defenders of the “world is flat” simply don’t stand up to the scrutiny. They make lazy excuses, or simply want to remain in a pool of ignorance because it gives them comfort to keep doing things their way. Good. The world is big enough for all of us. Join us if you want. Just don’t stand in our way.
A fair critique. We’d probably still be in the dark ages of “David Ortiz is so clutch” and have that pass for psychological analysis if not for the work of the past ten years (and Bill and Pete before that). My point is that we’re not only ready to make the next jump into real contextual analysis, I think it’s high time we did.
Maybe it’s just my bias at work. But, it’s an area that is just waiting to be explored. If anyone wants to win the Nobel Prize in Sabermetrics (why isn’t there one?), then here’s an uncharted territory for you to venture into.
(And sadly, I know exactly who Zefram Cochrane is...)