THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Is this an April Fool’s joke?  This has to be . . .

Correlation does not equal causation. Maybe they are consider to have good character because they have better batting stats. It works in the Gold Glove voting.

But isn’t the good character supposed to have an effect on the other players? So that the other Mariners produce more with Junior than if he wasn’t there.

I believe I have good character. I’d gladly take only minimum salary to sit on the bench and have my aura propel the rest of the team .

Interestingly, players on the same team as “good character” players are much less likely to clog the bases, even after adjusting for speed scores.  The converse is true for teammates of “bad character” players.

I think it is a joke, but in case not, it may be that the good teams are able to get the good character guys, leaving the bad apples for the losers with less talented team mates.

As for the tango quip, I guess he was unable to prevent the Blue Jays from releasing Kevin Millar (or maybe he had a voice there).

Remember, I did a WOWY which is basically looking at the deltas for each player, so it has nothing to do with the players on certain team being good or bad.  For example, Beltre with Griffey as a teammate and Beltre without Griffey as a teammate would be one of the data points, with the difference in wOBA weighed by the minimum of those two PA…

I would tend to agree with Brian. Further, players with bad clubhouse chemistry are often scapegoats (I would assume anyway). Thus news reports are probably a bad source.

Perhaps search through a collection of scouting reports? From my experience, character is often included in them, and would not be attributed to whether their team has recently been winning or losing. And you likely will get a larger sample.

In my opinion, the good/bad character issues only really hit the news when the writers need a story, and they are directly related to whether the team is winning or losing. A winning team will have happy players, so it’s easy to say player A has good character. But when the team starts losing, player A could become a sourpuss. And winning/losing is directly correlated to team statistics.

Not to mention players with especially bad/violent reputations tend to only have opportunities with especially desperate/bad teams. My guess is the teammates of Elijah Dukes last year were a lot worse than Jeter’s, and it has little to do with their character. (What I mean to say, if it’s not clear, is that Dukes’ character did not make his teammates worse, it was the facts that his teammates were the Nationals. Granted, he was with the Nationals partly because of his reputation, but that is not what MGL is trying to quantify here.)

MGL, can you show us the wOBA for each group of “character”?

pure evil sneaking this in at the end of the day…

Um, I mean, “what is the player is a 30-something catcher?”

"why even progressive teams like the Mariners keep players like Griffey on their rosters”

If this is true (and MGL is not April fooling us), why negate that with Milton Bradley?

"If this is true (and MGL is not April fooling us), why negate that with Milton Bradley?”

Maybe he is not the negative character everyone thinks he is?

“MGL, can you show us the wOBA for each group of “character”?”

When with the “good” group, .348, when with the “bad” group, .319.

Rally/#9:

I think this is rather obvious—think about chemistry. You combine opposed forces like Bradley with Griffey and Sweeney and BOOM! you get a CHEMICAL REACTION of wOBA-ness.

Mark the Mariners down for 98 wins.

MGL - Anyway to get a list of these players that have “it” and don’t have “it”.

I have little doubt this is an April Fool’s joke.  For starters, when does MGL write so little about a finding so big?  Every paragraph is either one or two sentences, when he usually puts 10 or 12 sentences in a paragraph.

I’m trying to figure out the clue(s).

"Maybe he is not the negative character everyone thinks he is?”

Is he part of your bad character sample?  If you’re going by media reports I can’t see how he isn’t.  Do his teammates play better or worse with him around?

Also, are you looking at how teammates do when he’s on the roster or only when he’s in the lineup?

C’mon, Tango, don’t try to cover by calling it a joke when you know it’s true. Trying to deflect other people from the One True Truth is a serious error.

Hasn’t anyone else done this sort of study? I’m surprised.

On a side note, documentarian Jonathan Coulton’s work on Kennesaw Mountain Landis is underrated. (Topeka the two to listen to Coulton’s audio evaluation.)

--JRM

A google news search of
“good clubhouse presence”
returns ONE article (Elijah Dukes).

C’mon guys… it’s b.s.  I’m looking for clues…

The WOWY checks for differences when a player is or isn’t in the lineup, not when a player is or isn’t in the clubhouse.  Does that count as a clue?

Unless MGL did use whether a player was or wasn’t a teammate.

In that case, maybe there’s some obvious flaw in the logic that we’re not picking up on?

Jose Guillen’s agent is tracking down the stats right now.

>“MGL, can you show us the wOBA for each group of “character”?”

>When with the “good” group, .348, when with the “bad” group, .319.

What could this mean?  There would be four numbers to give: players with good, players without good, players with bad, and players without bad. 

If MGL is just giving “players with good” and “players with bad”, that doesn’t mean anything by itself.

Actually, I did just use “on the team” or not and then use the other players’ entire years’ stats.

Yes, I think Tango is the one trying to deflect attention so as not to reveal what he already knows and likely has done research on himself.  His employers might think that he told me about his research and that I duplicated it.

So if anyone from the TOR or SEA organization is reading this, “Tango did not in any way shape or form suggest this research or indicate to me anything related to it...”

I am short on words, because I am writing it up actually for a new saber web site, Finch.com, and thinking about submitting it for the SABR conference…

In any case, it’s nice how everyone here immediately realized it’s a joke.  If this had been published in a more mainstream baseball site, people would wind up just believing it. 

The “finch.com” is an obvious April Fools clue ... MGL, were there others that we missed?  Should I stop obsessing about what the clues are?

I am so confused.

Seriously, I gotta go do some other work.  Happy…

Easter!

No love from Neyer:

http://espn.go.com/blog/sweetspot/post/_/id/3025/thursday-throneberries-7

Neyer was at 1pm.  You were at 8pm.  What, he’s supposed to be psychic?

The best one today was about the Royals doing some stupid stuff and everyone was pretty much like, yea been there before.

The Beltre-with-and-without-Griffey was a clue, too, I think, since Griffey was a notoriously bad clubhouse presence in Cincinnati, only magically becoming a good clubhouse presence in Seattle.

Very good joke, though - had me fooled for a few seconds.

finch.com is a fine site if you like your sabermetrics mixed with zen buddhism.  I especially enjoyed Sidd’s take on Strasburg and Chapman.  Good analysis from one who’s been there.

The sad thing is, there probably is an effect of character, but it’s just too small and hard to isolate, so we can’t really measure it yet.

We’ve all worked with teammates, coworkers, and managers who have gotten more out of us.  Hard work is contagious, and if we assume that hard work translates to better performance, I’d definitely be willing to bet there’s an effect.

Heck, even if someone just has a knack for getting rookies out of the bar and back to their hotel rooms one drink before trouble starts, that could have a decent impact on performance the next day in and of itself.

Someone (no idea who anymore) once posted a good one on FanHome about a study of player’s on-deck behavior.  And I still love Keith Woolner’s about adding fielder’s choices to OBA.  The one Tango posted from Advanced NFL Stats is a classic too.

Another observation about the joke. Just because someone speaks well to the media, or others speak well of that player to the media, doesn’t mean they’re any good at clubhouse chemistry, whatever that is.

I mean, basically you’re asking who is best at talking to reporters, not at telling a fellow player a message about their behavior or motivating them or about their batting cage swing that they might’ve heard a hundred times before.

#31, very true and good point!