from Amazon
Monday, February 11, 2008
How you can support just about any argument using silly statistics and logic…
This is from Chris Jaffe, no less, a baseball analyst. While I have read plenty of his stuff and I recognize the name, I admittedly know little about him (and get him mixed up with the other Jaffe). This is also an example of how when you start writing for a (somewhat) mainstream web site or publication, you invariably develop a case of “I can write crap too, just like the rest of the guys (mainstream writers)...” (See my past comments about Keith Law.)
On THT, they are having a “roundtable” (which I hate in and of itself) discussion about the Bedard trade. http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/tht-round-table-erik-bedard/
Jaffe says these things:
If he can post an RA around 3.00—which isn’t likely admittedly, but is possible—over 190 innings (his normal amount) he can save the team about 90 runs (!?!) over what they got from their back-end last year. Jeepers.
Why does he pick an ERA of 3.00 when he admittedly says that it is not likely? Let’s see, “If Peavy posts an ERA of 1.00 this year, which is not likely but possible, the Pads will...”
Seriously what is the point of picking a number that is not likely but possible (any number is “possible” for any player) in order to make a point?
The second part of his argument which is just plain wrong, and he points to this several times, is the idea that the value of a player to a team or how much a player adds to a team as compared to a previous year, is the difference between a player’s projection (in this case, it is not even the projection of course, it is the silly “possible ERA of 3.00") and the WORST performance on their team. The worst performance by some subset of a team, after the fact, is almost always going to be less than replacement level for obvious reasons. There was some discussion of this phenonmenon when someone wrote an article wherein they were trying to determine, after the fact, the average ERA (or whatever metric they used) of a 1st-5th starter and they made the mistake of defining each category based on the best and worst performances among starters, after the fact, which is the wrong way to do it of course.
Anyway, the notion that with Bedard, the M’s are 9 wins better is preposterous, which should be obvious even to a casual analyst without doing ANY calculations.
I’m a firm believer that one of the easiest (and more silent) ways to substantially improve a team is to begin with absolutely horrible back-end pitching (even by the standards of back-end pitching) and replace it with league average pitchers. Everyone expects a fourth or fifth starter to be lousy, but some are lousier than others. Based on my own numbers-farting, replacement level is around 78-80 ERA+.
Really? While it is true that many or perhaps most teams’ 5th and 6th starters are at or near replacement level, he writes as if a league average starter grows on trees and is cheap, neither of which is true.
If everyone stays reasonably healthy and effective, they Ms could have one of the best rotations in baseball.
That is the same thing as saying, “If everyone on the Rays hits a lot and remains in the lineup, they will score a lot of runs. If what he meant was that the M’s have one of the best rotations in baseball, and I don’t know if that is true or not without looking at the projections, that is what he should say, without adding the silly, “If everyone stays healthy and effective.” That is a tautology, really.
I probably haven’t made my point real well, so just read the “roundtable” and see what you think.
BTW, there was nary a mention of the fact that this was a pathetically poor trade for the M’s. They gave up a player (Jones) who is protected for almost 6 years and has a projection of around 20 WAR over those 6 years, for a player (Bedard) who is protected for another 2 years and has maybe 7-8 WAR in those 2 years. My back of the envelope calculation on the Vegas Watch web site http://vegaswatch.net/2008/02/bill-bavasi-and-pythagoras-are-not.html had the M’s giving up around 54 million in equity, just considering Jones and Bedard. And if the M’s managment thinks that they are in the sweet spot of playoff contention right now, based on their 88 wins last year, they are probably sadly mistaken, as Vegas Watch points out in the above referenced article.
MGL, not sure if you read the full thing, but we did mention at the very end of the roundtable (see my comment) the delusion that M’s management is operating under.