THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Tango, were you intending to brand the individual who uses “Lies, Damned Lies” as the header on his regular columns as a rank and arrogant number cruncher?

Whatever you intended, my view is that many blogsters and other regular columnists in the MSM who write about baseball—whether from a sabermetric or nonsabermetric perspective—are a distinctly opinionated bunch.  But that’s just what many readers want—opinions, evaluations, not just descriptive analysis. Not “two-handed economists” ("on the one hand, on the other hand") but people able and willing to make their best expert judgments.

No, I didn’t think of Nate Silver at all.  I think the line I used predates him by at least a few days.

I was referring to people who simply take numbers and perform mathematical gymnastics leaving me so perplexed I have no idea what they tried to accomplish, other than to shout me down with irrelevancy.

Over at BB Primer, someone asks mgl to prove one of his statements. mgl replied that he didn’t have to unless he was in a court of law. That seems pretty arrogant to me.

I tried to google
court law mgl
on bbtf’s site, and I couldn’t find anything.  Can you post a link, so we can see his statement in context, please?

There’s a mostly good thread that I participated in at SOSH that discusses the value of sabes in a front office:
http://sonsofsamhorn.net/index.php?showtopic=25219

http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/files/newsstand/discussion/dugout_central_caimano_clogging_the_bases/

Comment #21.

I’m fine with his response, in the context of that thread, and in the larger context of him having already given us a description of SuperLWTS that would form the basis for his opinion.

I visited the issue of baseclogging here:
http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/baseclogging/

I’ve read mgl’s comments at BBTF pretty regularly over the last 4-5 years, and have an incredible amount of respect for mgl’s opinions/player evaluation systems. I’ve never met mgl personally and for all I know he’s the least arrogant person in the world in person.

But over the internet I would have to say that mgl is the poster child for sabermetric arrogance. Some people just have a knack for bringing arrogance out of written words and mgl is one of those people.

That was one heckuva good thread at SOSH, tango. Thanks.

I would say that, at least on BBTF, if I am perceived as being arrogant, it is not an unwarranted perception.

So sue me.

The signal/noise ratio at Primer-to-BTF has definitely changed.  I get the feeling that mgl tailors his words to his audience, and if he’s perceived as arrogant, he’s probably talking to an arrogant crowd to begin with.  The amount of snarkiness at BTF is incredibly high. It’s talk radio, online. 

R.I.P. Primer: you were one of a kind.

http://vorosmccracken.com/?p=27

If you really could evaluate players based on 8 at bats, what the hell is the point of having four levels of organized minors playing 140 games a season? Then they add a few additional leagues running half seasons, fall league ball, winter ball and spring training games and guys are racking up at bats by the grossload. Seems to me the consensus when it comes to player evaluation is to try and play as many games as humanly possible as early as possible in order to evaluate these guys correctly. Whatever Jordan Schafer’s set point might happen to be, they’ve given close to 1300 regular season PAs to him before he turns 21 and before he even reaches AA and felt the need to send him to the Fall League for more looks.

I believe it, that you need a boatload of PAs to get the evaluation right.  But, it’s further complicated in that baseball players are at a steep upward slope in their development.

David Wright a few days ago said that only when he was in AA did I realize that he could play at a high level.  (I don’t know when the scouts knew.)

***

I should point out that this is different from fielding, where I believe that you need far less to know how good a fielder you have.  That we have such a high correlation between Fans and UZR+PMR gives us all the proof we need.

The SOSH thread was a very interesting read.

It’s a little discouraging, though.  Not in terms of how much MLB teams are willing to pay for sabermetric advice.  That doesn’t surprise me, and I’ve seen similar info from other sources before.  MLB currently does not want to lure the top talent away from their day jobs, and that’s the way it is.

What discourages me is how few people understand the difference between the ability to crunch numbers and the ability to use data to answer questions to develop a deeper understanding of the game of baseball.

So many people--within MLB, within the media, within the sabermetric community--seem to see the use of number crunching as primarily to value and predict the performance of players.  I’m far more interested in the kind of sabermetrics that open whole new arenas to analytical inspection.  DIPS, PITCHf/x, batted ball hang time measurements, biomechanical video analysis--these are the kind of things that revolutionize the game over time, and they’re definitely within the purview of sabermetricians.

In a mere three months of looking at PITCHf/x data, I’ve learned so much about the batter-pitcher confrontation that is at the heart of baseball that I understand the game at a completely different level now.  It’s nice to be able to present stats that say that batters make contact with 87% of the fastballs they swing at from Joba Chamberlain but only 35% of sliders.  Those kind of numbers can be helpful and insightful, but there is a bigger picture that sabermetrics informs that is much more transformational. 

Unfortunately, people seem to ignore that level of analysis altogether when thinking about the contributions and possibilities of sabermetrics, and then you get things like Huckabay’s screed on why baseball analysis is dead.

I’m with you all the way Mike.

I’ve said for many years that sabermetrics is the convergence of performance analysis and scouting.  And the pot of gold is tied directly to the pitch-by-pitch data.  This data actually speaks the exact same language to both groups: the batter/pitcher matchup. Who is doing, what, when, and how.  You can actually influence how well a batter or pitcher does, simply by intelligence.

As a very small example, I once found the pitching leaders in 3-0 counts, in terms of throwing strikes, and they were Greg Maddux and Jamie Moyer.  These guys not only threw strikes in the most heavy of all batter’s counts, but did so without getting killed on it.  At the other end was Ryan Dempster.  It was a range of 20-22% called balls on one side to 50% called balls on the other.  (I don’t know if a larger study would hold on these names, but that’s for other researchers to look into… maybe me, at some point.)

The question then is to see how these two eggheads did it.  Did they take a couple of mph off their fastballs, and try to paint the corners a bit.  No doubt that Dempster didn’t change his approach at all, and maybe even tried to overthrow the ball. 

Who knows.  But, that’s the fun in finding out.  How is everyone approaching each count, what are the skillsets on both sides, and what are they all doing.

It’s baseball at its most core, and it’s a language that performance analysts and scouts both speak.  Sabermetrics.

Sabermetrics is simply finding out the truth in baseball.  Why is that important.  Because the truth will set you free.  Seriously.  The answer to every question has to begin with the truth, which is one reason why this Presidential administration has done a piss poor job.

And why is sabermetrics (the quest for truth) so useful and important in baseball?  Because it is probably the ONLY industry in the world (no, there are tons when I think of it, but they are tied into decieving the public whereas baseball is not) where there is a decided lack of understanding and ignorance of the truth for various reasons.

I read the SOSH thread as well, and it was a good read.  Mike Fast is exactly on point and the whole situation is tricky: The sabermetricians are probably paid about right, but if I was a Tango or MGL I would not work for anything less than $70K (depending on the city and cost of living, of course), and if a team really did offer them a job that would be unpaid that’s a disgrace.  While I understand that sabermetricians aren’t dealing with the media and overseeing multiple departments (i.e., GM), if I was the GM of a team I would do my best to convince my owner to spend a good deal of money on five of the best stats guys I could come up with because ultimately they will help the organization profit-wise and on-the-field.  It’s completely understandable why the majority of teams don’t need/want to spend a good amount of money on guys like Tango or MGL, but why be like the majority when you have a chance to improve and be more efficient? It’s not like the owner can’t afford that type of money anyway.  I think the one problem/inefficiency there is among teams is HOW they allocate their resources (paying for FA over spending on player development, not spending enough for top-of-the-line employees, etc.).  I think a lot of teams just spend money to spend money.

I’ve contacted both Tango and MGL in the past and I would have no problem spending money to have them on my staff because I know they would be a significant help.  I don’t think teams realize what kind of impact these type of guys can have on a team…

I’m a 19 year-old sophomore at SDSU and I ultimately want to work for a major league team; it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, in fact.  It’s a hard industry to break into with little pay (as shown in the SOSH thread) and sometimes it can be discouraging (I know, I know, I’m only 19.  But, if there’s one thing I’ve learned so far in life it’s that there’s no such thing as starting too early (in terms of preparing for a job/career).  I’ve been doing my best at this by doing things like reading The Book, reading online about baseball on websites like this one, picking the brains of tango and MGL, contacting several front office members and PR directors of multiple MLB organizations, etc., but it’s still going to be hard as hell to land that first job even though I know I could do a good job for a team.  It seems like the best way for me to start out is to get an internship with a minor league team over the summer while school is out.  I’ve already been in contact with several teams (they’re fairly easy to converse with).

Besides all my ranting, I would just like to say that while MLB teams may not appreciate the likes of tango, MGL, etc. I want to thank all you guys personally for improving my knowledge of the game over the past couple of years.  It’s been a tremendous help.

Your welcome and the best of luck.  There is no doubt that a non-baseball sabermetric person, even a bona-fide sabermetrician, can work in BB and eventually work their way up to GM or something like that.  And of course a GM can make several million a year.

Like anything else, it is not just your “raw qualifications” that will allow you to work your way up the ladder in baseball.  I’m sure there are all kinds of attributes that guys like Espstein, Depodesta, Luhnow, etc. have besides an understanding of or at least a recognition of the value of sabermetric principles.  And chance too, although that kind of chance is more like the “residue of design” chance than the bounce of a ball or toss of a dice chance that we usually speak of.

Let’s say that a team understood that a sabermetrician was worth 2 mil a year.  How much would they pay one?  Well, as I always say, although the ultimate worth of a person is his intrinsic value (in this case, something less than but close to 2 mil a year), supply and demand ultimately rules.  The problem with paying a saber 1 mil a year was that if they started that, there would be eventually be a glut of good ones out there.  Let’s face it, becoming a sabermetrician is not like being an athlete.  A lot more people could do it and do it well if there were more incentive.  Right now there is little incentive.  In fact, it is amazing how many good sabers there are and how much good research there is given the lack of incentive.