THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

MGL - Isn’t part of a manager’s job discription to be a cheerleader for his team?  What would you expect him to say at a post game interview?  “Boy, we really got lucky today.  I wouldn’t bet on that happening again any time soon.  After all, we still project to be a pretty crappy ball club.”

Peter may be right here.  I think our official position must be that when an executive talks about a player, that we are forced to treat all such comments as being disingenuous.

I don’t think we can start to pick and choose those which are misleading and those which are sincere.  We simply need to discard all such comments.

My picking over Depodesta’s comments, a bright a guy as you’ll find and the one guy you’d hope would be sincere, shows that if he fails our sincerity test, then who can we trust (on the record)?

Well, in general I agree.  But, honestly, that comment by Washington, in my opinion, was not the “cheerleading” type, and I don’t think it is disingenuous.  I think that he really believes that his team is special, has good character, chemistry, leadership, etc.

Plus, aren’t all of the assessments about team character and chemistry equally silly? Why pick out this one and discard it?  It doesn’t matter that this one came from the manager as opposed to players or the media or the fans.

They are all equally silly and generally after the fact (as this one is, in terms of that one game, which, by the way, was not like they came back from a 12-run deficit in the 8th inning).

This thread was not meant to be particularly serious.  There are literally hundred of comments you can pick out during the season wherein players, managers, and coaches are “chirping” after a win.

I remember last year at the beginning of the season (maybe it was the year before), Chris Ray of the Orioles had a spate of nice saves and the bullpen was pitching well.  Ray was quoted as saying something like, “The bullpen is really special.  We are not going to blow too many games this season.” After that, he and they went on to blow a bunch of games in a row and the pen did not pitch well for the rest of the season, I think. 

Stuff like that happens all the time.  It’s all the same.

You can dismiss it ALL as cheerleading, if you want, because, in a sense, that is all it ever is.

If you are making the argument that Washington did not believe what he was saying, I completely disagree.  That comment was NOT like when a GM signs a mediocre player and he says in the press conference, “What a great addition it was,” or when a manager of a bad team says something good about his team.  This was completely different.  In no way was Washington being disingenuous and doing the usual cheerleading that managers and GM’s HAVE to do to encourage the players and fans.

Not directly related to the topic, but what do you think of Hamilton’s MVP chances?

I am not much interested in awards, but at the end of the season when the smoke clears it is not that hard to guess who is going to win each of the awards, unless 2 or 3 players are real close in their stats and all of them play for a contending team.  It’s like the Academy Awards.  It is generally not that hard to pick the best picture and best actor and actress awards for some reason.

For a team not in contention, like the Rangers likely will be, you have to be far ahead of the other players to win the MVP award.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/TEX/2008_sched.shtml

Through July 9, 2008, the Rangers were 48-44.

July 9 is when the Texas manager proclaimed the character composition of the Rangers was all-that.

The Rangers ended 79-83, which means that from July 10 onwards, the Rangers ended up 31-39.

Yes, fantastic.  All that great character assessment.  Yup.

Just how bad was Texas’s defense last year? Was it one of the worst team defensive seasons ever? I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking you guys. They made 132 errors, and allowed 107 unearned runs.

The correlation between “defense” and errors made (and unearned runs) is pretty low, I would think, even though errors are included in overall defense.  There might even be a small negative correlation between errors and range.  IOW, if you want to talk about defense, on this blog at least, don’t tell us how many errors a team or player has.  No one will listen!

Actually, my post should read “Just how bad was Texas defense this year?.” I wrote “last year” in that post. If I were to take your last post about errors literally MGL, than I would assume that Texas has a good defense (i.e., good range) because they made a lot of errors. Of course errors are meaningful. They are probably more useful if they are separated into Fielding Errors, and Throwing Errors. I agree that I shouldn’t of listed unearned runs.

Upon further thinking, MGL is right about defensive ability and errors probably having little correlation. It was just the fact that Texas had made so many errors this season compared to the League Average. Although a bad defensive team, this could be more of a result of their official scorer, and park effects.

It’s not that a team that makes a lot of errors is not a bad defensive team, with respect to making errors. It is that making errors is a minor part of defensive talent.  The majority is the ability to get to balls and turn them into outs (range), irrespective of errors.  That is all.  Also, error rate has more luck than range, because, as you say, of official scorers, bad fields, bad bounces, etc.  Quoting error rate as a proxy for “defense” is like quoting outfield arms as a proxy for defense.  They are part of the equation, but just happen to be a small part, and with errors you get more random fluctuation (and fluctuation due to bias).