THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

It is so fitting to me that Freakonomics picked JC to talk about this stuff.  Both run blogs I used to read, but stopped reading when I realized my competency in certain areas was greater than theirs, and they refused to admit - in the face of many detailed and helpful explanations from many people - that there was the possibility of them being wrong.

I feel like I can’t trust Dubner to teach me about seat belts and sumo wrestlers if he’s so willingly ignorant when he teaches me about baseball.

The transition away from Steve Levitt material into other domains and other people really weakened the Freakonomics blog, IMO.

Wolfers and Levitt are the only two authors worth reading, as well as the occasional guest.

Nice!  I was thinking that something like this should happen!

J.C. Bradbury’s answers to a selection of the questions got posted to the Freakonomics blog earlier today.

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/21/the-baseball-economist-answers-your-questions/

Interesting comment (that I think makes more sense than anything else I’ve read about Sabean since October) from the Freakonomics post where JC answered some questions:

“I think the Rowand and Zito contracts were one of the best things to ever happen to Brian Sabean and the SF Giants.

The monstrosities of those 2 mistakes forced the Giants out of the longterm contract, superstar free agent market and made Sabean have to become rational out of necessasity.

They even managed to produce an above average position player out of the farm system”

Very good questions.  And unless one wants to nitpick, the answers are quite good too, I think.

nice.  the one answer i object to a bit would be Matt’s wrt Billy Beane.  Beane consented.  i’d hope he wouldn’t be stupid enough to give away his competitive advantage.

...speaking of, has anyone actually addressed Lewis’ claims in a study?

I’d be interested in a follow-up post to your answer to Question 7.

#8/Craig

I agree. That’s why I’m here posting.

In Questions 53 and 54, he’s saying that he believes one of the ways the A’s overachieve is that they have above-average 4th/5th starters, so they win more games involving those starters than the average team. He further conjectures that this doesn’t help in the playoffs, because teams go with a 4 man starting rotation in the playoffs.

The problem is that I don’t know if any of his assumptions are actually true.

Is there any way to figure out which team’s 4th/5th starter is the best? How do you even define a 5th starter? Do you do it based on salary? Ben Sheets was the 5th Oakland starting pitcher in 2010 based on his ERA+, but he wasn’t really their 5th starter, right?

Tango/Matt,

I think you guys misunderstood question 15. I believe they were asking if the Pirates should overspend for international free agents (read: young Latin American players) for the farm system, not for the Major League roster.

I moved the last 12 or so comments to its own thread:
http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/non_saber_saber/

Please continue non-researched based discussion there.

Pete/11: Ah, I wasn’t thinking like that.  I was thinking of the Japanese players.

***

Zac/10: That was actually the answer I was most proud of in the entire thing!  Now you are going to make me ruin it by giving a serious answer.

Anyway, that’s an interesting question.  The makeup in the post-season for the starting rotation is disproportionately balanced in the playoffs.  I’ve been wanting to do a study on that for the longest time. 

For example, I think I calculated once that Mariano Rivera made up 10% of all Yankee pitcher innings in the playoffs.  Don’t quote me on that though.  If that’s correct, it’s a huge number, the equivalent of 146 innings in the regular season.  Pettitte has about twice the innings in the playoffs as Rivera, so that would be like 300 innings for him.  Again, don’t quote me.  So, I would love to see someone do some sort of study on that.  Just be careful about selecting sampling.

***

Craig/8: are you asking Matt or me?

***

Colin/7: I remember talking to Michael Lewis about him being granted access (this was before the book was published).  Originally, Beane didn’t really know the extent of what Lewis was doing there.  He said they were nice and give him a tiny office, but that they really didn’t know what Lewis was doing.  I presume Lewis ingratiated himself, and it snowballed.

***

Pete/5: that’s one of the things when you end up having no money to spend: you start to spend smart.  The Expos for example would be like this.  I remember when Loria said “Spend”, and the first thing the Expos did was spend on Graeme Lloyd and Hideki Irabu.  And I thought Loria should have said “spend wisely”.

It’s like these GM are playing with house money.  Once you turn off the faucet, they stop trying to spend to the budget, and now spend for survival.  The Twins, A’s, Marlins, Rays, etc, are all smart out of necessity.  The worst thing for the Rays is if they had enough money to spend on Crawford.

The free agent market is so out of whack, probably some 33% of the money spent in there is wasted, down the toilet, that teams are only spending it because they’ve been allocated that money, and it’s a use-it-or-lose-it scenario.  (I know Matt likely disagrees with me.)

Ask yourself this: if the Redsox didn’t spend on Crawford, and they didn’t land any free agent, would Epstein be allowed to “rollover” that 20MM$ into next season’s free agency?  Hell, no.  John Henry pockets it, and Epstein has to ask again.  So, why would Epstein do that?  He’ll spend the 20MM$ instead.

That’s how all the departments work in corporate america: you ask for money, and you spend it, and if you don’t, you lose it, and then next year, when you ask, they’re going to say “well, you asked last year, and you didn’t need it, so, we’re not going to allocate it again this year”.

It’s completely scr-wed up, but that’s how it works.  And the beneficiaries are the free agent players.

Tango tiger - i beleive you are correct re: gm playing with house money.  Imho, James inferred as much a couple of days ago in his ASK Bill section.  I may be reading in to what was said but even at the time i was reading it (it was a response about Crawford).  Budgets are set- you might as well use all that allocated.

This is what Bill said:

My take is that you have to get talent wherever you can find it, without drawing distinctions between groups of players (farm system/free agent) that aren’t meaningful once you hand out the uniforms.

You can definitely read it that way.

Basically, if you are given 40,000$ to buy a car, and anything you don’t spend goes back to whoever gave you the money (and the car dealer knows this), what are you going to do?  Buy a 30,000$ Accord for 40,000$, or buy a 20,000$ Civic for 15,000$?

It’s not clear to me that the owner will be happy with you that you saved 25,000$ if you come back with a Civic, if you complain afterwards that you don’t have enough passenger room and trunk space.

He may say that he authorized spending the 40K, and your job was to get the best car you can fro 40K, even if it’s an overspend.