THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

For the record, I wasn’t impressed with how quickly Hippeaux got personally offended in this matter. Although I have only read the posts from you and Hippeaux (and not Neyer’s), I didn’t think you reacted inappropriately or rudely.

But we all must apologize for things we don’t think we did wrong sometimes. And how about THAT for a “royal we?”

"For the record, I wasn’t impressed with how quickly Hippeaux got personally offended in this matter...”

Where is the discourse between the two?

I, for one, have zero interest in discussing something with someone who thinks that they are a subject matter expert, but has hardly a clue.  It would be like me trying to debate something about brain surgery with a brain surgeon.  I would assume that the surgeon wouldn’t give me the time of day.  Now if I wanted to ask the surgeon some questions about medical things that I didn’t understand, that would be a completely different story.

I stand by my contention that the article was putrid and I have no desire to give the author any more publicity than he has already gotten. He is a very good writer, but he should stick to fiction or some subject of which he has more than perfunctory knowledge. I’m not sure what the fascination is with this article…

I apologize for the vitriol and it is nothing personal against this author, but I have a real pet peeve for people who criticize things (in a public forum) they don’t understand very well.  I hear and read about it every day with politicians and it disgusts me…

I think he redeemed himself with his grunt work on UZR/FB%.  Had he not written that part, then the rest of the article could have been bylined by Buster, and we could all safely ignore it.

But in the interest of fairness, I think a balanced response was called for on my part, especially if I contributed or instigated part of the negative response.

I have not read any of Hipp’s responses, so I have no idea of his defense mechanisms.

Take this for what it’s worth MGL (which probably won’t be much, I gather), but I could pretty easily take a number of your statements and pass them off as Murray Chass quotes with but minor alteration.

I hold the two of you in about equal esteem.

Brien, that’s absurd.

I remember reading MGL’s original UZR posts from 2003...about 10 times?  It took me a long time to get a handle on what he was actually doing, and most importantly how it had differed from prior methodologies.  Yet after that, I STILL didn’t really know what was going on.  Eventually I became an MGL Stalker, hunting his posts on defense wherever possible.  One of my favorite Google dorks became | mgl uzr site:insidethebook.com |

Now, after studying it as much as I possibly could (as a non-sabermetrician), I can I say that I am comfortable EXPLAINING UZR to a layman. 

But criticizing it?

I wouldn’t know where to begin…

People in general react and don’t try to understand what they’re reacting to.  I hate to come off as an MGL apologist, because he’s certainly capable of defending himself, but let’s be real here.  He has put a TON of work into his stat (and his work at large), and it’s a damn good stat.  It’s not perfect, just as no stat is perfect.  And people just appear from all corners of the internet to criticize it for whatever reasons they might hold.  Their criticisms are superficial (points that have been discussed endlessly, often partially or wholly resolved), ignorant (from misunderstanding the statistic or statistics in general), and irrelevant (e.g. complaints that may apply to all statistics).  I’d be damn PO’d, too.

UZR is really quite logical, and doesn’t require that much insight.  It’s really time-intensive in terms of coding, data processing, and the like.  It’s more of brute force work.  If you have access to the data, many would invent UZR or SAFE or the like.

MGL’s masterpiece is the sac bunt chapter in The Book.  I don’t think you’ll find a better sabermetric piece anywhere in print or online by anyone.  That topic requires not only a great handle of sabermetric concepts, but also of selection biases, as well as being extremely well versed as a baseball fan and baseball tactician.  Other than MGL, I don’t know if there was another saberist around that could have pulled off that chapter.  I can’t say enough nice things about it.

I consider myself a little bit of a heavy lifter, a person with a good ability to separate truth from fiction, but not much of an innovator…

When I read this article it really made me think about how to properly critique a statistic. Over the past month or two there were two intriguing articles written critiquing portions of UZR, Hippeaux’s article criticizing the supposed correlation between FB% and Outfield UZR and Max Marchi’s article on direct and indirect standardization. Both articles made somewhat reasonable points about potential flaws in UZR. The main difference was how the authors approached the topics. Max made a very specific critique while offering a hypothetical solution to the issue. Hippeaux on the other hand made some very extreme claims (before backing off them) and made some other critiques that made it easy to question his knowledge of WAR. These issues made it very easy to dismiss Hippeaux’s post even though there was an intriguing nugget in there about FB%.

And I told Max that even though we generally decided after the discussion here that for how we were using the standardizations we would keep doing it that way, it was a very important discussion to have, and that I learned things in the course of it.

"I, for one, have zero interest in discussing something with someone who thinks that they are a subject matter expert, but has hardly a clue.  It would be like me trying to debate something about brain surgery with a brain surgeon. “

5-6 years ago a bunch of experts in the real estate and banking industries gave out a bunch of questionable mortgages to a bunch of questionable borrowers. Those mortgages were then purchased, packaged into investments, and sold by a bunch of experts on Wall St. Those questionable mortgages were then purchased by expert investors all over the globe (including some of those same Wall St. experts who packaged them inthe first place). These investments were rated top-notch by all the experts in credit analysis and ratings. The world’s largest insurance company, clearly an expert in that industry, provided ridiculously cheap insurance on these investments that placed an extremely low probability of default. And our economics experts looked at this situation and declared that there was nothing wrong with it whatsoever.

Meanwhile, a doctor in California with Asperger’s Syndrome realized that all the “experts” were wrong, bet against all of them, and made millions and millions of dollars (if not billions) as a result.

Just because somebody is a “subject matter expert” doesn’t mean they are infallible.

Tom/12: please.  Please.  PLEASE.  PLEASE!

This isn’t a GOP debate.  Take that outside. Please.

"Meanwhile, a doctor in California with Asperger’s Syndrome realized that all the “experts” were wrong, bet against all of them, and made millions and millions of dollars (if not billions) as a result.”

Well, that wasn’t just some random doctor. It was Mike Burry, a man who spent years developing his skills as an investor. He was posting about investing strategies online since the 90’s and ran his own hedge fund quite successfully for almost a decade. I would argue that, although he was trained as doctor, he was quite the investment expert and invested a significant amount of time into researching his investments.

That actually sounds more like MGL than a non-expert who beat the experts at their game.

However qualified an investor Burry was, that doesn’t change the fact that THOUSANDS of experts were dead wrong on this matter. People who dedicated their entire lives to real estate or mortgage lending, or asset securitization. People like Alan Greenspan, who was supposed to be the world’s smartest economist.

The point of my post #12 was that an expert can easily be wrong about a subject, and it’s extremely hubristic to believe that they are above reproach.

And I stand by my post #12, Tango, and I don’t believe I said anything out of line. MGL’s post that I referenced reeked of hubris, and he deserves to be called out on it. Because he is NOT too good a sabermetrician to ever be wrong. I’m not saying he has been wrong, but I am saying that if he ever IS wrong a subject, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a fellow “expert” who points it out or a “novice”. If he ever turns out to be wrong about something, it won’t make him “less wrong” if it’s pointed out by an “amateur” rather than an “expert”

Tom/15: no one is saying that you can’t have an amateur offer constructive criticism.

Please.

I mean, the premise of your argument is so ludicrous, that I just don’t want to say that one-sided political crap on this site.

What proves that Hipp is not qualified is not his amateur status, but that he had conclusions based on no evidence. 

So, c’mon, just stop with the Rush/Hannity/Olbermann crap.

And, I set the line, not you.

Where was I talking about being wrong about certain things within a subject?  And I was not talking about myself at all.  Where is the hubris?

I was merely expressing my disdain for people who discuss (criticize, praise, whatever) a subject matter in detail when they are clearly not qualified to do so.  In sports this is rampant. This guy wrote article #112,245 along those lines. It just happened to be written well stylistically so apparently it is getting some press (for some reason that, again, mystifies me).

That is not to say that there is nothing in the article that is worthwhile.  If I wrote an article about brain surgery or quantum physics, it could easily have one or two tidbits of value, especially if I do a little bit of research.

The thing about all these critiques (by non-subject matter experts) is that the overwhelming common theme is to complain about things that these metrics are not designed to do or reflect.  They do that because they don’t understand the metrics.  I have never heard a sabermetrician “criticize” WAR.  It is what it is.  And it can be used in whatever way the reader/user thinks is appropriate for his business, assuming that he understand the components.

Tango, I thought Tom in #12 was parroting the left wing, banks are the bad guys line.

What he was missing, the true Republican line, is that Congress, a large group of experts in nothing, pressured the banks through regulatory threats (Community Redevelopment Act etc) to make said questionable loans to questionable borrowers in order to battle the perceived racially motivated practice of “red-lining”. Freddie and Fannie were offered to launder the toxic assets in order to keep the economy healthy, but it was a bubble that couldn’t sustain itself. The experts on Wall St were trying to find ways to make a profit with the sh!t they were handed by the government.

So it was a case of people not knowing how things worked thinking they know best, and having the power to force their ideas on the system.

I wasn’t trying to make a left/right analogy.  Just that the GOP has a debate, and that’s why I said it.

Nice try trying to tone down the political rhetoric.  The people will not be silenced!!!

Tiger, I hope you don’t think I’ve been purposefully avoiding you.  It has been an inconveniently busy week.  I appreciate the sentiment of this post and the constructive criticism in the previous one.  I have questions.  And, I certainly didn’t intend the “Is WAR the new RBI?” post to read as thought I was flush with debate-ending answers.  The argument was not, “WAR has flaws.  We should use RBI instead.” I explicitly applauded ways in which WAR and UZR had opened up new lines of inquiry.  I feel some people completely missed my point, but I’m happy to admit that failure to be clear on my part had as much to do with that as any willful oversight on their’s. 

I don’t know where the impression that I’m “personally offended” is coming from.  I’ve never said anything resembling that, publicly or privately.  I’d have to be pretty thin-skinned to get crispy over the rebuttals from you and Neyer.  Many of the criticisms were utterly justified, which is why I linked several of them in my follow-up:

http://itsaboutthemoney.net/archives/2011/09/07/in-defense-of-the-royal-we/

Despite your occasionally patronizing tone, familiar to all who have read you before, I don’t feel you were belligerent, hurtful, or disingenuous.  Same goes for Neyer.  I’m not going to apologize for my rhetorical style.  Nor should you.  I didn’t take it as anything more than that.  I look forward to further discussion.

-----

I’m not going to respond to each individual aspersion upon my intelligence which popped up over the last several days...with one exception.

Before urging somebody like me to stick to fiction, MGL, you might reflect upon the attitude of the luddites who have told you where to stick your spreadsheets.  If my genuine inquisitiveness isn’t welcome here, perhaps they’ll have me, and I’ll just swing the satirical hammer at your self-satisfied prosing.  After all, apparently that’s all I’m good for.  I’m pretty sure there’s an audience for it. 

I never referred to myself as an expert.  Expertise is ALWAYS a work in progress.

As for whether I “deserve” entry into the conversation.  Did I miss the gatekeeper?  I must’ve just walked right past him.  I really thought this was a public course. 

Before you dismiss me as a deliquescent iggit, you might consider looking at a slightly larger cross-section of my work.  I’m sure you’ll find plenty of flaws, but I’m pretty sure you’ll also see that it’s done in good faith and with appreciation for the utility of WAR, UZR, and many other advanced metrics:

http://itsaboutthemoney.net/archives/2011/05/02/in-defense-of-the-flyball-starring-2011-nl-cy-young-ian-kennedy/

http://itsaboutthemoney.net/archives/2011/08/14/ian-kennedys-cutter-turned-him-into-a-cy-young-candidate-seriously-this-time/

http://itsaboutthemoney.net/archives/2011/04/19/swinging-with-doc-halladay/

http://itsaboutthemoney.net/archives/2011/06/15/rally-killing-dragon-slaying-quantified/

http://itsaboutthemoney.net/archives/2011/08/02/relative-expected-utility-the-2011-trade-deadline/

http://itsaboutthemoney.net/archives/2011/08/01/the-other-japanese-bubble/

http://itsaboutthemoney.net/archives/2011/04/25/better-prince-fielder-than-prince-albert-seriously/

No doubt, I occasionally range beyond my depths, but you know what, that’s the nature of intellectual curiousity.

Being quoted, I guess I have to man up and say “my bad.” I read the responses by both Hippeaux and Brien at IIATMS back-to-back, and clearly conflated them. I picked up personal offense in Brien’s rebuttal, but I never saw it from Hippeaux.

“It was most certainly not an attack on sabermetrics or an attack on WAR as a concept, but to hear some people tell it you’d think that post came straight from the keyboard of Murray Chass.”

“I’m more than a little miffed at how Rob could not have come in contact with any of them if he’s really the man of the people he purports to be.”

I maintain that Brien’s response sounds like it was written by someone who was personally offended.

When I read the title “Is WAR the new RBI?” and subsequently the rest of the article ("It doesn’t work") I took the RBI comparison to mean that WAR is a stat that does not well describe a player’s talent and should be marginalized, as saber folks have done to RBIs.

In reading the article, I found that most of it was a criticism of UZR (and well founded or not, that’s not a criticism of WAR) and a misunderstanding of positional scarcity.

The idea that we can measure each facet of a player’s performance in terms of runs, compare those to a baseline and then sum into a single number is not new, Bill James introduced it nearly 30 years ago. That’s WAR, regardless of the name, and little in the article told me how that concept does not work.

I’m not going to apologize for my rhetorical style.  Nor should you.

No need to apologize, Hippeaux.  But I hope you don’t use that same *definitive/over-the-top headline and statement before the break--qualifier after the break* approach again.  It’s not intellectually honest, IMO.

Note to self:

When publicly belittling someone who is a better writer, best not to choose forum where he/she(?) can fire back in writing.

Perhaps I misread/misinterpreted MGL’s sentiment. If so, my bad. I would certainly hope that if MGL encountered legitimate, well-researched critiques of his work, he would be sensible enough to consider them, regardless of the source.

Tango, MGL, and some of the other more-seasoned sabermetricians that post here have generally been good about helping out those of us who are less-advanced. Its greatly appreciated, and I hope it continues.

And just for clarification, my posts had no political intent/leaning whatsoever. Just trying to use a recent event as support for my point (which is still true, btw… just because somebody is an “expert”, doesn’t mean they know all).

MGL (or I for that matter) never heard of Hippeaux.  So, who cares who Hippeaux was, and who cares if it’s Colin Wyers, or Studes, or Alan Nathan. 

What matters is the merits of the argument.  That’s the only thing that matters.

Now, with Alan et al, we give them more slack because they have proven themselves.  I’m not going to argue physics with him (not that we haven’t tried a bit).  We give Alan a prior.

With Hippeaux, there’s no prior.  So, the only thing we can depend on is his arguments.

And his arguments were without merit, plain and simple (other than the one section I quoted elsewhere).  His article was replete with conclusions and misunderstandings.

If Studes had written that, I would have not only done the same thing, but I would also have been extremely disappointed (because I’d have to drastically adjust my prior downwards).

Basically, it’s surprising that any person who comes to this blog on a semi-regular basis would think that anything other than merit of the argument would matter to mgl (or me, not that I was named).

But if it had been Colin or Alan, I don’t think MGL would have used such a rude (or whatever you wannt to call it) tone…

I don’t write articles as much as I’d like (I do have 5 or 6 topics on my to do list), but over the past three plus years, I know that whenever I’ve published one the next thing to do is duck and cover, and go see what was written about it on Tango’s blog. I just consider it 21 century Internet peer review. I know ahead of time I have to be able to take the heat. I considered it a compliment yesterday when Tango in another thread said I “stuck my balls out there”. I can if I am confident.

Now I’ve know mgl long enough to know he can be rude any time he wants to (although I fel we’ve gotten along fine the couple times we’ve met in person, I love talking baseball with him, agree or disagree). But this is the same mgl who led off his appearance at FanGraphs Live echoing Richard Nixon with “I am not a pr!ck”.

“That doesn’t mean that I am going to change the same tone I have been using for 30 years. What the hell is the difference? If you guys can’t separate tone from substance, that is your problem not mine. Stop being such whiners about tone.” –MGL

Just one more point to defend myself: I was not trying to stir anything up, or trying to make an insane argument just to get a rise out of anyone (in other words, I was NOT trying to be a Rush, or a Hannity, or an Olbermann). I legitimately thought that MGL meant something other than what he thought. And had my interpretation been correct(and again, I concede that I was most likely mistaken), then he would have deserved to be called out on it.

Tango, if you or MGL posts something that deserves criticism (and again, I reiterate that MGL’s post most likely did not deserve the criticism that I heaped on it), then criticzing you or MGL would not be out of line, even if it your site. So, quite frankly, you do not “set the line”, assuming you are open to honest and legitimate discussion/commentary/criticism.

So again, this was all a big misunderstanding, I hope we can all move on, I love the work you guys do, and I’m glad that you guys provide us (fans of your work) an open opportunity to interact with you guys and learn more about your work. I just don’t want you guys thinking I’m some kind of troll who gets a kick out of riling people up for no reason.

I am not setting the line as to whether I deserve criticism.  Have you not read some of the criticisms against me?  And that’s just from the regulars!

I set the line at to whether I think you are writing the equivalent of being drunk at a bar.  I’m a bouncer.  My bar, my rules.

Think of me as sometimes being Sam Malone (or Carla) and sometimes being Norm Pederson.

A drunk Cliff Clavin gets thrown out.

My call.  You don’t have to like it.

And my point is that I wasn’t being Cliff.

But if it had been Colin or Alan, I don’t think MGL would have used such a rude (or whatever you wannt to call it) tone…

I’m not the guy you want to be using as an example here.