THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Jonah Lehrer: “This is largely the fault of sabermetrics”

A fantastic and great opening to his article.  And then he says something completely idiotic (the sentence in the subject line).

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But sabermetrics comes with an important drawback. Because it translates sports into a list of statistics, the tool can also lead coaches and executives to neglect those variables that can’t be quantified. They become so obsessed with the power of base runs that they undervalue the importance of not being an asshole, or having playoff experience, or listening to the coach. Such variables are the sporting equivalent of a nice dashboard. They can’t be quantified, but they still count.

It’s not a drawback!  What sabermetrics does is explain the numbers.  Give the saberists the numbers, and he’ll tell you what it means.  A saberist will NOT tell you anything else.  What the saberist is going to do is tell you the LIMITS of numbers, of how far you can take the numbers.  AFTER that, after the numbers have been parsed and exploited, THEN that’s where your scouts and your guts come in.  And those are IMPORTANT activities that take place.

See, after I tell you what the numbers mean, and how much uncertainty there is (say, I’ll tell you that Justin Verlander (entering 2011) is a .575 (+/- .050) winning % pitcher if given average support), then the scout can come in and say “A pitcher with these kinds of tools is way better than a .575 pitcher.” Great, that’s perfect.  I ACCEPT that.

If he follows that up with: “Just look at how many strikeouts he has (through 2010).” Then I have to stop him.  I’ve already parsed the numbers.  I know what the numbers mean.

What sabermetrics does is allow the scout to focus on things OTHER than the numbers.  On the pitchers tools and his guts.  Let the scout quantify that into a 20-80 scale.  I already quantified his actual past performance.

Then, the GM, given two lenses, the scouting lens and the performance lens, he can merge the two to give us the view that, “you know, Verlander really is as good as Felix and Weaver and Lincecum and Josh Johnson”.  Maybe the performance numbers don’t show it, but combined with scouting, it does.  This is the pinnacle of sabermetrics, the convergence of performance analysis and scouting observations.

Lehrer’s objection is not with sabermetrics, even though he blames sabermetrics.  His objection is with the misuse of statistics or with the non-use of non-statistics.  That’s not the problem with sabermetrics.  That’s the problem with the user.

You may as well blame technology for being able to do your taxes in under an hour and then getting audited.  Just because Turbo Tax can handle 99.9% of everything doesn’t mean that there isn’t some obscure thing that it can’t handle.  Are you going to blame Turbo Tax for that?  Tim Geithner did not.