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Friday, June 03, 2011
Mike Scioscia, saber-scout
Fun look at Mike Scioscia:
Mike Scioscia isn’t a stathead kind of guy. He’s not as anti-stat as you might imagine—he’s extremely wary of sample-size issues, he doesn’t believe in distinguishing between earned and unearned runs, and he thinks pitcher wins are a bad way of measuring starters—but he is extremely skeptical of advanced defensive stats. He says they don’t account for the role of advanced scouting, positioning and, yes, even the catcher’s role in calling pitches that reflect the scouting and positioning. There’s only one defensive statistic that he thinks can accurately reflect the player’s role: Catcher Runs Allowed. “An absolute tool as to how a catcher relates to a pitcher’s performance,” he called it.
“Let me put it to you this way,” he once said. “If you string out 162 games and you have one catcher who is giving up one run a game less when he catches, on the net runs end of it, he’s 162 runs ahead, right? So the other catcher has to produce 162 runs more than the other guy just to break even. I think a catcher is going to influence a game and a season behind the plate more than he is with his four at-bats a night.”
Perfect: the one advanced metric he approves of is one that had essentially been considered disproven for a decade. And the one advanced metric he approves of is the one that conveniently makes him look like he was a superstar.
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