THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Monday, January 07, 2008

The Tidy Lie

In Moneyball, Michael Lewis in describing Bill James, stated that he preferred leaving a honest mess rather than an tidy lie.

Rally posted the offensive runs for each position, by time period.

Look at the very long time period of 1956-1969, where the 2B and SS are equals offensively.  A 2B is nothing more than a former SS. Unless MLB of that time period was overflowing with great SS talent that there was enough to cover two positions, it would be insane to consider the overall SS and 2B baseline to be the same.  And remember, we are talking about a 14-yr time period.

And from 1956 to 1984, there is a ONE run difference in offense between 1B and each of the corner OF positions.  Once again, it’s insanity to have the same baseline for 1B and the corner OF positions, since 1B is where corner OF go to die.  And in this case, it’s a 29-yr time period.

If I can get the sabermetric giants that sets their positional defensive baseline as the negative of the offensive baseline (even over something as long as 30 years!), to make a declaration that they will never do this in the future, I won’t ever bring this up again.

This is one of those “get your noses out of your spreadsheets, and watch a game” ideas.  Sometimes in sabermetrics we get very lazy, and simply look for something tidy.  In this case, it’s a tidy lie.  Give us the honest mess.

Sabermetricians: repent!