setting the table
the rise of sabermetrics (aka "moneyball") in baseball is one of the most polarizing movements in sports. while i regard it as an improvement over much of the traditional analysis, there are those who choose to belittle it or otherwise dismiss it, despite the evidence amassing in its favor. Baseball Prospectus (one of the progenitors of this approach) put up a great piece about the whole debate yesterday. though i urge you to read the whole article, i'll reprint the crux of the argument, which i think explains the whole thing very well in a very straightforward manner:
The vastly overstated Beane/Moneyball/sabermetric bias against scouting is a red herring, as is the macho derision of sabermetricians. The truth is, while statistics provide the evidence for most of the new theories of the game, most of the ideas advocated by the so-called statheads can be explained by plain old common sense. Over in the Pinstriped Bible about a year and a half ago, I attempted to summarize what I had learned in 20 years of following baseball in the form of 19 "commandments." Let's revisit a few of those now and see if we can justify them in the most simplistic way possible, without resorting to "freaky" sabermetric weirdness--that is, no "advanced" stats, no math, which I can't do anyway:
It's how often a player reaches base that's important, not batting average, not RBI.
Baseball doesn't have a clock in the sense that football or basketball does, but it has outs, 27 of them, and each one an offense spends brings the game closer to extinction. The players who reach base most often are the ones most likely to put off the inevitable death of the offensive effort. The more your players get on base, the more your players get a chance to hit, meaning you score more runs.
Remember league and position averages: numbers have meaning only in context.
Hypothetical season: the Anaheim Angels' first baseman hit .275 and slugged .440. That seems pretty good, until you realize that the American League as a whole hit .277 and slugged .445, and that American League first basemen in particular hit .295 and slugged. 500. The Yankees often endured this problem with Tino Martinez. Baseball is, among other things, a game of matchups, of 'my first baseman is better than your first baseman.' It's not enough that your first baseman answers to an amorphous definition of "good"; where he ranks in the class is most important.
RBI are opportunistic; RBI are a team stat and are not indicative of a player's ability.
In 1985 Don Mattingly had a great year. The Yankees often batted Rickey Henderson first and Mattingly second. Henderson was having an even better year than Mattingly, reaching base 42% of the time and putting himself in scoring position constantly thanks to his 28 doubles, five triples, and 80 stolen bases--the last of which cost the Yankees only 10 caught stealing. At his peak, Henderson was the rare player where the rewards of stealing handily outweighed the risks. Hitting .324/.371/.567 behind this on-base dynamo, Mattingly drove in 145 runs and won the MVP award.
The next year, Mattingly was even better, improving his numbers to .352/.394/.573. Oddly, he drove in 32 fewer runs. The problem was Henderson, who saw his OBP drop to .358 in 1986, meaning he was on base less often. Better Mattingly + Worse Henderson = fewer RBI opportunities for Mattingly. If RBI were an expression of a player's ability, we should hold the shortfall against Mattingly despite his being better than the year before. That doesn't make much sense.
Stolen bases don't matter all that much.Wade Boggs was a terrific leadoff hitter stealing two bases a year. Vince Coleman, a contemporary, was nearly useless stealing 100 a year. Rickey Henderson and Tim Raines would have been among the best players in baseball had they never stolen a base in their careers. Boggs, Henderson, and Raines all "manufactured" runs, to use a term favored by the conservatives, by finding ways to get to first base. Coleman couldn't get to first base at the Annual Cotillion for Semi-Inebriated Cheerleaders Who Are Really, Really Turned On By Ballplayers. Speed is value-added in a player, but not in and of itself a reason to put someone in the lineup (see Endy Chavez).
Then there's the home-run era that we've been living in more or less continuously since 1920. Say your team has a runner on first base in a game at Coors Field. Most often, there is really very little to be gained by having your runner attempt to move up one base, at the possible cost of a caught stealing, when the next hitter has every chance to hit the next pitch out of the ballpark.
If you're playing at Pac Bell, where everyone except Barry Bonds has trouble hitting for power, then the stolen base becomes more valuable--but that's what pinch-runners are for.
The main function of the batting order is to distribute plate appearances.
Over the course of a season, the leadoff hitter is going to bat more often than the number-two hitter, the number-two hitter is going to bat more often than the number-three hitter, and so on, and the leadoff hitter is going to bat a lot more often than the number-nine hitter. If you make Neifi Perez your everyday leadoff hitter, he is going to play more than any other player on your roster, including Barry Bonds. We leave the question as to whether that's a good idea or not up to you.
A strikeout is just another out.
Each batter is presented with fewer opportunities to advance a runner from second to third with a grounder than you might think. Each hitter gets fewer chances to hit a sac fly than it appears. There are, however, quite a lot of opportunities to hit into a double play. These things tend to come out in the wash. In any case, strikeouts correlate with power. That's your trade-off for home runs. Mickey Mantle used to regret the number of times he struck out, but he also said that if he hit like Pete Rose he would wear a dress. That's a pretty good summary of the trade-off inherent in cutting strikeouts.
Placing good bats on the right side of the defensive spectrum is one of the keys to winning.It's that 'my shortstop is better than your shortstop' thing again. It's harder to find a good hitter that can play up the middle than it is, say, a right fielder. Take two teams at random, both run competently. Both are going to have right fielders and first basemen that are roughly comparable, but only one is going to have Derek Jeter at short. At the tail end of their championship run, the Yankees were getting relatively poor production from all four corners. They so outdistanced the competition at catcher, short, center field, and (sometimes) second base that they won anyway.
The 27 outs of a ballgame are precious. Managers should not give them away lightly.Again, each ballgame has a life of exactly 27 outs. Bunting away outs is a bit like smoking cigarettes--you're hastening the end. The sacrifice bunt is a tactical tool. You deploy it when it's obvious that it will win you a ballgame. Some managers make a fetish of it, failing to recognize that even their worst hitter--Einar Diaz, say--has a 30% chance of reaching base, thus prolonging an inning long enough for a real hitter to come to the plate. When the bunt sign is on, that chance drops from 30 to zero.
A player's offensive and defensive contributions must be in balance.
Over the course of the season, your great defensive shortstop saves 10 more runs that the average shortstop would have missed but creates 15 fewer runs with the bat than that same average shortstop does. You're down five runs.
The odds are on the closer's side.
In most cases, the difference between the best and worst closers in terms of save percentage is quite small. That's because with only three outs to get, a closer has a tremendous advantage. Tony Gwynn comes to bat against Dickie Noles. Against the league, Tony is hitting .350. Against Dickie, he's a .450 hitter, which is to say that Dickie still gets him out 55% of the time.
Comments
The SI article that Michael Lewis recently wrote as a rebuttal to the anti-Moneyball crowd was pretty damn good. Still haven't read the book yet, but his recollections of the uproar the book has caused among baseball lifers were great. The stories about the Toronto sportswriter and Joe Morgan got me all riled up, although some of the stuff he wrote about the A's-Red Sox series stunk of sour grapes, particularly the GW bunt by Hernandez.
Posted by: jake | April 7, 2004 05:59 PM
Are you sure you didn't reprint the entire article and not just the crux?
Posted by: David | April 7, 2004 06:25 PM