Sports Guy Talkin' Crazy Again

It is so over.

2010-04-17T18:52:00.000-07:00

I had already retired this blog to concentrate on Pages and Lights, but I want to acknowledge the end of an era. After taking steps in the direction of statheadedness, some of which I wrote about, Bill Simmons is officially a convert, and his column on the conversion is excellent.

Sports Guy Talkin' Sense.

That's your ballgame, folks.

Throwdown number 1: Eric Gordon, eyeball vs. analyst

2008-11-06T11:45:00.000-08:00

I call THROWDOWN! This is the first in what will be an ongoing series.

When he rated the NBA's incoming class of perimeter players using statistical methods, John Hollinger placed Eric Gordon among "the riff-raff" and wrote, "subjectively, I've been suspicious of him for some time, and I'm a little unsure what has everyone so excited."

The Sports Guy, contrarily, thinks "this kid is going to be great." He says this is one thing we'll enjoy about the NBA this year:

Eric Gordon's beautiful, moonball, knee-weakening, once-in-a-generation jump shot. It's just perfect. I love it. I love everything about it. Every time he shoots it, the Clippers crowd goes quiet for a split-second like one of the cheerleaders just pulled up her shirt. Even the spin is gorgeous. I can't say enough about it. I am in love with Eric Gordon's jump shot. I want to marry it. I want to have kids with it. I will go to at least one practice or shootaround this year just to see him hoist 200 of them. And by the way, the kid is going to be great -- he's bigger than I thought, and when he drives to the lane, defenders just bounce off him. He will end up being the third-best guy in that draft. Unless, of course -- and I'm contractually obligated to mention this since it's the most jinxed franchise in sports and we're only two years removed from Shaun Livingston's knee flying off his body and landing in the eighth row -- something horrible happens to him. Please, Lord, no. Just give us a decade of Gordon jump shots. I don't ask for much.

THE THROWDOWN

QUESTION: Barring major injury, will Eric Gordon be good by the end of his second year? (I'm splitting the difference between the two writers' time frames.)

JUDGMENT DAY: April 30, 2010

TERMS: For Simmons to win, Gordon must have a second-year PER of at least 15. That's Rajon Rondo territory. We don't ask him to be great, just good.

UPDATE: JUDGMENT DAY!

This one was looking bad for Hollinger early on, but he ended up winning this throwdown, though so closely that it's fairest to call it a draw. Gordon's second-year PER was 14.15, a disappointing number after 14.98 his first year. To date, Gordon appears to be better than Hollinger suspected, not as good as Simmons hoped.

Usain Bolt and the Obscured Ceiling

2008-09-25T12:56:00.000-07:00

How is a procrastinator like Usain Bolt--in a bad way?

After I wrote this post about Usain Bolt on my sports blog last week, Grinnell alum Hung Pham initiated a conversation about the post in which Pham used the idea of obscuring the ceiling to describe what I was commenting on in Bolt's pre-finish line celebration in the 100-meter dash.

Obscuring the ceiling is what I think Bolt successfully did in his race: I argued that by celebrating before the finish line, Bolt let everyone imagine how much faster he might have run--and those imaginings have, in fact, credited him with being even faster than he is. If obscuring the ceiling can make perhaps the fastest human who has ever lived seem faster, it is a powerful tool indeed.

Pham's phrasing helped me articulate something that had nagged at me since I praised the power of Bolt's maneuver: I've seen this before. And after a few days, I got it. Obscuring the ceiling is what a lot of my students do--and a number of people I know in other ways, but I think of this phenomenon primarily through my teaching.

To the best of my memory, when I started teaching about 15 years ago, I thought of student motivation like this: every student is more or less self-motivated, and every student has positive and negative external forces that affect performance. That is, I imagined intrinsic factors to be neutral or positive--at worst, the absence of positive motivation. What surprised me, therefore (and I've seen it surprise other new teachers), is the extent to which students will actively sabotage themselves in all manner of small and large ways: doing work well but handing it in late, making flamboyantly bad choices about time management, and so forth. I slowly came to realize that many of my students were choosing to incur penalties consistently so that I never got a chance to judge their best work in a straightforward way. That was the point. If you never try your hardest, nobody can ever find your limits. Like Usain Bolt, you have obscured your ceiling.

When I started articulating this idea, Molly Backes, an alumna of Grinnell's education program, pointed out the similarity of my thinking to Martin Covington's failure quadrant, which, as she put it, goes something like this:

* if you try really hard and still fail, you feel the worst
* if you try really hard and fail -- but you have an excuse, like
your grandmother just died -- you feel less bad
* if you don't try at all and fail, you feel better
* if you don't try at all and you have an excuse, you feel best

Another alumna pointed me to Homer Simpson's more concise formulation: "trying is the first step toward failure."

I had brought up this subject through the words of Malcolm Gladwell, who put the point yet another way in an interview with Bill Simmons, discussing sports:

Why don't people work hard when it's in their best interest to do so? Why does Eddy Curry come to camp every year overweight?

The (short) answer is that it's really risky to work hard, because then if you fail you can no longer say that you failed because you didn't work hard. It's a form of self-protection. I swear that's why Mickelson has that almost absurdly calm demeanor. If he loses, he can always say: Well, I could have practiced more, and maybe next year I will and I'll win then. When Tiger loses, what does he tell himself? He worked as hard as he possibly could. He prepared like no one else in the game and he still lost. That has to be devastating, and dealing with that kind of conclusion takes a very special and rare kind of resilience. Most of the psychological research on this is focused on why some kids don't study for tests -- which is a much more serious version of the same problem. If you get drunk the night before an exam instead of studying and you fail, then the problem is that you got drunk. If you do study and you fail, the problem is that you're stupid -- and stupid, for a student, is a death sentence. The point is that it is far more psychologically dangerous and difficult to prepare for a task than not to prepare. People think that Tiger is tougher than Mickelson because he works harder. Wrong: Tiger is tougher than Mickelson and because of that he works harder.

I return to the subject now because the exaggerated glorification of Bolt's run has reminded me of the profound effectiveness of obscuring the ceiling. If the fastest runner in history can make most people think he is even faster by obscuring his ceiling, how tempting must it be for the rest of us to use the same method when we can protect our self-image?

We are starting to understand how to avoid the temptations of obscuring the ceiling: valuing the produce of work rather than the aura of talent, seeking the lessons of failure instead of making excuses, trying to improve even upon apparent successes.

I have only begun to recognize and struggle with the means of obscuring ceilings within myself, and I feel I have even farther to go in understanding how to help my students find, reveal, and shatter their own ceilings

Comments are most welcome. Especially critical ones!

(This post is crossposted at Underlying Logic.)

Usain Bolt and the Peacock's Tail

2008-09-17T14:12:00.000-07:00

Jason Kottke brought to my attention this interesting analysis of how fast Usain Bolt could have run the Olympic 100-meter dash if he had not celebrated before the finish line.

This has made me think about the effects of Bolt's celebration: even though he would have run slightly faster without it, is there any doubt that he increased the percepation (and marketability) of his athletic prowess? The perception that you can win a gold medal and break a world record while devoting a little time to expressing your joy strikes me as much more valuable than the possession of a slightly better world record. (The less scientific estimates I've heard from casual viewers tend drastically to overestimate the impact of the celebration. In other words, many people now think Bolt is even faster than he actually is.) I think it's a peacock's tail phenomenon: even if a big tail is a first-order disadvantage, surviving in spite of it shows that you are one bad peacock.

But as DeSean Jackson has learned and learned again, flashing the tail is only impressive when it doesn't get you eaten.

Knocking Miss Austen down a peg

2008-09-11T19:41:00.000-07:00

Big, big news about the origins of baseball: the first British mention of "base ball" has been pushed back more than half a century, to 1755.

What this article doesn't mention--but a lot of book-types will recognize--is that the first reference in the Oxford English Dictionary belongs to Jane Austen, from Northanger Abbey.

I'm surprised that the new reference pushes the date back so far, but finding previous usages must have been nearly inevitable. Thanks to digitization, scholars can now routinely discover usages that predate OED coinages--I found a couple myself researching my first book--and lots of people would be keenly aware of the importance of any reference to baseball. The most notable thing about the Austen usage--"it was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had by nature nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, base-ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books"--is that Austen seems to assume that every English reader will understand the term without effort.

Not to take anything away from this discover, of course--what a find!

Analogy

2008-08-28T09:58:00.000-07:00

Junior of Fire Joe Morgan writes, "My new, fairly self-evident theory is that Diplodocus-intellected sportswriters elevate the importance of the statistic that is called a "win" for a pitcher simply because it's called a win. But it's still a statistic, guys, and a bad one at that -- one that depends on your offense and your bullpen."

I write,

pitcher wins : team wins :: nutritional fats : body fat

Usain Bolt

2008-08-27T11:39:00.000-07:00

Jason Kottke has drawn webland's attention to this chart illustrating (originally) the majesty of Michael Johnson's record time in the 200-meter dash and now showing how great Usain Bolt is. In this follow-up post, the author, Aliotsy Andrianarivo, raises the issue of Bolt's showboating in the 100-meter dash. I have three thoughts about Bolt:

1. Many have noted the Bolt-from-the-blue appropriateness of the champion's name, to the point where we have neglected the potential of the first name. I propose this usage: "19.30? That's insane!" "No, man. That's USAIN!" Usain can describe only the most freakishly impressive things and events.

2. My brain has gotten stuck on what it must have felt like to be in the next group of finishers in those races, especially the 200. I'm thinking of the men good enough to have gone into the Olympics with some hope of winning the gold. What must it mean to train for this incredibly specific task for years, then to realize not only that you have lost but that you are one or two whole levels of performance below the best? And then to set off, in many cases, for more years of training, with every training race and competition haunted by Bolt? The psychological risk of uncompromisingly striving for greatness astounds me.

3. Can't we get a pretty good sense of how much time Bolt lost by preening in the 100? I would like very much to have someone with the right capability to judge Bolt's peak speed and estimate any lost time at the end of the race. Is this an absurd wish?

Big Shot Bob: Robert Horry and the Hall of Fame

2008-07-30T19:45:00.000-07:00

Let's take up a burning question in NBA circles: is Robert Horry a Hall of Famer?

OK, maybe it's a smoldering question, but it was burning during this season's playoffs, and among many other writers, J. A. Adande said yes, Horry belongs.

Those who know the general inclinations of stat geeks know that we tend to give less weight to postseason performance and to clutch performance than most other fans and analysts. Therefore, it's probably not surprising that I think Horry, whose only claim to the Hall involves some clutch shots in the postseason, is nowhere remotely close to a Hall of Famer. Many others could make that case better than I.

What separates this from a number of parallel cases (that of Jack Morris in baseball, for instance) is the media coverage of the incident in the 2007 playoffs when Horry pushed Steve Nash, and the resulting scuffle brought about suspensions to Horry, Amare Stoudemire, and Boris Diaw.

Reading and hearing reactions to this incident, I noticed a consistent pattern: in all the disputes about the dirtiness of Horry's push and about the fairness of the suspensions, everyone seemed to agree that Stoudemire's absence would hurt his team much more than Horry's would hurt his--even though Horry was suspended for two games and Stoudemire one.

My sense was that this consensus was exactly right: for all of Horry's previous clutch shooting, and even though Stoudemire hadn't won a thing, everyone seemed to understand that even in the playoffs, Stoudemire was the true star, Horry only a role player. This wire report offered the standard account:

The Spurs probably can do without Horry, a role player known for his clutch 3-point shooting. The Suns, however, will sorely miss Stoudemire, a first-team all-NBA selection and their leading scorer and rebounder in the series.

Precisely! And the League had to justify the suspensions in terms that acknowledged the obvious competitive unfairness of the suspensions:

"It is not a matter of fairness, it's a matter of correctness," said Stu Jackson, NBA executive vice president.

For almost a year, I indulged the fantasy that the comparison of Stoudemire and Horry had clarified for all the world that even in the playoffs, Horry's value couldn't touch that of a truly excellent player. That was a good year.

What might have (previously) been: Socks Seybold and retrograde projection

2008-07-23T07:00:00.000-07:00

Can you project a baseball player's performance into the past?

I have an unusual interest in Socks Seybold, who played for the Philadelphia A's in the first decade of the 20th century. He was my great-great-great (I think) uncle--by marriage, so he deserves no blame for my own limitations as a player.

My man Socks was an excellent hitter. After a brief stint with the Reds in 1899, he began playing full-time for the A's in 1901. According to Jack Kavanagh, Connie Mack brought Seybold with him to Philadelphia when the American League commenced operations. In his second full season, Seybold set an American League record for home runs with sixteen, a record that would be broken by Babe Ruth 17 years later.

Seybold hit very well from 1901 to 1907, all of his seven full seasons: he was in the league's top ten every year in slugging percentage, and in the first six of those seasons, he was also in the top ten in OPS and OPS+. His career OPS+ mark (probably as good a quick indicator of hitting quality as any) of 130--that is, 30% better than league average--ties him with Roberto Clemente and Wade Boggs, and puts him ahead of the likes of Dave Winfield, Carl Yastrzemski, Eddie Murray, and Jim Rice. Obviously, his was a short career--only seven full seasons--and Kavanagh writes that "an injury in 1908 ended his major league career."

Simple enough, right? A good career shortened by injury. So it goes.

But here's the key fact: when he incurred that injury in 1908, Seybold was the seventh-oldest player in the league! He was already 37 and almost certainly at the end of his playing days. Born in November of 1870, Seybold was on the old side of 30 when he began playing full-time, already in the typical declining years for a baseball player. I don't know why didn't begin playing earlier: in those days, I imagine he might simply have gone unnoticed as a local star for years, or wanted to stay in a safer or more respectable trade until a solid professional opportunity came along.

We have lots of tools, such as similarity scores and Bill James's favorite toy, to look at a career cut short and project a hypothetical future. As far as I know, we have none that help us see what the missing first half of a career might have looked like. I can say that eyeballing the thirtysomething years of the Hall of Famers I mentioned above, only Clemente (definitely) and Winfield (possibly) look like they might have posted an OPS+ of 130 or better at the ages Seybold played.

I wonder whether a retroprojection tool might be useful not only for cases similar to Seybold's but also for examining more recent players who might have been brought up from the minor leagues too late.

Why have the Rays gotten so good?

2008-07-17T18:15:00.000-07:00

When I see that a baseball team has improved dramatically, I enjoy watching the popular narratives of the success develop. Usually, some combination of these four reasons comes up:

1. Charismatic leadership
2. General team chemistry (perhaps resulting from the departure of one or more bad apples)
3. Better players
4. Chance
5. Avoidance of major injuries

My sense is that dominant media narratives generally emphasize the first two factors, whereas statheads emphasize numbers three and four. Both sides are just beginning to catch up to the importance of injuries, an area that seems to capture everyone's interest these days. (Tom Verducci's recent article on Tim Lincecum captures the drama of biomechanical analysis beautifully.)

Incidentally, I see one of the most interesting questions in contemporary sports to be whether statheaded skepticism about charisma and chemistry in baseball should apply equally to sports such as basketball and football, where sustained concentration and teamwork matter so much more.

Anyway, to the Rays: listening to Chicago sports radio on a recent travel day, I heard four analysts in two forums describe the success of this year's Tampa Bay Rays almost entirely in terms of charisma and chemistry, with only an occasional mention of whether the team simply got better at playing baseball this year.

Given the fact that Nate Silver predicted in February that the Rays would experience precisely this kind of improvement (to the tune of 22 more wins, said Silver) and correctly pegged the key factor to be team defense, I have wondered whether any mainstream outlet would pick up the fact that Silver's model, which cares not a whit for chemistry, got this prediction so right. Granted, Silver wrote his article for an obscure regional rag called Sports Illustrated, but still, you'd think someone would pick up this story and run with it, right?

I lost all hope last week, when Silver's own organ, Baseball Prospectus, put out a podcast in which host Brad Wochomurka referred to the Rays' season that nobody saw coming. If the success of Silver's model hasn't convinced his own colleagues, I'll wager we have a long way to go before other outlets engage it.

Baseball team stats and individual stats

2008-07-13T19:17:00.000-07:00

In the course of making its funnies, Fire Joe Morgan applies statistics to baseball as well as just about anyone, but I think Ken Tremendous makes an interesting mistake in this takedown of the site's eponymous punching bag. Joe Morgan writes that the Red Sox are "the best team in the game," and KT replies, "The Cubs have a better team ERA and a better team OPS. For the record."

Leaving aside the question of whether a snapshot of team performance is a good way to call one team better than another, I want to focus on the use of ERA and OPS as measures of team performance. They are generally excellent measures of individual performance. The best quick justification of OPS, however, is that it basically explains where runs come from--team OPS correlates better with team runs than, say, batting average. And OPS scales well to the individual: one player's OPS gives you a pretty good sense of how much that player contributes per plate appearance to his team's scoring.

If we want to look at team performance, however, we can eliminate the middleman: it's all about the runs. Forget stats that correlate well with runs--use runs! And on the pitching side, we can drop the "earned" component of ERA, since the whole point of that is (however roughly) to separate individual from team performance. Again, use runs!

A recent Rob Neyer column about the Tampa Bay Rays touched on another case where statistics work fundamentally differently at the team and individual level. Neyer points out that the Rays have taken a huge step up in defensive efficiency this year:

[T]here's an incredibly simple statistic that tells us almost everything. Defensive Efficiency -- invented by Bill James in 1975 -- never really has caught on, which is sort of bizarre because it essentially answers a most basic question: "When a batted ball is put into play against a team, what percentage of the time does that team succeed in turning that ball into an out?"

In 2007, the Tampa Bay defense turned 66.2 percent of balls in play into outs. That figure was 30th best in the majors.

In 2008, the Tampa Bay defense has turned 72 percent of balls in play into outs. That figure is second best in the majors.

Defensive efficiency is like measures of individual fielding that attempt to discover a player's ability to convert balls hit near him into outs; at the individual level, such statistics are always beset by the difficulty of establishing the player's zone accurately. At the team level, aside from relatively minor park effects, the problem disappears: every team is responsible for the whole field. And for a single team playing in the same park, year-to-year comparisons become sublimely simple.

The moral of my story: sometimes the nuances of measuring individual performance cause us to overlook simple, powerful team statistics.

It's just criminal.

2008-06-12T10:34:00.000-07:00

In the latest NBA scandal fueled by the downfall of Tim Donaghy, I haven't seen any news coverage of the most revealing word in the NBA's defensive posturing: criminal.

"There's one criminal here," says says David Stern, referring to Donaghy. Or check out this statement from Stern:

"He turned on basically all of his colleagues in an attempt to demonstrate that he is not the only one who engaged in criminal activity," Stern said Tuesday. "The U.S. Attorney's office, the FBI have fully investigated it, and Mr. Donaghy is the only one who is guilty of a crime. And he's going to be sentenced for that crime, regardless of these desperate attempts to implicate as many people as he can."

Criminal, crime, crime. If you look at other statements from the league offices, you'll see the same wording, over and over again.

Today's New York Times article does raise one way in which this language is fishy: "Stern's implication was that if the authorities had discovered other criminal misconduct, they would have acted on it. That is not necessarily the case, according to legal experts."

But there is another, deeper fishiness about this: Donaghy has alleged many abuses of power among NBA referees, abuses that would certainly violate professional ethics and possibly league rules. But few, if any, of these charges are allegations of criminal conduct--Donaghy is a criminal because of the way his misconduct connected with gambling.

Stern is issuing classic non-denial denials; such carefully parsed denials are nearly confessions of the misconduct they are crafted to keep silent. He is so far getting away with them.

Schilling, Clemens, and steroids

2008-02-21T04:25:00.000-08:00

I'm hardly the first to say that we're only beginning to understand what the steroids era has done to player evaluation in baseball. One of the most underappreciated elements of the steroids controversy, it seems to me, is that the impact of steroids seems to have been greatest at the same time that new methods of statistical evaluation were gaining influence. I keep remembering moments that have taken on new meaning in retrospect: an argument with a friend, for instance, about whether Paul LoDuca could hit Major League pitching. The stats said no; the news out of spring training said yes. The statistical models were wrong. My friend won the argument, but now we know that LoDuca had juiced himself out of the statistical models. Again and again, I was bewildered by the ability of players such as LoDuca to avoid the fates marked out for them by comparable predecessors.

Similarly, when I saw Curt Schilling's much-publicized reaction to the Mitchell Report naming Roger Clemens, I remembered another moment. When Dan Duquette made his notorious remark that Clemens was in the "twilight of his career" and opted not to re-sign Clemens for the Red Sox after the 1996 season, I was living in Philadelphia and participating regularly in an email group of hundreds of Phillies fans. The Clemens situation arose for discussion on the group. I supported Duquette's position: Clemens' struggles and age indicated that he wasn't worth the money he was asking.

Taking the other side and defending Clemens was the group's most famous member: Curt Schilling, then a Phillie, who thus became the most notable person who has condescended to argue with me. Roger had plenty left in that tank, said Curt, citing Clemens's famously maniacal training regimen. It wasn't hard to see what Schilling had at stake in the debate, as a power pitcher thinking of his own value and future.

Obviously, Dan Duquette would have done much better by himself and the Red Sox if he had agreed with Schilling and not with me. And Schiling's identification with and support of Clemens at the time helps explain his investment in the findings of the Mitchell report now. Schilling had invested a lot of faith in Clemens in 1996.

So how will steroids continue to make us rethink our knowledge of the past? Yes, the issue clouds the statistical achievements of Clemens, Bonds, LoDuca, and the rest. But consider how deep the implications of this story are: Duquette's decision was a major reason for his downfall in Boston and a key test case pitting statheads like Duquette and me against the legions of anti-statheads who held almost undisputed sway in those pre-Moneyball days. If Clemens responded to the Duquette "twilight" comment by getting juiced, as has been alleged, and thus changed the shape of his career, was Duquette's tenure as GM of the Red Sox another casualty of the steroid era? And how fundamentally was the process of talent evaluation altered as a result?

Why the Twins got so little for Johan Santana

2008-02-07T20:17:00.000-08:00

Say I call you up tonight and offer you a wonderful car--a loaded, new BMW that was once owned by Tom Hanks, your family's favorite movie star. And then I say that what I'm really offering you is the chance to buy that car from a dealer. Oh, and that I've already told your family that you're giving them that exact car for Christmas. And I told the dealer how much you all adore Tom Hanks. Think how much stuff you'd want to give me in return for the favor I've done you.

That's why the Twins got such a crappy package for Johan Santana.

On his podcast last week, Bill Simmons (this blog's eponymous Sports Guy) proposed that the Minnesota Twins' general manager had done so poorly in trading Johan Santana that he should be fired. This got me thinking about the kinds of value that were involved in the Santana trade, and my thoughts helped me understand how the Twins might have received so little in return for such a terrific player.

Every sports analyst I've heard is talking about the Santana trade as a gift to the Mets, a deal in which the Twins received 60 or 40 or even a very few pennies on the dollar. This view comes from what seems like common sense: the Twins traded one of baseball's best players and received nobody who appears likely to become anywhere close to as good as Santana. I accept that assessment of the quality of the players involved.

But this is the crucial fact of the trade: the Mets didn't exactly trade for Santana. They traded for a brief window of time in which they could negotiate a contract that would persuade Santana to waive his no-trade clause. The negotiations did not involve the competitive bidding of free agency, but the lack of competing bids arguably made the Mets' position weaker: they could not withdraw gracefully after being outbid, as they could after making an offer to a free agent. Instead, they faced a situation in which every observer I know of thought they absolutely had to sign Santana to consummate the deal and thereby avoid the insupportably embarrassing circumstance of appearing to steal Santana from the Twins and then give him back.

In other words, the trade gave Santana overwhelming strength in the negotiation, to the extent that he could easily force the Mets to pay as much or more than Santana would have received as a free agent.

And reader, the right to pay market value or more for a commodity is simply not worth very much. Santana now has a gargantuan contract; he may be the best pitcher in baseball, but he is now also the highest-paid pitcher by a fair margin. Given legitimate questions about his health and his poor performance at the end of last season, Santana does indeed seem to have benefited from his extraordinary leverage in negotiating with the Mets.

The Mets, therefore, traded four prospects of some value in order to overpay a player. The Twins received not only the prospects but many millions of dollars. They would have paid Santana more than $13 million in 2008; his replacement will make vastly less, and the lost ticket revenue will--unfortunately--be balanced by the income the Twins will receive from the perversely structured revenue sharing agreement. I'll guess that the total savings comes to about $8 million, but I welcome refinement of the estimate.

Therefore, instead of thinking about the quality of the players alone, we can think instead of the stuff each team actually received.

The Mets received a terrific player but one with (at least) a fully valued contract.

The Twins received four prospects and maybe eight million bucks.

The only reason for a team to give up substantial value for Santana would have been defensive: a team could reason that Santana's value was literally incomparable because he so thoroughly outclassed players available by trade or free agency, so even above-market compensation made sense if it meant blocking anyone else from gaining a uniquely desirable asset. This is the Yankees-Red Sox scenario, in which either time could have overpaid to block the other from acquiring Santana--just as both were willing to overpay for the rights to negotiate with Daisuke Matsuzaka. Matsuzaka's case was, in fact, much more closely analogous to Santana's in economic terms than more apparently similar trades such as that of Erik Bedard, who had no negotiating power with his new team.

If the Yankees and Red Sox did not view Santana as a singularly market-altering property, or if each team simply realized that the other was not seriously pursuing Santana, the Twins were left with almost no trade leverage. Their weakness seems surprising given Santana's raw value as a player, but in economic terms, the Twins had very little to offer another team. Having little to offer, they received little in return.

Addendum: The Twins appear to be using the money they've saved to piddle away millions on medium-sized contracts for replaceable players. If they want to know how that will work out, they might investigate the track record of the 1990s Pirates.

Shoeless Joe

2007-12-20T13:08:00.000-08:00

In a recent article on the Mitchell report, Thomas Boswell, who should know better than to get baseball history from Field of Dreams, writes,

Shoeless Joe Jackson, an illiterate outfielder who hit like a demon in the 1919 World Series, but neglected to blow the whistle on his crooked teammates, died with his good name as black as their Sox.

Side point: why is "illiterate" in this sentence? Hypothesis: it's there to distract us from the plain facts of what Joe Jackson did in 1919.

May I volunteer an alternative version of Boswell's sentence? I may? Super!

Shoeless Joe Jackson, an outfielder who took money from gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series, performed dramatically differently in the straight and crooked games, and later described--under oath and in detail--how he contributed to throwing the Series, subsequently died.

Component ERA is on the traditional side for this guy?

2007-11-07T14:29:00.000-08:00

I'm going to wind my way to a comment on the new GM of the Pirates, Neal Huntington.

I inherited a rooting interest in two baseball teams, the Giants and the Pirates, which are the hometown teams of my father and mother, respectively. I've always pulled for those teams aside from my one rebellious stage, the Great Yankee Apostasy of the last 70s, about which the less said the better.

The GYA ended during Game Four of the 1979 World Series, a game six-year-old I watched with my dad from the very last row of the upper deck in Three Rivers Stadium. The Pirates lost the game, but the crowd swept me into a durable affection for the team, even after the days of Willie Stargell (my favorite player for the rest of childhood) had long faded away.

The Pirates began and sustained their ongoing, record-shattering streak of losing seasons by combining a small-payroll strategy with traditionalist management. That is, they spent limited resources on the commodities that the market of the time most overvalued. Hence the signings of Pat Meares, twice, Derek Bell, Charlie Hayes, and others of their ilk. During the 1990s, the main online discussion board for Pirates fans turned into a place where statheaded fans gathered to savage then-GM Cam Bonifay and to imagine what a more enlightened GM would do with a player like Aramis Ramirez. Here is a typical conversation from 1999 in which I participated.

The Pirates were extremely slow to give Ramirez a job, and they never appreciated him. In 2003, they ended the Cubs' famous string of terrible third basemen by handing them a 25-year-old Ramirez for Jose Hernandez and a couple of minor-league nobodies. Oh, and the Pirates threw in Kenny Lofton. Ramirez has been a well above-average hitter ever since. Though he did play oddly well for the Dodgers the following year, Hernandez would never again play 100 games in a season.

In those days, the Pirates drove statheads crazy by failing to appreciate basic statheaded principles: the value of plate discipline, the value of minor league performance, the importance of a player's age, and so forth. Things have never gotten much better.

But now, lookee here. The new GM says,

We are going to utilize several objective measures of player performance to evaluate and develop players. We'll rely on the more traditional objective evaluations: OPS (on base percentage plus slugging percentage) , WHIP (walks and hits per inning pitched), Runs Created, ERC (Component ERA), GB/FB (ground ball to fly ball ratio), K/9 (strikeouts per nine innings), K/BB (strikeouts to walks ratio), BB%, etc., but we'll also look to rely on some of the more recent variations: VORP (value over replacement player), Relative Performance, EqAve (equivalent average), EqOBP (equivalent on base percentage), EqSLG (equivalent slugging percentage), BIP% (balls put into play percentage), wOBA (weighted on base average), Range Factor, PMR (probabilistic model of range) and Zone Rating.

Zoikes! For the first time this century, I'm very interested in what the Pirates will do next.

Fixing revenue sharing

2007-11-04T20:09:00.000-08:00

Michael "not the Moneyball guy" Lewis has a column in the New York Times proposing a reform for revenue sharing that would punish teams for lazy freeloading. Such a reform seems essential to me: the free rider problem has become grotesque in some cases, and not just in baseball. I wish Lewis painted the problem a little more vividly, and it's hard to tell whether his formula gets a solution exactly right, but he certainly seems to be talking sense. I hope many more writers join in the conversation.

The power of Scott Boras

2007-10-31T14:44:00.000-07:00

OK, one more post roughly related to Alex Rodriguez and his contract--

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution wonders how Scott Boras might be able to command higher prices for his clients than other agents do. J. C. Bradbury is skeptical of this power. Such skepticism is to be expected from economists, who would be surprised to see a single actor fundamentally change the dynamics of a competitive market as Boras is supposed to do, but I don't think you can seriously dispute that Boras has fundamentally shifted prices at times, especially in the amateur draft.

Cowen lists some mechanisms by which Boras might beat his market, but he neglects what I consider the most interesting possibility: that Boras actually makes his players better. This recent story in ESPN the Magazine describes the ways in which Boras tries to increase the skill and durability of his players. An ability to increase durability seems plausible to me, and if it seems plausible to owners, it may well cause them to pay more for Boras's clients. In the case of A-Rod, durability is a crucial factor, arguably the crucial factor, even a decisive one: if he stays healthy, he will almost certainly become the home run king. I can easily imagine Boras's longtime management of Rodriguez's training regimen being worth millions of dollars to a team.

A-Rod's Contract Again

2007-10-29T19:17:00.000-07:00

I usually agree with Rob Neyer, but I don't agree with this blog post, where Neyer contends that Alex Rodriguez isn't worth the money he's now earning or will earn. As evidence that A-Rod is overpaid, Neyer cites Nate Silver's study of the first years of A-Rod's present contract.

I see three problems with Neyer's case.

First, and most trivially, Neyer cites the contracts of Rodriguez, Mike Hampton, and Manny Ramirez as regrettable decisions by irrational owners: "All three franchises, within just a few years, regretted those deals. Terribly regretted those deals." Sure, Hampton's deal was a disaster, but doesn't it seem a little nuts to criticize Boston for the Ramirez deal in the very week that the team wins its second World Series? I mean, I discount the meaning of postseason performance as much as anyone, but it's hard right now to imagine a better way for Boston to have spent that cash.

Second, the Neyer/Silver argument may be outdated. Neyer doesn't account for the increasing revenues in MLB. The increases may not be enough to change the big picture, but they need to be accounted for.

But the more fundamental problem with Neyer's argument is that he's making a case about a market that simply doesn't exist. Baseball owners don't get to sign free agents on the basis of Silver's calculations of their value. The asking price of free agents is (give or take) the amount of the richest competing offer plus a little bit. In such a market, top free agents will always and necessarily command more than their demonstrable value, while top young players in the present salary structure receive less. The owner who offers the Silver-Neyer price for free agents simply won't sign any of them. The rational price is above the median assessment of a player's demonstrable value. That is, the right price is what Neyer would wrongly call an irrational one.

The interesting quirk of this situation, however, is A-Rod's act of opting out of his present contract, which costs the Yankees $23 million. Avoiding that loss should be worth a lot to the Yankees; they could rationally pay, say, $20 million more than A-Rod's free agent price to extend him. The fact that A-Rod appears to be turning down a contract extension means a) he's bluffing, b) he really doesn't want to play for the Yankees anymore, or c) he and the Yankees are each betting on evaluating the free agent market better than the other. I'm guessing A-Rod wins that bet.

Undefeated seasons and aligning incentives

2007-10-26T05:42:00.000-07:00

The Sports Guy has written recently about the relative probabilities of going undefeated in the NFL and in a given fantasy football league. Simmons skips the obvious historical approach--getting the a fantasy stats service to tell him how many teams go undefeated and comparing the incidence with the NFL's history--but he offers good reasons for thinking the undefeated fantasy season the rarer achievement. I'll add a couple of thoughts about the role of incentives in the comparison.

Many of Simmons's points boil down to the simple fact that fantasy results are hard to control due to misaligned incentives. If the Patriots are winning by three touchdowns and your fantasy team needs Tom Brady to through for two more, you're out of luck because Brady doesn't care what you need. His incentives are different from yours. Incidentally, this scenario demonstrates why I think fantasy baseball is a better pretend sport than fantasy football: in baseball, Manny Ramirez is going to try to hit well whenever he comes to the plate. His incentives are aligned with his fantasy owners' because there's no way to run out a clock.

(Side note: the latest Nobel prize in economics was awarded for work on mechanism designs that maximize incentive alignments. Here is one explanation of the work.)

OK, so the point is that misaligned incentives make fantasy football tougher to control. But there's also a contrary influence of incentives. In most fantasy football leagues, every team is trying to win a given year's championship. In the NFL, some teams are trying to win the Superbowl, but many of them are looking at least partly to the future, some are in full rebuilding mode, and a few are coasting along on low salaries to soak up guaranteed profits through revenue sharing. Therefore, the NFL is guaranteed to have unbalanced resources, with a handful of really good teams standing in the way of any undefeated season. It would be much easier to sweep a league that disbanded every team each year.

How do these variously misaligned incentives shake out to answer Simmons's question? I don't know. I'd love to see some data.

The Rockies' momentum

2007-10-24T10:24:00.000-07:00

I've loved watching the Rockies win game after game lately. I have not loved media speculation about whether the layoff between the team's last playoff game and the World Series will break their momentum. Momentum plays a big role in commentary about sports, but statistical analyses have found consistently that independence generally trumps momentum. Thomas Gilovich's wonderful debunking of the basketball "hot hand" in How We Know What Isn't So is a great early example.

The streak has demonstrated that the Rockies are a better team than almost anybody imagined a couple of months ago. They have higher real and Pythagorean winning percentages, and their terrific pitching staff seems to have been solidified by mid-season shifts in the roster and role assignments. The team will now face its toughest opponent and toughest arena. To think of momentum or its dissipation as the central issue of the Series is a distraction. The Series will be determined by the quality of the teams and the quirks of short-series baseball, not whether the Rockies have continued to please the God of Momentum.

Peer effects in golf

2007-10-23T17:20:00.000-07:00

Tim Harford posts about a new piece of economics research finding no peer effects in professional golf tournaments. That is, according to the researchers, golfers aren't affected by the quality of their playing partners in tournaments.

I've long been skeptical of peer effects in golf. But the general finding doesn't (as far as I know) address the key specific question: does being paired with Tiger Woods on Sunday hurt other golfers? Just about everyone thinks so, but I'm skeptical because there's a simple explanation for the appearance of a Tiger Effect.

That explanation is this: intimidation aside, Tiger is the best golfer in the world. Therefore, if he and another player are contending to win a tournament, the other player's performance is by definition more of an aberration than Tiger's. (Any player who is tied or nearly tied with Tiger on Sunday has overachieved relative to Tiger.) Therefore, if Tiger and his playing partners do what we would normally expect of them, they would create the sense of Tiger intimidating the other players into Sunday collapses. Utterly ordinary expected performances would create the same Tiger Effect that golf analysts and fans now perceive.

Obviously, this reasoning does not disprove a real Tiger Effect. But any test of the effect should account for this explanation, the fact that courses generally get harder on Sunday, and other reasons why Tiger's playing partners may not be wilting but simply finding their level on Sundays.

A guy who ought to know

2007-10-18T08:22:00.000-07:00

ESPN the Magazine leads off an article in its issue of October 22 thusly:

Recent history says the team popping the bubbly this season won't be the best record. So is it all luck? The Mag's Buster Olney asks a guy who ought to know: Braves pitcher John Smoltz.

What amazes me about this and many similar formulations is that writers seem to go out of their way to say, in essence, "This is a question that fall squarely in the province of statistical analysis rather than observation"--in this case, to frame the question as one of the relationship between probability and uncertainty--and then tumble directly into personal anecdote.

In next month's magazine, I hope to see the same logic in the other direction:

What does it feel like to take the mound with your team's season on the line and tens of thousands of hostile fans burying you in boos? The Mag asks a guy who ought to know: Louisiana Tech Professor James J. Cochran.

Livan Hernandez and myths of the postseason

2007-10-14T11:53:00.000-07:00

I've been a Giants fan for a long time: my first sentence was "Go Giants, beat Reds." Therefore, I remember all too well the lesson I learned in 2002: when you ask the gods to do something, you'd better watch our for ironic compliance.

In 2002, I had been arguing for years that there was no reason to think that Barry Bonds, then widely regarded as a postseason choker, was a different player under pressure. Here is a post I wrote in 1997 to that effect; there were many others. In 2002, Barry got his big chance to play in the postseason again, and he was ridiculously great: excellent in two playoff series, then about as good as anyone had ever been in a World Series: .471/.700/1.294.

While the gods granted my request to demonstrate that we should base postseason expectations on regular season performance, however, they also had Livan Hernandez prove the point in the other direction. Hernandez then enjoyed a reputation as a tremendous postseason pitcher, and indeed, he had pitched a two brilliant playoff games early in his career. But he had been declining as a pitcher, and though his postseason W-L record and ERA had held up, his supporting statistics had collapsed; the Livan pitching for the Giants was clearly not the Livan of 1997. In 2002, Livan pitched a solid game in the first series, a very shaky but lucky game in the second (6.1 IP, 10 baserunners, 0 strikeouts, 2 ER), and two utterly disastrous games in the World Series.

He pitched less than six innings total in the two games and gave up nine earned runs. Surely, thought I, this is the end of his reputation as a postseason force.

But it wasn't. As the Diamondbacks entered this postseason, the talk started again: don't pay attention to the regular season numbers, we heard, because Livan has another gear in October!

Indeed, Hernandez had a good postseason W-L record, but that was more a function of luck and run support than excellence: his regular season and postseason ERAs were nearly identical. And the best part of that postseason record came a full decade ago, when he was a much better pitcher in all situations than he is now.

But none of this stops ESPN.com's Mark Simon from saying, in a blurb that can't be linked directly, that Livan is "one of baseball's best postseason pitchers":

It will be up to one of baseball's best postseason pitchers to try to cool off the Rockies in Game 3 of the NLCS on Sunday, with Livan Hernandez trying to get the Diamondbacks a desperately needed victory. Hernandez doesn't exactly have the best history at Coors Field, but he's been known to dial it up a notch when it counts.

Anything can happen in a small sample, but this is a myth that deserves to die.

Sports Guy gets his stathead on

2007-10-13T19:25:00.000-07:00

In response to a reader question about teams moving to a short rotation in the baseball playoffs, Bill Simmons writes,

SG: Graham, that's a fantastic question. I don't have an answer for you. The three-day rest thing only seems to work when you don't have another choice (like the Red Sox in 2004, for example). If it's a conscious decision, the results always seem to be brutal. But I have another question: Why is everyone always so confident that sinkerballers are better on three days rest? People just spout this out like it's a foregone conclusion -- oh, yeah, it's fine when Wang pitches on three days rest, he's a sinkerballer. It is? Who said? Do we have scientific proof that it's better for any pitcher (even someone with a specialty pitch like the sinkerball) to be more tired than less tired? I'm dying for them to tackle this on "MythBusters."

That's a great response from Simmons; I want only to add that this case offers an excellent demonstration of the power of the optical revolution in baseball analysis. We suddenly have the power to know exactly what happens to sinkerballers after three or four days of rest, to see whether any effect correlates with the amount of sink on pitches, and to do all of this with a direct measurement of the pitches' break instead of inferring that measurement from fly ball/ground ball ratios. Amazing.

A-Rod's contract

2007-10-09T19:44:00.000-07:00

Everybody seems to acknowledge that if Alex Rodriguez opts out of his current contract to negotiate a new one, he'll make more money. In other words, he is currently underpriced. Every story about his contract also includes the fact that the Rangers are scheduled to pay the Yankees $3M/year of that contract if A-Rod sticks with it. I haven't seen any story draw this conclusion: the Rangers made a trade that has them paying the Yankees to employ baseball's best player at a bargain price.

February 2004 is not that long ago, after all: "Texas will pay $67 million of the $179 million left on Rodriguez's $252 million, 10-year contract, the most cash included in a trade in major league history." Well played, Rangers! No wonder you're so good!

Shining when the lights are brightest

2007-10-08T06:57:00.000-07:00

I was going to write recently about Livan Hernandez's undeserved reputation for postseason excellence, but I just heard an even crazier example. Indians GM Mark Shapiro just said on the Baseball Today podcast that Kenny Lofton is a proven postseason performer who shines when the lights are brightest and whatnot.

No. The only good thing you can say about Lofton in the postseason is that he's gotten to the playoffs a number of times. In fact, I hypothesize that any player who makes the playoffs with a bunch of different teams and manages not to be memorably awful will gain a reputation for clutch postseason play.

But here (scroll down) is the real story of Lofton's playoff performance: 19 series over 11 years, with a solid sample of 360 at-bats, producing at a clip of .253/.323/.353 including the current hot streak. He's been putrid.

The last day of the regular season

2007-10-07T11:43:00.000-07:00

The extraordinary lack of close series in the playoff so far make me recall one of the many components of the great drama of the end of the NL regular season: Jayson Stark wrote for ESPN.com that the Philadelphia crowd gave the visiting scoreboard a standing ovation when it posted the Marlins' seven-run first inning against the Mets. On that Sunday afternoon, two crowds--those in Philadelphia and Colorado--had the extraordinary pleasure of watching the loss of the key rival go up on the scoreboard while the home team in front of them won the crucial last game. That's a tough combination to beat.

Torre's job

2007-10-07T11:20:00.000-07:00

Many media reports today say that George Steinbrenner will fire Joe Torre if the Yankees lose their current series against the Indians. I dislike the Yankees anyway, for most of the usual reasons, but such stories add fuel to the fire. The result of a short series in baseball conveys almost no meaningful information about a manager's performance, especially when the manager in question has experienced great postseason success and disappointment by turns. I can think of a few legitimate reasons to fire Torre, but Stenbrenner's would be an especially stupid one.

Shape stats and consolidation stats

2007-10-02T20:06:00.000-07:00

As has been widely noted in the sports media, Jimmy Rollins last weekend became only the fourth Major League Baseball player to join something called the 20-20-20-20 club: at least twenty doubles, triples, home runs, and stolen bases in a season. I think that's great. I've liked Rollins since I followed him through the Phillies system, including catching him alongside Pat Burrell at the wonderful minor league park in Reading, and the 20-20-20-20 thing offers a quick narrative-in-a-number describing the kind of player Rollins has become.

I would contend, however, that joining this quirky "club" should have no bearing at all on Rollins's ranking among players, including his candidacy for the MVP award. The 20-20-20-20 number is what I'll call a shape stat: it describes the shape of Rollins's production, the way his value manifested itself, rather than the amount of value he produced. Homers are worth more than triples, which are worth more than doubles, and all of those are much more valuable than stolen bases. 20 homers and 20 steals is not as valuable as, say, 27 homers and 2 steals; the former totals are just less common. For evaluative purposes, we need exactly the tools that most sportswriters gleefully ignore, the ones such as VORP that assign informed weights to each of these statistics and then sum up the player's performance.

For the purposes of description and narrative, I've got no problem with shape stats. But if we're talking about the MVP or other ways of ranking players, setting aside the shape stats is a good starting point for any serious discussion.

The low-payroll pennant race

2007-09-26T18:29:00.000-07:00

I recently heard a friend claim that the Cubs don't deserve their underdog status because in spite of their history, they are today just another big-market behemoth stomping the true underdog: his beloved Brewers. That argument made me wonder whether you could argue that the current Brewers are doing about as well as a team can given Milwaukee's payroll.

I translated that curiosity into a testable question: do the Brewers have the best record of any team with their payroll or lower? According to Ben Fry's chart, the answer is no, but I found the stats interesting beyond the simple question, so I constructed the standings of the Brewers-or-lower-payroll teams:


TEAM         W-L     SALARY   GB
Cleveland    93-63   $62M     0
Arizona      88-69   $52M     5
San Diego    86-71   $58M     7.5
Colorado     85-72   $54M     8.5
Milwaukee    81-76   $71M     12.5
Texas        74-84   $68M     20
Cincinnati   71-86   $69M     22.5
Washington   71-87   $37M     23
Kansas City  68-89   $68M     25.5
Pittsburgh   67-90   $39M     26.5
Florida      67-90   $31M     26.5
Tampa Bay    65-92   $24M     28.5

Obviously, Cleveland has had a remarkable year. Milwaukee is just above the TEX-CIN median of the twelve. The selection criteria exclude a handful of higher-salary teams doing worse than the Brewers, so Milwaukee looks better in the context of the whole MLB, but still only a little above average for their payroll. I'm surprised by how competitive the mid-level payroll teams are. Arizona and (in the truly low-payroll division) Washington stand out as teams producing a lot of value for the money. And to go back to an old hobbyhorse of mine, Tampa Bay must be a very, very profitable team given that puny payroll and revenue sharing, and that is a great shame.

A bottom line: if the season ended today, these 12 teams at the bottom of the payroll standings would produce three of the eight playoff squads. Not bad.

Generality, meet example

2007-09-04T14:21:00.000-07:00

Today's guest on the Baseball Today podcast made this sensible and important remark:

"Teams are never as good as they appear to be on hot streaks and never as bad as they appear to be when things are going badly."

Right on, brother!

One minute later, he made the case that the Padres are the best team going in the National League because "over their last dozen games or so," they're averaging about six runs per game. And "if they're going to hit the ball, they're going to be good." "I think the Padres, right now, might be the best team in the National League."

I leave it to you, reader, to put those two moments together and see what happens.

The loss column (drive or fly?)

2007-08-21T18:26:00.001-07:00

On the Baseball Today podcast, Peter Pascarelli frequently presents a team's position in the standings only in terms of loss column differential--as in, "The Dodgers are only five back in the loss column, so don't count them out."

The use of the loss column alone is always strange. Unlike the sensible games behind formula every newspaper uses, the loss column stat ignores what we usually think of as the most fundamental stat in baseball: team wins. At this point in the season, there's no reason at all to speak of the standings in terms of the loss column only, as the absurdity of saying a 60-20 team is tied with an 18-20 team easily demonstrates. It matters if you've already won a game.

I assume that the whole loss column business got started as a way to describe pennant races at the very ends of seasons. If a team is 1.5 games behind but tied in the loss column, that team still controls its own destiny, as the saying goes, and we humans love that sense of control. (The famous fact that almost everybody fears flying more than the much more dangerous activity of driving derives from the same illusion of control.)

Therefore, it makes sense that measuring races by the loss column at the end of the year became routine back when teams had to be good to compete for the playoffs. The grain of truth in the loss column idea would lie in the fact that really good teams are likely to win any given game, so if the Yankees are three back of the Red Sox with five to play, the loss column standings could have a real effect on the probability of a comeback. The closer the two teams' winning percentages are to 1.000, the more the loss column matters. The less glorious divisional races of the twentieth-century, in which the Cardinals could realistically make the playoffs with a losing record, make the conventional standings a much better measure of a race.

The Optical Revolution in Baseball Analysis

2007-08-16T04:09:00.000-07:00

This Slate article, brought to my notice by John Smick, has given me a sense of what I have missed by moving to the periphery of baseball analysis over the last five years or so. When I slipped from analytical wakefulness into a fog of half-awareness, my fellow contributors on the once-proud rec.sport.baseball Usenet group had followed the lead of Bill James and worked out the basics of modern statheadedness: adjusting statistics for park, league and era; understanding the value of adjusted minor league numbers; separating players' performance from their teammates' influence; and so forth. Some of the r.s.bb writers would go on to create the Baseball Prospectus and other publications. After Moneyball popularized our long-held belief that baseball's conventional wisdom rested on flawed assumptions, a few of them even worked their way into jobs with major league teams.

We knew back then that we didn't understand how to evaluate fielding very well. Whereas pitching and hitting were largely individual efforts, the team effects of fielding make judging fielders like judging football or basketball players, whose performance always depends on the actions of other players. But I thought I had a sense of where the breakthrough would lie: the statistics needed to be based on technological observations. With cameras or lasers or something (I'm, um, not an engineer), we could know exactly how players react to batted balls--how fast the players break, how fast and accurately they track the balls, how often they catch balls when they reach them. Given the amount of money floating around baseball, I wondered why some team hadn't already introduced this technology in a proprietary way.

At the end of the Slate article, author Nate DiMeo hints at "next year's rumored Gameday innovation--video cameras that cover the playing field. These cameras promise to yield important insights about the art and science of fielding." Apparently, the dream becomes reality next year, but wonderfully, the data will be public, not the jealously guarded property of certain teams, as I had imagined.

The other factor I hadn't imagined lies in the main point of DiMeo's piece: the whole-field cameras follow the introduction of similar cameras that analyze pitching. In the combination and extension of these developments lies the root of a real revolution in sports analysis, one that I predict will ultimately mean more than and largely replace the Jamesian statistical revolution.

This is the optical revolution.

The Jamesian revolution largely involved the proper adjustment of individual performance for context. Often the conventional wisdom had undervalued context: we needed to adjust statistics for park and league and era to get past the idea that a homer is a homer is a homer. Sometimes we needed to value context less: the Jamesian revolution led us to see a less fundamental difference between major and minor league numbers and to regard RBIs as essentially a measure of slugging percentage muddied by context.

While the Jamesian revolution generally refined the analysis of existing statistical observations, the optical revolution will change the means of observation and the nature of the observed. The result of the optical revolution will be the separation of performance and results; we will shift from analyzing the statistical record of games to analyzing players' performance in a hypothetical, parallel world.

In this parallel world, we will attempt to build links between players' actions and results. The optical revolution will attempt to imagine a world of baseball without chance.

We already see hints of this development in pitching statistics that have grown out of Voros McCracken's thesis that Major League pitchers have control over walks, strikeouts, and home runs, while chance dictates the results of other batted balls. McCracken and others have used that insight to measure assign to pitchers hypothetical ERAs, adjusted for luck and team defense--these statistics attempt to measure what should have happened rather than what did. This process goes beyond norming the stats for context; it involves evaluation that deliberately excludes results. These numbers, for example, that Matt Morris's relatively effective pitching for the Giants during the first half of this season was largely the result of random variation. (More of his batted balls than usual found their way to fielders' gloves.) The Giants probably capitalized on that knowledge when they unloaded Morris into that repository of all other teams' failed projects and miscalculations, the roster of the Pirates.

The optical revolution will extend this line of thinking much farther. We have always known that some balls are called strikes and vice versa; now we know which ones, and we will soon be able to adjust for those mistakes. We will be able to say how much of an excellent pitching performance arose from the pitcher, how much from defense, how much from the opposition, and how much from luck. We will be able to say how much setting up an outside curveball with an inside fastball changes the effectiveness of the curve. If a great hitter has a lousy playoff series, we will be able to say whether he simply faced great pitching or whether he failed to hit pitches he normally smokes. This last example illustrates the transformation of the Jamesian revolution: the Jamesians cast doubt on the notion of the clutch hitter by looking at aggregate statistics, but the optical revolution will enable us to see exactly how performance changes (or remains constant) as the season becomes the postseason.

The Jamesian revolution asked us to take our eyes off the ball and look at the numbers. The optical revolution will use technological eyes to follow the ball in unimagined ways.

Fire Joe Morgan on Fire

2007-08-15T07:21:00.001-07:00

Here is a column I wish I'd written on A-Rod. Hat tip: David Archer.

The knee of the Tiger

2007-08-14T11:35:00.000-07:00

Update, July 2008: I suspect that this post does not describe Tiger's now-famous knee injury, but I want nonetheless to acknowledge that yes, I realize how dumb it sounds now. So noted.

During Tiger Woods's victorious final round at the PGA championship on Sunday, Woods stumbled awkwardly as he pumped his fist after holing a birdie putt on the eighth hole. I was watching the round with two friends, and none of us saw anything of concern in the stumble, but the CBS announcers immediately speculated that Tiger had incurred a knee injury. (Come to think of it, they may have said ankle first, but they soon settled on knee.) For many holes afterwards, they relentlessly attributed every bump in Tiger's road to victory to his allegedly hurt knee, in spite of no limps or grimaces to bear out the theory. When Woods clinched the victory with spectacularly huge swings, the knee narrative disappeared. I found this to be an unusually clear demonstration of selection bias, and one that illustrated more general problems with sports journalism: the announcers had more incentive to set up a dramatic narrative than to evaluate the evidence in front of them. With the narrative established, they supported it at every opportunity and then wordlessly abandoned it as it proved to be nonsense.

The Sports Guy on the Donaghy scandal

2007-07-24T11:21:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to say more about what makes Bill Simmons a terrific sportswriter, one I'm almost always eager to read, even though his analytical instincts drive me nuts. This column on the NBA refereeing scandal is Simmons at his best. This is a sports story that is all about fan psychology--the way everybody will talk about games next year, and nobody covers that angle better than Simmons.

How about the Sports Guy Race Theorists?

2007-07-16T18:35:00.000-07:00

Back in March, Bill Simmons got himself in a little hot water by saying that this was an "astounding realit[y]" of the 2005-06 college basketball season: "Two white guys (Adam Morrison and J.J. Redick) were indisputably the two best college basketball players alive."

Perhaps Simmons thought that Boston sports fans have such a longstanding record of interracial harmony and good cheer that nobody would notice that you can't explain the logic underneath that statement without cringing. Hey, I've got a minute. Go ahead and explain to yourself why the joke is funny. I guarantee at least two cringes, or a cringe and a wince.

When readers called Simmons on the comment, he thoughtfully offered this olive branch: "For anyone who was offended, I'm sorry … not for the joke, but for the bug up your ass." Yes, it takes a lot of courage and integrity to go for the old "bug up your ass" line. Not to mention writing skill.

Bill Simmons is a skilled writer and often a skilled thinker, too, but his head seems to shrink when he tries to joke about race. Here is his reason number 929 why he loves sports:

The Utah Jazz
I will never get used to this: One of our most white-bread American cities roots for an NBA franchise named for a musical movement created by African-Americans. It's genuinely insane. You can brainstorm with your buddies all weekend to come up with a name for a sports franchise that makes less sense -- there's no way you're topping Utah Jazz. Not even with Dallas Indians.

Let's leave aside the lack of originality here--seriously, has anybody not heard this before?--and go to the hysteria of Simmons's resistance to the idea of jazz in Utah. Obviously, Utah Jazz an odd name, with the oddity stemming from the team's move from New Orleans to Salt Lake City. Probably nobody would have considered giving the name to a new franchise. But "genuinely insane"? There's no topping it, even with hypothetical names?

I find Simmons's adolescent excitement about an old joke revealing. Utah Jazz is an oxymoron only in the dull-witted logic of bad jokes, in which all Utahans are Mormons, all Mormons are white, and no white people play jazz. The fact that lots of people have played and do play jazz in Utah is a side point, though, compared to the revelation that in Simmons's imagination, a loose association between a broad style of music and a racial group has more force than anything else he can imagine. So I take up the challenge to think of team names nuttier than Utah Jazz. Simmons offers us a weekend, but I'll take five minutes:

Laramie Surf
Minneapolis Camels
Havana Barons
Miami Frost
New York Humility
Hartford Rebels
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It's not so hard--if you think about it.

Inauspicious: Pascarelli on Polanco

2007-06-01T07:37:00.000-07:00

Last year and this, I have listened regularly to ESPN's Baseball Today podcast, hosted until this week by Alan Schwarz. I have enjoyed the podcast in part because Schwarz and his guests (especially Rob Neyer and Steve Phillips) did a good job of combining responsible statistical analysis with current news and anecdotes.

Schwarz has now departed to work for the New York Times, and Peter Pascarelli has taken over the hosting duties. Yesterday, an email asked him to discuss the best second basemen in the American league. After entertaining a couple of other possibilities, Pascarelli brought up his own choice. He began,

My favorite second baseman, though, in the American League is Placido Polanco, who I think is one of the most underrated players in baseball.

This surprised me: I've long thought of Polanco as an overrated player, a useful guy talked about as a star because he's versatile and makes contact well. But I haven't followed the story for a while, so I waited for more details. Pascarelli continued,

And those of you who like stats might be interested to know ...

At this point I literally stopped in my tracks and waited, suspecting that I was about to hear a customized statistic designed to carve out a little slice of Polanco's performance that makes him look especially good. Sure enough:

... that since 2005, Placido Polanco has the best average with runners in scoring position of any player in baseball, and that is something which I bet a lot of you didn't know.

Well, I certainly hope most people didn't know that. It's a misleading fact in three ways: 1) it's about batting average, a stat whose limitations favor Polanco; 2) it relies on one measure of clutch hitting--clutch hitting is an idea enormously susceptible to distortions and small-sample variations, and people who pick one measure are almost always doing so to slant their evidence; and 3) it arbitrarily chooses 2005 to the present as its time frame.

In fact, if you look at different time periods and a different measure of clutch hitting, Polanco will look much worse; he has stunk with men on and two out, for example.

My point is not to knock Polanco, who is a very good player. My point is to knock Pascarelli, who (like Bill Simmons, to relate this to my blog title) seems to confuse statistical expertise with the recitation of isolated and slanted numbers--which is pretty nearly the opposite of statistical expertise. Pascarelli closed his comment thus:

All of you who think of yourselves as experts, well, take a back seat to me, pal, I knew that number and you didn't.

He sounded like he was kidding. Sort of. I fear we've lost an excellent podcast.

Graphickry: Team Salary, Team Performance

2007-05-30T07:49:00.000-07:00

Ben Fry has concocted an ingenious interactive graph showing the relationship between each Major League Baseball team's salary and won-lost record for any day of the season.

To criticize such a graph--certainly the most interesting and useful presentation of this data that I've seen--would smack of churlishness and ingratitude. Hey, that's my cue!

The problem with the graph is that it distorts the relative positions of the team's salaries and performance by presenting them in evenly spaced lists on the two sides of the graph. Fry seems to recognize the problem with this approach on the salary side and therefore represents each team's salary by its line thickness as well as its position on the right side of the graph. The result is two visual representations of team salary that contradict each other: the Yankees' position on the right side of the graph inaccurately presents the teams a one evenly-spaced slot above the Red Sox, whereas the thickness of the line accurately but unintuitively reveals the huge gap between the top two teams. Combined with the deceptively even spacing of the team records on the left side, this flaw creates line slopes that can get seriously out of whack: at some points, one win or loss creates a deceptively large change in the slope of a team line, and the Yankees and Red Sox should be more obviously in their own leagues at the top of the salary side.

I've done enough web programming to know that my ideal graph would be vastly harder to program than Fry's already-complex one, so I understand his decisions; I just hope someone will surmount the technical hurdles to make an even better version of this.

I would also add a point of substance: it seems to me that team salaries in this context should include the costs and benefits of the luxury tax system. Which means that the Yankees are doing still worse.

In other words, Fry's graph makes the Yankees' season (to date--let's be clear) look disastrous, but it's actually much, much worse than it looks.

The Preakness: Odds and History

2007-05-20T18:41:00.000-07:00

I was struck by the headline in The New York Times on the day of the Preakness Stakes: referring to Kentucky Derby winner Street Sense, it read, "Favored in Preakness by Odds, Less So by History."

The article, by Joe Drape, shows the opposite.

It opens with a reference to Street Sense's status as the 7-to-5 favorite in the Preakness. That means that the odds gave Street Sense just under a 42% chance of winning. Like other sports betting markets, that of horse races has a fantastic track record, so we can reasonably expect horses with 7-5 odds to win about 42% of the time.

The article then moves to this paragraph, quoting Street Sense trainer Carl Nafzger:

“What I know is that I have a 9-to-1 chance to win,” he said, referring to the number of starters in Saturday’s race. “And that’s a lot better than it was at Churchill Downs for the Derby when we were 19-1.”

Because I am a generous man and have a good dessert in my belly, I will assume that Nafzger likes to toy with reporters rather than that he is as silly as this comment. (By this logic, horse owners might as well toss any old entry into the Preakness; heck, but a bunny in the gate--it's a lot cheaper to feed than a horse, and it will still have the same chance of winning!) Even so, this is an inspired bit of nonsense. It combines obviously false egalitarianism with a classic confusion of probability and odds ("9-to-1 chance" rather than one in nine).

Drape makes more sense in the paragraph that follows:

History suggests that the odds are much better than that for Street Sense: 52 percent of Preakness winners were sent off as the post-time favorite, as Street Sense certainly will be. In the past 10 years, six Derby winners have won the mile-and-three-sixteenths race and headed to Belmont Park with a chance to sweep the Triple Crown.

And here the more interesting point arises: if pre-race favorites had won 52% of Preakness runs, and Derby winners have done even better in recent races, then Street Sense's 7-5 odds reveal a weaker favorite than one would expect, a horse given less of a chance to win by bettors than the performance of similar horses in the past would indicate.

"Favored in Preakness by Odds, Less So by History"? Nope--favored by history, a little less so by the odds.

A blog is born

2007-05-10T08:13:00.000-07:00

I started this blog after composing this little rant on May 10th, 2007, so I'll date this post to that day, call it a blog, and then try to explain myself.

I just realized something: Bill Simmons, the Sports Guy, is the anti-Bill James. Like James, Simmons is an excellent writer with a great knack for popularizing his ideas. I often enjoy Simmons's columns immensely; I am always reminding myself to cut blog subscriptions, and Simmons always makes the cuts. But Simmons's reasoning is TERRIBLE. He's just a dreadful analyst in many ways, foremost among them his constant use of misleading statistics combined with reflexively anti-intellectual bashing of stat geeks (like me, it should be noted). Perhaps the next blog in my life needs to be sportsguytalkincrazyagain.blogspot.com.