It is so over.

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

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.

Why the Twins got so little for Johan Santana

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.

Undefeated seasons and aligning incentives

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.

Sports Guy gets his stathead on

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.

The Sports Guy on the Donaghy scandal

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?

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
Cedar Rapids Mountaineers

It's not so hard--if you think about it.

A blog is born

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.