Knocking Miss Austen down a peg

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

Schilling, Clemens, and steroids

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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.

The Rockies' momentum

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.

A guy who ought to know

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

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

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

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

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.

Torre's job

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

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.