The Dord of Darien

What’s this I see?

A baseball article in New Scientist? It’s about how pitchers aren’t as clever as they think they are, and their attempts to mislead batters exhibit really noticeable patterns. Also they say some stuff about football; I guess dudes should pass more? I don’t know anything about football, but every time I watch football, I find myself thinking they should pass more. So the scientists agree with my guts and my well-developed scouting eye, so that means they must be right.

So, hey. Interesting stuff about baseball and game theory. But that’s outside the scope of this blog, where we’re more interested in making fun of people who say dumb things. Luckily for us, along comes John Wooders right at the bottom of the article to add some unsubstantiated crazy, under the awe-inspiring heading "What about intangibles?":

John Wooders of the University of Arizona in Tucson calls the finding "interesting" but questions whether it is a true test of the minimax theory. In particular, he points to the way that Levitt and Kovash measure the payoffs for each sport. "The objective of a team is to win the game," he says. "At the end of the day, they don’t care if they win by five points or 10 points," he continues.

So all we know about this John Wooders is that he is "of" the University of Arizona. I’m guessing he’s an undergrad, or maybe a janitor, because he’s displaying a pretty sharp ignorance of context. He’s right if you’re a bonehead, because, yeah, in any given game it really doesn’t matter how much you win by. But the obvious thing he’s totally ignoring is that, over the course of a season — which runs, need I remind you, 162 games — scoring more runs and allowing fewer runs will translate into winning more games. It won’t make you win the exact same number of games but just do it by wider margins. That is, in fact, a very weird idea in the first place, and I think even a janitor would be smarter than that. So John Wooders is an undergrad or maybe works in admissions.

Wooders, who was not involved with the study, has concerns that using OPS as a measure of a batter’s payoff doesn’t adequately capture his contribution to his team’s win or loss.

I’d like to mention that I love that he’s not involved with the study and he doesn’t know anything about baseball, and yet they still went to him for the counterpoint. They should have gotten some tribesman in like central Africa instead. At least then they’d be offsetting Ken Kovash’s Mozilla experience with a dude who was involved with Ubuntu!

That said, well, maybe John does know something about baseball after all, since he’s right: OPS is not the most rigorous of statistics. It’s quick and easy and gives you a reasonable idea of a batter’s value, but it doesn’t account for baserunning or defense or pitching at all — it’s purely a batting stat. It also values SLG more highly than it should. So, okay, it’s not the most sophisticated available stat. That’s what John’s about to say, I’m sure, right before he suggests using VORP or EqA or MLVr instead.

"There are a lot of ways that a player can help his team that don’t show up in numbers," says Wooders.

Ah… or, I guess, he could go that way.

Let’s keep this simple so even a homeless dude who makes his gin money by selling pencils out of a cup outside the U of A campus centre can understand it. No, John, you are wrong. While it is undeniably true that there are many ways a player can help his team that don’t show up in OPS — I named a few up above there — it is completely false that baseball is full of stuff dudes can do that doesn’t show up in any numbers at all. You know why that is? Can you guess, John? Real quick, just go to this page and tell me what you see. Why, it’s numbers! Numbers as far as the eye can see!

That whole page of numbers, John, is entirely concerned with the batting performance of exactly one player. And it’s not all-encompassing; over here you will find some overlap, and you will find some entirely new numbers. The point of all this? There are a lot of numbers recorded and calculated about baseball. Like, a shitload. I live in Massachusetts, where we have the University of Massachusetts Lowell Baseball Research Center, where actual scientists calculate lots of numbers about baseball. There’s the Society for American Baseball Research, the aforelinked Baseball Prospectus, and many, many others. Believe you me: if it has happened in or near or at the same time as a baseball game, somebody’s captured it in numbers. We may not have complete data for the real old-timey players like Old Hoss Radbourn, but, holey moley, look at all those numbers we do have even though he hasn’t played a game of baseball in 118 years. (Meanwhile, it’s possible to get from Old Hoss Radbourn to Young Hoss Randy Wells in only eight moves, even though Radbourn hasn’t played in 118 years).

So, hey, thanks for playing, John! Do a little reading about all the amazing things we’ve learned about baseball, and stop whining that there are no numbers that can calculate Derek Jeter’s inspirational aura or Barry Bonds’ hovering cloud of doom.

October 2nd, 2009 Posted by Darien | Baseball | 6 comments