Bill James 2013 SABR Analytics Conference Keynote

A little old, but I finally have time today to do this stuff.  (h/t Roberto)

• Title: “Wonderful Ignorance”; subtitle: “The Past Is Always Going To Be With Us”
• Bill discusses SABR’s beginnings. It was smaller, allowing for more personal interaction, and more populated by “eccentrics”. He reminds us that founder Bob Davids was reluctant to publish more than one article every two years about statistical analysis in the SABR Journal. He says that of SABR’s 70 members at the time, only himself, Pete Palmer, and Dick Cramer were statistical analysts.  He feels that to an extent, SABR still reflects this emphasis on non-statistical research.
• He has an amazingly mixed metaphor about how sabermetrics is like connecting a power cord, or a hose, or a string, across oceans, or maybe lava, from the surface to the core of a planet, which is made of bricks.  I dunno.  His ultimate point is that sabermetrics is not about producing numbers per se, but rather about using them to answer questions.
• Bill points out that sabermetrics was easier back in the day, when even basic questions had not yet been studied.  Nonetheless, “there will never be any shortage of ignorance.” He believes the LOOGY is an example of said ignorance, as he had previously explained.
• Bill discusses the structure of a front office. He explains that the front office is divided into two virtually separated sides, business and baseball operations. Business has some say in baseball ops, but the converse is not true.  Baseball ops is divided into scouting, field operations, and office management.
• Scouting in turn is divided into amateur, pro and international. Scouting is necessary because MLB competition is so much better than college or high school; also, scouts learn essential personal information about players.
• Field ops is divided into minor league, major league, and field staff.  “Much more of our time is focused on minor league operations than major league operations.”  This is because there are more minor league teams, and also because the money goes out a little at a time, rather than in “big buckets.” 
• Office management is divided into department heads, financial management, information systems, and decision-making.
• Baseball ops talks to business regarding two subjects: spending money/budgeting, and public relations (e.g., Drake Britton’s DUI was the subject of “several meetings” with PR).
• Bill regrets that Craig Wright and another friend who “had sabermetrics on his business card in the 1980s” never got shots at being GMs. “There were two major battles that went on this winter that I was completely on the losing side of, and that’s fine. I don’t expect the Red Sox to do everything I think they should do. But I’m treated with respect.” Bill speculates that his friends in the 1980s weren’t treated with respect, and responded emotionally. Bill advises anyone who wants to work in MLB not to “run too hot.”
• Bill explains that the exuberant Nick Punto is the type of player who “works really well” when you’re winning, but not so much when you’re losing.
• Bill feels that an “all-bullpen” strategy would work, but hasn’t been used yet because it isn’t enough by itself to turn around a bad team. It could—and perhaps is—being adopted incrementally.
• Re: the former popularity of the bunt/current popularity of the LOOGY: “People are very, very bad at judging intuitively relative values.”
• “I’m old and running out of energy, and I just don’t have the energy to do the Red Sox work and do the writing the way that I hope that I might.”
• Bill applies the Law of Competitive Balance to player happiness.  It’s good to treat players well, but doing so will in turn increase the standard of what it takes to make the player happy. One has to “stay ahead of the curve.”
• Bill explains that there are many practical problems with grooming knuckleballers: it’s hard to coach them, bring them into minor league games and otherwise get them work, etc.
• Bill doesn’t believe that teams have better information available to them than the public, because the public simply is so much larger a group.  “You’re always going to be ahead of us.”
• “We spend many, many, many, many more hours trying to manage the clubhouse than we do trying to manage the team.” He points to last year’s Red Sox as an example of why.

Bill James Mailbag - 2/9/13 - 2/17/13

Seems perfect for the Red Sox.

Have you read My Baseball Diary by James T. Farrell? He wrote a ton of books, most notably the Studs Lonigan trilogy. His baseball memoir has a lot of great reminisces about baseball during the teens. Apparently one of his first literature essays was a high school paper called The Fall of Prince Hal, written in 1920 after finding out that Hal Chase, one of his favorite players ,had been involved in fixing ball games.

I generally dislike the genre. . ..personal reflections on my history of being a baseball fan.  There are a hundred books like that, and my friends often recommend them to me, but they always seem to me self-centered and precious.

So, if you became a baseball manager, what current orthodoxy would you go against. Use your closer like a 60’s closer? 4 man rotation? Chocolate donuts in the dugout?

... Let’s say that the manager brings in a lefty reliever to face a lefty 200 times over the course of a season, which sounds like a lot; I doubt that any manager actually does that 200 times in a year… A lefty hitter would typically hit. . .what, 30 points higher against a right-handed pitcher?  That’s six hits…

Six hits and some number of them extra base hits, yes, and maybe a walk or two, and let us assume that these tend to be high-leverage situations… Let us say, to be generous… By making that move 200 times, you save six runs.

But what do you give up?  You’ve shrunk the bench to where you can’t platoon.  I would argue that you can gain much, much more than 6 runs by platooning, in many cases…

Right or wrong, it is my opinion, until somebody can show me where I’m wrong, that carrying left-handers in the bullpen is a complete waste of time and resources.  You not only don’t need THREE left-handers in the bullpen; you don’t need one…

I would even argue that platooning SAVES more runs than using lefty relievers, because when you have platoons one of the players will usually be better defensively than the other, so when you have a lead late in the game you can go with the better defender. 

Another way to state my essential thesis is that you can control the platoon advantage much more effectively if you control it from the offensive side than if you try to control it from the pitching side.    But. ...I can’t convince anybody.

Just an observation, Bill, but sports fans have funny hot buttons. (Perhaps, it’s not just sports fans, but all of us.) Tell them Al McGuire doesn’t quite meet your criteria of “great”, and you get a wave of upset readers, at least, one of whom accuses you of denigrating him. In a Scoresheet forum, I mentioned Jose Altuve and Robbie Alomar in the same sentence (they both happened to be N.L. all-star second-basemen shortly after turning 22, then became Americans Leaguers the next year.) . . . and I get thrashed for saying Altuve is going to the Hall of Fame. I guess my question is, how do you keep yourself from getting totally discouraged with your public?

It is a challenge, and I actually appreciate your asking that exact question.  My audience includes many people who are brilliant, incisive and disciplined thinkers.  But DISCUSSIONS, by their nature, are rambling, incoherent events that wander backward and forward.  Discussions among groups of people, by their nature, tend to take sweaters and turn them into strings of yarn.  The challenge of leading is a discussion is to construct the discussion in such a way that it advances our understanding of the issue; in other words, to try to take yarn and make a sweater, rather than the other way around.    It’s very challenging, and I have to discipline myself, sometimes, to ignore very interesting things that people say, ignore them and not publish them, because, while the comment is interesting in itself, it unravels the discussion.

I think you are a proponent of baseball having non-standard dimensions for its parks. All the other major sports however have taken the opposite view of standardizing everything… would you support the idea that each team can set those dimensions as they want, within a league-imposed min/max range?

From the standpoint particularly of basketball, I wouldn’t think of it as one of baseball’s charms; I would simply argue that it is better.  It is better from everyone’s standpoint.  If you make the court wider, for example, you favor a smaller team with more quickness, and put a premium on ball-handling skills.  If you make the court more narrow, it favors big, burly guys, puts a premium on passing, and minimizes the importance of dribbling.

Allowing different teams to experiment with different sized courts allows the game to breathe, allows the game to search out the most satisfying combinations.  Mandating one size for all courts makes the game rigid, unable to adjust.

Bill James Mailbag - 2/6/13

And what better day for it than the Babe’s birthday, pt. 2…

At the time Babe Ruth allegedly corked his bat, was that against the rules?

Yes.  And he didn’t “allegedly” cork his bat; he was caught using a bat glued together from three pieces of wood.  Sisler and Kenny Williams were caught with funny bats at about the same time.

Are NFL offensive linemen the only subgroup of players in the big 4 sports for which POSITIVE statistics aren’t kept? Or is there some statistic of measurement used for offensive linemen that i’m not aware of? I’m thinking that all other the other players in the NFL have some stats kept on them; same for all of MLB, NBA, and NHL players, right? Just curious.

It’s a good question.  Do they keep stats in hockey?

Regarding the question about Malcolm Gladwell and authors you like, recently I have been reading Noam Chomsky, and I have to say his style reminds me a lot of your style. And for this reason I find it very enjoyable, even though I disagree with nearly every single thing the man says. But he explains his points in bracingly clear prose, like you do.

Thanks, Jules.  I always enjoy being compared to a raving lunatic.

I recently moved to the SF Bay Area and have been told several times by old Giant fans that Willie Mays would purposely stop at first base on a sure double in order to have McCovey bat with a runner on first. Could this be true? Mays taking himself out of scoring position?

You know, I’ve read that.  I doubt that it is true… I would suppose that what happened is that Mays, in some situation, turned down an effort to make a double because it was kind of a breakeven gamble, and then EXPLAINED what he had done by saying that he wanted to keep the hole for McCovey.  Looked at in that way, it actually reflects extremely sophisticated on-field decision making from Mays:  That, in calculating whether to push the gamble of trying for a double, he adjusted his calculations to include the fact that even if he succeeded, he would be closing the hole for McCovey.  Mays was an extremely sophisticated player in those ways, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he DID do that.

Bill James Mailbag - 2/4/13

One of many interesting things here is that I don’t think the “Bard wanted to start” point has normally been hit quite so hard.

When teams make a trade, do they try to make sure that the trade works for both teams?

... It is pretty much universal that you have to protect your reputation in negotiations; in other words, you can’t say things about the players you are trading that are just not true, or it will ruin your reputation and make it hard for you to trade.  You can’t tell people that so-and-so is a great team leader if he’s really a turd. 

But to go to the next level, that you HAVE to try to make sure the other team gets value. . .not quite.  In a lot of businesses in which you make frequent transactions, you have to be sure you’re not shorting the other guy because… you get a reputation as somebody that people don’t want to trade with.  We might call it “Parity Discipline.” But in baseball, you don’t make THAT MANY trades; you might make a handful of meaningful trades a year.  You make a big trade with somebody; you probably don’t expect to make another trade with him for five years.  It’s not a big enough number of trades to enforce Parity Discipline.  If he’s dumb enough to trade you Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas, that’s his problem, not yours.

[Earl] Weaver wrote extensively about [Earl] Williams in his autobiography—Weaver thought Williams had the tools to become a catcher, but Williams just didn’t want to do it, and the situation didn’t work out… How would you go about determining how a team should proceed in this situation?

It’s a mistake generally to try to make a player do something that he doesn’t want to do…

With the Red Sox, sometimes I have an idea to help the organization, and I KNOW that it’s a good idea, but I can’t get people to buy into it.  Same thing. ..you can “force” the idea forward sometimes, like putting Earl Williams at catcher, but it fails on the ground if the people who have to execute it don’t believe in it…

we had a reliever last year who wanted to start.  It was a complete bust, and he had a lost season. 

We regret the lost season, but do we second-guess ourselves for giving him a chance to start?  I don’t.  I don’t think most of us do.  Many times you CAN’T give the player the chance to do what he wants to do.  MOST of the time, you can’t give the player the chance to do what he wants to do… But when you CAN give a player a chance to do what he wants to do, you have to do it, because the players HAVE to buy into what you’re doing, or there is no chance that it is going to work.

Expansion, more divisions, wild-card, 2 wild-cards… Are you a fan of the growing opportunities for more teams to get a chance to win the World Series?

...If it was my choice, here’s what I’d do.  I’d add two teams, break them into four leagues of eight teams, and four teams would make the playoffs—period.  I think Wild Cards and small divisions, generally, cheapen the championship, and make the contest less interesting. 

It’s NOT about the best team winning.  The best team doesn’t win, most of the time, no matter how you run it.  If you put all 30 teams into one league and said that the only champion was the team that had the best record in the regular season, I doubt that the best team would win any more often.  It’s not about that… It’s about making THIS game important—the June 16 game between Atlanta and Seattle, let us say—it’s about making THIS game important because you have to win these games to earn the championship.

Neyer: Wait, Ryan Hanigan is HOW underrated?

I’m not ashamed. It’s the computer age. Nerds are in. They’re still in, right?

So I’m watching MLB Network’s “Top 10 Right Now”, hosted by Brian Kenny and focusing on catchers, when Bill James shows up with his Top 10 list ...

Kenny: “Bit of a surprise here, Bill. You throw this right out at us: Ryan Hanigan of the Cincinnati Reds. Why Hanigan?”

James: “With Ben Zobrist, those two are the most underrated players in baseball. I mean, Hanigan’s on-base percentage is not only good, it’s very, very good. He’s hit .260, .270 or better every year of his career. He walks a lot. He throws extremely well. The Cincinnati Reds’ ERA with Hanigan catching last year was 3.04; when he wasn’t catching, it was up around 3.8. Maybe Ben Zobrist is the most underrated player in baseball, but Ryan Hanigan may be the most underrated player in baseball.”

It’s hard for me to believe that a part-time player is the second-most underrated player in the game, unless you can make the case that management’s holding him down; that he’d be an All-Star if the Reds would just play him as often as he deserves. In the meantime, though, I think I’ll stick with Alex Gordon, who somehow ranks fifth in the majors in Wins Above Replacement (Wins+) over the last two seasons. Even if the method is generous—and I will note that Baseball-Reference.com’s Wins+ has him fifth, too—dropping Gordon to 10th or 15th or 20th would still have him much higher than almost everybody in the baseball world would guess. So I’m going to go with this ranking:

1. Alex Gordon
2. Ben Zobrist
3. Austin Jackson
4. Erick Aybar

Bill James Mailbag - 1/26/13 - 1/29/13

do you think it would be realistic for a team to use a 4-man starting rotation…?

... Between 1975 and 1988, baseball went through two separate transitions, both intended to accomplish the same thing, which was the reduction of injuries/protection of arms.    The first transition was from a four-man to a five-man rotation… The… idea… was that it would be OK for [a pitcher] to… face 35 or 40 batters per start, thus throwing 130 to 170 pitches per start (and sometimes more)... as [long as] he got an extra day between starts.    That really didn’t work.   There was no chance that it would work.    If you damage a pitcher’s arm by asking him to do something marginally crazy, you can’t UN-damage it by giving him an extra day to recover.    
 
But what COULD have been done, instead, was this.    Many pitchers threw 280 to 300 innings in a season from 1965 to 1975, and many of them did so with no evidence of damage to their arms.   At 17 pitches per inning, 16.5 pitches per inning, that’s 5,000 pitches in a season, more or less.  Suppose that pitchers had been asked instead to pitch in a THREE-man rotation—but with strict limits of 90 pitches per start, and less than that for very young pitchers.   That’s 54 starts a season, 90 pitches per start MAXIMUM. . ..you’re actually REDUCING the number of pitches thrown in a season from about 5,000 to about 4,600 (assuming that the pitcher NEVER throws 91 pitches in a season and occasionally exits after 70 or 80.)
 
More significant than that, you’re also reducing the stress per pitch, for an obvious reason.   The most stressful pitches are those thrown when the pitcher is tired.    I would postulate that the strain on a pitcher’s arm is probably proportional to the SQUARE of pitches thrown. . ..in other words, throwing 100 pitches in an outing is four times as stressful to a pitcher as throwing 50, and throwing 150 is nine times as stressful as throwing 50. .. .assuming simply that the stress increases as the pitcher becomes fatigued.    
 
Using that assumption. . .that the stress is proportional to the SQUARE of pitches thrown….a pitcher who makes 37 starts in a season but throws 120, 130, 140, 150 or 160 pitches in each start has a total stress load of 724,000 “points” over the season.   The pitcher who makes 54 starts but throws 85, 88, 89, 90 pitches every start has a total stress load of a 431,000 points. . . dramatically lower. 
 
For this reason, I believe that if baseball had switched not from a four-man rotation to five, but from a four-man rotation to three, but with a strict 90-pitch limit, it would have worked better than what was actually done.   That’s my opinion.   
 
I also think that pitchers would have liked it.   A pitcher making 54 starts for a good team would have had a fair chance to “win” 30 games, and a hell of a chance to win 20.

[The questioner is referring to electing Marvin Miller to the Hall of Fame over his stated objection - TDA]

Because the Hall of Fame is a museum and has a duty to history.

Words.  That’s not an argument; that’s just a bumper sticker.  A museum has a duty to history, a duty to its community, a duty to the economy, a duty to integrity, a duty to doody. . ..so what?    That’s no more an argument in re Marvin Miller than it is in re Shoeless Joe, Spike Eckert or Lefty O’Doul.

Clubhouse Confidential: Bill James on the Hall of Fame Ballot

Bill James on the Hall of Fame candidates.

Summary Bonds: “you have to honor him, but I’d make him wait”; Clemens: “an obvious Hall of Famer”; Piazza: “sure”; Sosa: “I probably wouldn’t”; Biggio: “sure”; Schilling: “probably above the line”; Lofton: “probably”

Later in the show: Raines: “absolutely”; Walker: “not high on my list”; Trammell: “a Hall of Famer”; B. Williams: “probably not”; E. Martinez: “I think so”; Morris: “I wouldn’t vote for him”; D. Murphy: “I wouldn’t vote for him”; McGriff: “probably above the HOF line”

And finally, Bagwell: “Pass.”  (Okay, fine, they forgot to ask him about Bagwell.)

There was also a casualty- and Bushmills-free encounter with Larry Bowa.  And the next day (Friday), the show cited the BBTF Ballot Collecting Gizmo.

Bill James Mailbag - 12/15/12 - 12/16/12

Oh, Paulie DePodesta… won’t see him no more.

I love the All-Decade teams in the Historical Abstract. Do you have a New Millenium team?

1B—Albert Pujols.  2B—Not sure; maybe Utley?  3B—A-Rod (although there are many good candidates. . .Wood Chipper, Rolen, Wright.)  SS—Dirty Rotten.  LF—Bonds.  CF—Carlos Beltran.  RF—Bobby Abreu, or possibly Sheffield.   DH—Papi.   C—Open to Suggestions.  SP—Sabathia, Pedro, Big Unit, Halladay.  CL—Mariano.

if a good fielding / mediocre hitting team and an all-bat, no-glove team are both looking for a shortstop, should they value the available players differently?...

Well. . .I don’t know if this is the RIGHT answer, but then, neither does anybody else.   I would consider the other things at the margin.   If you have a slow left fielder and a slow right fielder, you probably need a fast center fielder.   If you have a bad defensive third baseman, you probably need a good shortstop. 

I think there’s a rational basis for that, which is this.   While we tend to think of plays as “belonging” to one fielder or another… it is easily observable that there are many plays in the field which can be made by either of two fielders (and sometimes more than two.)   It stands to reason, then, that when one player’s range contracts, his neighbor can cover that to some extent.. .whereas if two neighboring fielders both have poor range, there is probably an interactive effect.  

There is a second reason to avoid stacking up liabilities in the field, which is the curvature of the lines.   If you increase hits by 10%, you increase runs by 20%.   If you increase runs by 20%, you increase losses by 44%.   When you stack up parallel liabilities in the field, there may be a more-than-proportional cost because of the curvature of the lines.

If you want to know why some of us get angry at the writers about the Hall of Fame vote, here is an example which might hit home for you, taken from a piece by Howard Bryant on espn.com: “The emerging Generation M (M standing for Moneyball), influenced by its Godfather, Bill James, and his capo, Billy Beane, is also deeply culpable for allowing their calculations to blissfully ignore steroids and, through that omission, attempting to legitimize the whole dishonest era (and themselves) by attempting to make the game revolve around only numbers…”

... There is a large, general historical argument going on about how to evaluate baseball players and about how baseball games are won, and Bryant perceives us—correctly—as being the aggressors in this argument, seizing territory long held by traditional sportswriters.    He resents the loss of this territory, as people have always resented the loss of territory they claim to own, and he focuses this resentment on us.  

But we are transitioning also into a third argument, away from the argument about how to win games and thus how to evaluate players, into one about steroids.   The truth will ultimately prevail in that argument, as it has prevailed and will prevail in the other arguments.   We have to be careful, then, that we do not allow others to assign us territory to defend, and thus wind up defending the indefensible.  

It has never been my position that nothing counts except the numbers.   There is a great deal that matters in baseball that is difficult to document and difficult to assess the value of.

It is not my position that you can’t discount the accomplishments of steroid users.   I think it is entirely fair to apply a discount, if you choose to do so, to the things done by Jason Giambi or Manny Ramirez or any other pill popper.

It is my view, however, that attempting to apply that discount traps you into an ultimately unsustainable balancing act.   At least three players who were almost certainly steroid users have already been elected to the Hall of Fame.   In five years that will be ten players, or 20.   At that point you will be drawing a line between those who were credibly accused of using steroids—who you want to keep out of the Hall of Fame—and those who merely have all the characteristics of steroid users, but who have somehow escaped the accusations.   As time passes it is going to become progressively more difficult to sustain that distinction.

The phils new SP, John Lannan , is 2-5with a 6- plus era in Citizens bank park. How much stock do u give such things generally and how much does it mean for pitching in cbp for lannan facing the nats braves mets etc?

It doesn’t mean anything, except it expands my respect for the Phillies a little.   If a player plays well against YOU, you’d be surprised how much that drives demand for him within an organization.     It’s unusual that a team would sign a player who has pitched poorly against them.

Bill James Mailbag - 11/23/12 - 11/29/12

I think I did do this in Strat-O-Matic and .850 is about what happened.

To look at the question of how All-star teams would perform I used Teams-on-Paper estimates for the starting lineups in the 1980-84 all-star games. (using the first four starting pitchers who appeared and the last reliever for the staff). League average scores are around 200 with the best teams ever at slightly over 300. The all-star teams scores ranged from 271 to 357 and the predicted won-lost based on these scores were 96-66 to 122-40. The average number of projected wins was 110.5 (standard deviation 7.62) , a .682 W-L percentage.

Thanks.   I think you’re getting close to the reasons for my skepticism about teams playing .850 baseball.  

It may be that you could make Strat-o-Matic cards after the season, pick the best card at each position, and THAT team would play .850 baseball.   But this is because the season is not long enough to grind all of the randomness out of the statistics; therefore, some players in each season appear to be better than they are.   There are a handful of players in the league who are legitimate .310 hitters; one of those hits .340, one of them hits .330.   If you pick and choose after the fact, you can make an .850 team—but choosing real players before the fact, the best players would not play at that level.

Hey, Bill, I’m reading “Popular Crime” and I was comparing/contrasting the proposition of the economic class strife of the early 20th Century as it would have applied to baseball at the time. I suppose that same economic stress would have contributed to the Black Sox scandal during the 1919 World Series and would be a major reason gambling on baseball was such a concern during that time?

Absolutely, yes.  The Betting Scandals of that era are very directly connected to the tension between rich and poor that was dividing the country in that time.     The only reason I didn’t make that point in the book was that I chose to write that book with no reference to baseball—even to the point of repeatedly scouring the manuscript for phrases like “out in left field” or “made a big hit” that might be taken as baseball references.

Bill, Sad news today with the announcement of Marvin Miller`s death. In your opinion, where`s his place in MLB history ? It certainly is a shame that he doesn`t yet have a spot at Cooperstown…

And has told his friends in no uncertain terms that if the Hall of Fame tries to elect him postumously, they are to be told “No, thanks.”   Some people are bigger than their awards.   Babe Ruth doesn’t need to be in the Hall of Fame; the Hall of Fame needs to honor Babe Ruth to make the Hall of Fame look bigger.   To me, Marvin’s on that level.   He is too big for it to be relevant whether the Hall of Fame likes him or not…

I knew Marvin fairly well, knew his late wife as well.  We have close friends in common, and when I got to New York I would often have lunch or dinner with Marvin and Allen Barra.