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1. GotowarMissAgnes Posted: April 03, 2009 at 12:57 PM (#3122987)I can understand just wanting to enjoy the game without focusing on those arguments or the numbers. There are lots of times I'm just happy to watch a great game. But, I really don't understand defending your argument with "Hey, he's probably right".
Mostly because the purveyors of sabermetrics tend to be a--holes, or if not actual a--holes, they at least adopt a--hole-ish personas. And most decent folk don't wish to keep company or be associated with a--holes.
I don't want it to.
Unlike those purveyors of old school baseball thinking Bill Plaschke, Murray Chass, Jay Mariotti, etc.
Anyway, it seems that sabrmetric thinking has gone mainstream in a limited way. On base % gets used in a lot of baseball telecasts and I hear a lot of announcers talk about SB success rate as much as bulk SB #'s. I hear other sabr-truisms creep into telecasts, especially from the play-by play guys who tend to be younger and not as tied to old school baseball thinking. I'd like it if more telecasts had a kind of new thinking/old thinking dynamic in the booth. The perspectives play well off each other if you have the right guys doing it. I don't like know-it-alls from either side of the divide.
........
Sure, there are some areas where strategies that appear to be suboptimal are employed. Take a look at AL lineup splits by spot in the batting order. There are lots of low OBP guys batting second. This is probably suboptimal. But we also see a lot of high OBP guys batting lead off. As a point of reference, the league average for OBP at #1 is .347, compared with .334 at #5. Compare that with 1988, where lead off OBP is pretty similar to the #5 hitter.
I haven't taken the time to look exhaustively, so perhaps these differences are a consequence of the years and leagues that I picked. But my impression is that there are a lot more high OBP guys batting lead off, and a lot fewer fast/low OBP guys at the top of the order these days. There wasn't an announcement about this, but the change just happened.
Note: A quick perusal of the tables from baseball-reference, and it looks like there might have been a change in #1 vs. #5 OBP that occurred around 2003? I will try to plot it out to see if I am not just fooling myself. And also, it could just be a coincidence.
It has.
This was my take also. You can find sabermetric stats at ESPN, FoxSports and anywhere else. Little things like the importance of OBP or the way fielding is being evaluated are coming from many sabermetric principles. The teams themselves seem to be using sabermetrics pretty regularly these days and fans more and more seem to be comprehending the concepts if not the exact numbers. My sense is that fans are appreciating the well-rounded player more than they used to and I think that's due largely to sabermetrics.
You get that sense since most teams have either hired a notable figure from the Sabrmetric community (BP seems to lose someone every year to MLB), or have openly discussed their interest in improving their statistical analysis abilities. I doubt that there is a single team left out there who doesn't have at least a couple individuals doing hard core number crunching for them.
At this point, the difference seems to no longer be between which teams are and are not doing analysis, but instead the type of analysis, and the weight which they're willing to give it.
Mostly because the purveyors of sabermetrics tend to be a--holes, or if not actual a--holes, they at least adopt a--hole-ish personas. And most decent folk don't wish to keep company or be associated with a--holes.
And yet A--holes like Marriotti and Lincicome and Bayliss and the little midget in NY keep on trucking along. It has nothing to do with the personality defects of the people and everything to do with what people want to hear or read.
edit:
owe shooty a Diet 7up
I may be full of crap. But here is what we have. (I wish I could post a graph. Oh well, graph it yourself.)
Here are the raw data:
AL OBP for the lead off (#1) hitter and the #5 hitter between 1995 and 2008.
year #1 #51995 0.350 0.354
1996 0.362 0.352
1997 0.349 0.355
1998 0.353 0.350
1999 0.348 0.357
2000 0.351 0.343
2001 0.331 0.337
2002 0.335 0.336
2003 0.331 0.339
2004 0.353 0.347
2005 0.345 0.339
2006 0.350 0.357
2007 0.349 0.339
2008 0.347 0.334
Generally, OBP for both of these spots in the order track together. Some years, #1 is higher, some years #5. In 2007 and 2008, to my eyes #5 seems to drop off relative to #1. Actually, OBP at #1 has been pretty steady since 2004, whereas OBP at #5 has bounced around a bit more. (Also, what happened between 2001 and 2003? OBP dropped at both spots.)
This may be the case of having too few data. We would need to track it longer to see if it is a trend. I am too lazy to do the NL right now.
Edit: of course, my source is baseball-reference.com. (The beta site is fantastic!)
Yeah, but two wrongs don't make a right, turn the other cheek, etc..
FWIW, there are occasional player comments at BPro and Transaction Oracles that have rubbed me the wrong way, but everyone has bad days. I just wish that Chipper was more specific.
A couple which I can think of:
1) Changes in SB percentage, and optimization of timing of steals
2) Changes in the use of sac bunts, and overall bunting
3) Lineup optimization
4) Leveraging of relievers
EDIT: Considerations with respect to BIP data for hitters and pitchers (bad year/good year across multiple seasons) leading to more "second chances".
Because we are suffering from a shortage of nerds in this world.
People tick me off all the time here. 98% of the time I type a response and then don't post it. Anyway, my larger point about Plaschke, etc. is that it's easier to lampoon any group of people if you shine a focus on the a-holes. It's a dishonest endeavor to my way of thinking. #2 is full of #### is what I'm trying politely to say.
Heh. Mention Star Trek or some obscure punk band from 1978 and see how wrong you are!
Changes in SB % ought to be easy to track. The optimization part is a bit harder to measure, I would guess.
How about early inning bunting?
This is what I was driving at above, but it would take a lot more work to get it right.
I suspect that reliever leverage ideas have not diffused that heavily into actual MLB practice. I also wonder how practical it would be to manage bullpen usage strictly around leverage concepts. The advantage of the current system (one guy takes most of the save opportunities, and the rest get slotted around him) is that it makes it pretty easy to manage a bullpen. The major downside is that the top reliever gets too few innings, and sometimes pitches when the game isn't really on the line.
But this is a good list. They are all "on the field" sorts of things. Are there some roster management, off the field things we could look at?
My thought would be to see if guys get paid for OBP today, compared with what similar players made in the past. I am not talking about the slugger with high OBP (those guys always got paid), but the guys that are more marginal in their abilities, but make fewer outs at the plate. This would be an interesting test to see if sabermetric ideas have influenced the game.
Most people can't do it and don't like it.
Take a look at the most highly compensated professions in American, you will find a disproportionate number that require serious math skills (finance, engineering, medicine, actuaries, computer science). Since people that can do this stuff are in short supply, you have to pay up to get them.
I always joke to my boss that instead of playing soccer/basketball/tae kwon do etc. his kids should be practicing their Excel skills, b/c that's probably how they're going to earn a good living.
I think tae kwan do will be far more practical in the coming hunter/gatherer society.
Tell him to get them into the trades. Engineering, computer science, and a lot of other fields can be sent overseas, but a plumber always has to be in the area.
While maybe some baseball writers are in the "hate math" group, I am guessing that even they know how to calculate batting average and ERA. And really, is calculating OBP any harder?
Railing against things gives writers something to write about. That thing could be A-Rod, or it could be HGH, or it could be some statistic. I view all of this as a sidelight, and try not to get worked up about it.
The guys who run baseball teams probably don't hate math. I view rudimentary acceptance of math as a basic skill required of anyone who runs a business. And these guys can clearly do that. They can hire number crunchers/programmers to do the heavy lifting. And that is happening right now.
One question, I have always assumed that these people who get hired to do calculations for baseball teams are not all that well paid, relative to what that skill set could earn in another setting. Is this assumption right?
A very good book could be made out of my unsent posts. You could also make one out of my unscent posts, but it wouldn't be scratch and sniff.
It requires significantly more complex math to show that OBP is a better stat than the ones they've always used. So it's either a hatred/fear of those who can do math or a hatred/fear of those who want to change things.
Or maybe both.
More guys want to work for teams than slots available. I think Theo Epstein was working 16 hour days for the Padres doing everything down to cleaning toilets when he started out. This is true for assistant coaches in football. IIRC, Mangini leaved in tenement like conditions when he started out; just like his mentor.
This I don't entirely agree with. I mean, in principle it is correct. Someday, it may be the case, but we are a few years away from it happening.
North America has a large and powerful infrastructure for cranking out scientist and engineers, and either employing them or funding them to start companies. Other countries have made positive steps, but by and large I don't think that a country like India (for example) can yet produce the number of high quality scientists and engineers needed. And once India builds up to the point where they can produce enough scientists and engineers (that stay in India, as many of the good ones these days come to our part of the world), then the Indian engineers probably won't be quite as cheap as they are right now.
For instance in the restaurant industry at one point in time you could argue that restaurants would always need cooks and they would have to pay them a salary based on that value. Well, fast food restaurants came along and basically streamlined the process and made the short order cook all but extinct. They took a job that paid relatively well and allowed people to make a living and turned it into a minimum wage job. Then decades later chefs and cooks are now getting confronted with the same corporate streamlining in casual and white tablecloth restaurants. They are bringing in immigrant work and streamlining the process by buy prepared ingredients from distributors. They are once again trying to take jobs that paid relatively well and created stable careers and make them extinct.
It can happen for basically any service job here in America. Sure somebody has to do the job but there really is no reason why they have to be paid well.
I don't care if Jay Mariotti or whomever doesn't know anything about BABIP or whatever, just like I don't care that MTV doesn't play my favorite bands. I gave up this fight a long time ago.
I didn't mean there was a shortage on this site.
.I don't think sabermetrics will have gone mainstream until we start seeing OPS+ or ERA+ in telecasts or in the major media.
I've heard OPS mentioned on EEI on occasion (McAdam, I think). Not OPS+, though.
edit...and I think Dale Arnold is Sabr-friendly.
My understanding is that the central argument is that OBP is more strongly correlated with runs than BA is. (With something like OPS being even better.) While calculating things like a correlation coefficient takes some algebra, illustrating a correlation takes almost no math at all. A graph or a ranked list is all that is required.
"Look at this table. The Royals had a better BA then the White Sox, and the Royals sucked. Teams with higher OPS almost always score more runs than teams with lower OPS."
Also, OPS+ is great and all, but for most broadcasts the modifications OPS+ puts on OPS aren't worth the trouble. A lot of the point of OPS+ is to compare across eras. (There is also a park correction factor, which would be more useful.)
So getting OPS is a big win.
.3700.3675
.3650
.3625 1
.3600
.3575 5 5
.3550 5 5
.3525 5 1 1
.3500 1 1 5 1 1 1
.3475 1 5 1
.3450 1
.3425 5
.3400 5 5 5
.3375 5 5
.3350 1 5
.3325
.3300 1 1
-------95--96--97--98--99--00--01--02--03--04--05--06--07--08-
The data is very obvious and clear that SB% has gone up significantly over the past two decades. It has cleared 70% on a number of recent occasions, something never done before in history.
Going every five years in the NL:
1953: 61%
1958: 62%
1963: 58%
1968: 60%
1973: 64%
1978: 68%
1983: 67%
1988: 71%
1993: 69%
1998: 68%
2003: 69%
2008: 73%
My memory was faulty: the first time a league cleared 70% was in the late 80's (I would have sworn it was the late 90's). Anyhoo the NL actually cleared 75% in '07. My WAG is that teams are not only picking their slots better, but that the hit-and-run is being used less often (that is the likely culprit in the crap percentages seen thru '68), and catcher's arms have been deemphasized a bit since the Roid Era began.
Novick has a pretty good take, as does Dock. It's basically human nature, including the human nature of the saberheads. Why not just accept the influence sabermetrics has obviously had on baseball thinking and not worry about whether everyone accepts it or even uses it?
Diversity is good. Resist the totalitarian impulse. Time will tell who has fell and who's been left behind...
We are idiots, Alex
It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves
Bob Dylan wrote some awesome break-up songs.
And in Will Clark (and the rest of the Giants) in 1987. 5 for 22 as an individual, and 126 for 233 as a team.
It's more useful for adjusting for park. When you go across eras you run across problems with how talent is distributed.
But the problem is that most people don't understand correlation, and that it's harder than "Hits divided by at bats" or "runs divided by innings times 9." People very often don't understand things and refuse to try when it goes against what they already believe.
I think this is the most pervasive point. I consider myself a convert to sabermetric principles, but I don't consider myself a math person at all. Somebody mentioned above that ERA+ and OPS+ are quite useful. I see them quoted all the time, but to me they haven't become part of my language. I know what an average OPS is, but I don't know, even in the ballpark, what Matt Holliday or Willy Taveras' OPS+ was last year.
I'm willing to learn and I will eventually, but many people don't really see the need to go beyond the stats that flash on the screen when a guy comes up to hit. Heck, I'll bet there are a lot of people that consider themselves baseball fans and know what an ERA is, but have no idea how to calculate one.
Like I said, I don't want to make too much of the 2007 and 2008 numbers. But I found it interesting that OBP for the #1 and #5 hitters basically are the same in most years.
Math and science will always be elite occupations as long as the current civilization stands.
I disagree. It's not hatred or fear, it's distrust.
Just about any sales pitch will include numbers that suggest you would be colossally stupid not to buy the product being sold. Very rarely can the numbers be fact-checked. The lack of fact-checking capability, plus the salesperson's expressed level of certainty, lead some people to buy; others faced with the same situation tend to distrust.
In sabermetrics it's not the underlying info that prevents fact-checking, as much of that is readily available. Rather, it's the math. If one must significantly develop mathematical skill even to begin fact-checking, it's likely not happening. If sabermetricians push certainty of their conclusion - rather than acknowledging the inherent uncertainty of projections - some people won't buy what they're selling. Those people aren't stupid; they just have no reason to trust the answer.
No stat is perfect, but these are two of my favorite ones. Both are actually very simple. Both miss some subtle effects, but capture much of the big stuff. Both are designed to take something like OPS or ERA, add a park factor, and give league average values of 100.
To me, the best part of these statistics is that they are not black boxes. No details about replacement level or relative value of positions need to be understood (or assumed in the calculations). And they are very handy for scanning a player's career line and quickly finding their best (or worst) seasons.
.........
In the article that started this thread, the author suggests that fantasy baseball is a big factor. People who play follow BA, WHIP, ERA, etc., but don't follow OPS. If this argument is a good one, then it suggests that there are plenty of fans with the intellectual capacity to understand and follow OPS, but their exposure to it is limited.
I do think it would help if more people in sabermetrics acknowledged that in the late nineties, punting defense was broadly "sabermetric", and into the middle of this decade, drafting college players exclusively was as well. We now "know" better, but the fact that what is "sabermetric" is a changeable thing should be acknowledged.
(What counts for knowledge in any working field is going to be in flux, and it's bad when it isn't in flux. But I think there's a tendency toward a lack of humility in sabermetrics that arises in many ways out of refusing to recognize the field has a history.)
What bothers me though is the segment of society that doesn't try. There are a lot of willfully ignorant people out there who are content not to be more educated. They blindly follow whatever they are told and anyone who tries to upset the status quo isn't to be trusted.
I'm fine with the guy who says "I don't know enough about VORP to understand it so I don't pay attention to it." The guy who says "I don't know enough about VORP to understand it therefore VORP is wrong" bothers the hell out of me.
This is where the a-hole thing came into play.
The sabermetric writing on the internet often has a disdain for factors that people haven't figured out how to measure yet.
This can't be reiterated enough. SABR has gone mainstream. Every major sports outlet - ESPN, Fox, CBS - list OBP, SLG and OPS. Commentators, play by play guys, daily beat writers all reference at least first gen SABR metrics regularly. (Anecdotally, the Braves added a play by play guy last year whose primary job qualifications were 1) looking like Syndrome from The Incredibles and 2) calling Joe Simpson on ######## by pointing out OBP/OPS.)
I think that when people ask "why hasn't SABR gone mainstream" they fail to understand the history from whence we came. First gen sabremetrics - OBP, OPS, basic concepts like park and league adjustments - are mainstream. They're the Death Cab For Cutie of SABR. Sure, there's a less accepted trailing edge of second and third gen stats - EQA, linear weights and such, the defensive metrics - but those two are coming along. They too will break the mainstream in due course. You just have to understand where it actually started before asking why we're only "so far along."
A great point. SABR did not spring forth, fully formed from the mind of Bill James. The 90s, in particular, were quite ugly at times.
I routinely tell my eighth graders that they can probably forget everything I teach them in history class and still get through life. They just won't be as interesting and they'll end up the kind of people that I make fun of to my students. Since very few at age fourteen see themselves as intending to be lifelong buffoons, they get the message.
One of the other things I've noticed as a teacher is how wide the spectrum of abilities is compared to what I thought it was when I was younger. I assumed that all of the other kids were more or less like me when I was a student. That wasn't the case at all.
Just look at how often mainstream writers are referencing the Fielding Bible for an example.
FWIW, I never use those. The scales for both metrics are wrong, but particularly for ERA+. They do seem popular, but if most people saw how OPS+ is calculated, they'd shake their heads and walk away.
And I agree with Sam. Sabermetrics is probably as "accepted" as it should expect to be. And what is sabermetrics anyway? To me, it's the "search for objective baseball truth." It's the research. Most fans don't want to, and shouldn't want to, research baseball analytically. What a boring world that would be!
Sabermetric "wisdom" (which is, I guess, what Dan is talking about) may be accepted slowly, but that's a good thing, IMO.
Baseball is a conservative institution. Change seeps in at the margins. Very, very rarely will you see some major shift in conventional wisdom take hold quickly. Hell, it took multiple seasons for traditionalists to figure out that the "Ruthian style" might be something other than a fad. Jackie Robinson was such a cultural marker because his story was such a big change in such a slowly changing game. SABR "wisdom" is creeping in along and along, and I for one would hate for it to flood in faster. I'm quite happy that the game was smart enough to ignore all of the "just stick Jeremy Giambi in centerfield" catcalls.
Stranger than me having read both a copy of ESPN the Magazine and Sports Illustrated this week is that both included an article quoting mgl and treating his POV as expert rather than crank. It took Okrent almost two years to get his Bill James profile (the first thing I ever read about James) published in SI. I'm guessing whoever thinks sabermetrics hasn't gone mainstream is significantly younger than I.
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/sabermetrics-in-the-mainstream/#comment-70143
at a rate of 4-5 years behind the latest stuff.
BTW, there are some posts in SOSH's current Jimy Williams(hated him)thread the guy being some kind of anti-BABIP genius--
Matty's term about the saber-people "punting defense" back then brought it back to mind.
There was a program on MLB Network last night listing the top 9 hitting seasons (only including the single best for players who otherwise would appear multiple times on the list). They were ranked by OPS+.
SABR and sabermetrics are two different things. AFAIK, a lot of the younger sabermetricians aren't even in SABR.
I think the OPS+ scale is far more wrong. ERA+ makes sense. Yes it really should be measured as 1/ERA+, but if you want a higher number to be better, the inverse is the only logical way to do it. The OPS+ scale makes no sense at all. There's no advantage to not doing it properly as (100 + OPS+)/2, which makes it the measurement that most people think it is and lower bounds it at 0 instead of -100.
No, but it takes a certain amount of time to become comfortable with those numbers, even if they're not all that tough to figure out. I haven't gotten to the point where I can estimate what any random player's OPS+ is because I haven't sat down for the few minutes necessary to figure it out. Now that I've opened my big mouth in this thread, I'll be ready for the quiz on Monday, but otherwise I probably wouldn't feel the need to make a specific effort to learn it.
Really, "measurement sense" is just from familiarity. We could convert to the metric system in this country if more people could look across their family rooms and estimate the distance in meters rather than feet. Since most Americans haven't taken the time to learn that, they're resistant to the change. They know how much a gallon looks like, whether it's in a milk jug or a bucket. They can't look at the same quantity and estimate liters. Give them a week and it'll get done, but since it isn't really necessary in order to drink the milk, nobody bothers to learn.
In baseball, for a long time, we trusted numbers that didn't tell what we thought they did. Some people are slower to catch on to that, but that's because knowing that something dopey like WHIP being more accurate than wins doesn't really affect their basic enjoyment of the game, which involves beer and hot dogs at least as much as VORP.
Never once have I explained to someone why pitcher wins really don't tell you how good a pitcher is and had them dismiss my point. In fact, the most vehement defense of things like that come from the ex-players that clutter up the studio shows.
Right. Even to do the research, the ability to think logically and do research seems more important that the ability to do mathematical gymnastics. How advanced are Bill James' math skills? (I don't honestly know.) But from the stuff I have read, most of the math behind what James did isn't that hard. But the guy clearly understands how to think systematically.
Yes. But that's still very rare. Most people are neither particularly numerate or quantitative in their reasoning.
Algebra is pretty easy too, but most people just don't get it, and like to loudly proclaim it is useless.
That's true in two ways. Most of the valuable stuff in sabermetrics doesn't involve particularly hard math, and a lot of the people who try to do particularly advanced math with baseball stats stumble pretty badly over things that are well known in the saber crowd.
My take on James is that he has a very good nose for interesting questions, as well as a freakishly good knowledge of baseball history and historical statistics. That lets him get away with things like Win Shares and the like, where there are a lot of free parameters that James supplies himself.
I agree with this. OPS+ kinda sucks, but the PI is a great, great tool.
I didn't follow sabermetrics in the late 90s, but who was making these arguments? As for drafting college players, do you just mean Moneyball (2003) to the mid-decade?
As for sabermetrics in the main stream, ESPN had this today:
This would make me much more excited if 1) Geren wasn't batting Ryan Sweeney and Orlando Cabrera in the top two spots with Cust 6th, and 2) Geren wasn't so off on the 3 spot getting more PA with the bases empty than the leadoff spot.
There certainly is an advantage - you get a better correlation with actual run scoring and you get a measure that scales appropriately. If you take OPS+:
OBP/lgOBP + SLG/lgSLG - 1
then what you get actually scales properly - an OPS+ of 125 produces 25% more runs than the average player. This isn't true of OPS/lgOPS. (I don't know what you're suggesting here, but think that's it.)
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