baseball analysts. They're awfully quick to declare a given contract bad (or great, when it comes to 'undervalued' skillsets getting rewarded, like with Figgins) but the reasoning is always predicated on a backwards-looking analysis which purports to have predictive capabilities (like WAR and Steamer).
I always found it interesting that the 'givens' in baseball are precisely that: givens. It's a 'given' that a team will bat its best hitter either #3 or #4, with the second best hitter in the other half of the #3/#4 combo, and generally speaking the next best hitter will bat #2. Sabertistas declare that it's unquestionably best to put your best batter in the leadoff spot or, if there's another guy with a roughly similar OBP and less power, then put that guy in the #1 spot and bat your best hitter #2.
Why, then, don't we see this happen in actual MLB baseball (or even Japan, Cuba, etc..)? If it's really an inefficiency to do things the way they've been done for a century, wouldn't someone want to exploit that inefficiency? It always strikes me as a huge blind spot when analysts steadfastly refuse to acknowledge the psychological component of professional sports.
The entire reason why the game plays out the way it does, ranging from batting orders to bullpen assignments, is precisely because baseball has been played almost identically for a hundred years. The rise of the bullpen has been a genuine change in the way the game is played, but overall it's a pretty minor one in the grand scheme.
When analysts declare that Nelson Cruz is worth ABSOLUTELY NO MORE THAN $10mil/year for, at most, two years with a vesting option third season, it really does discredit them. If Cruz bashes 50 HR next year and wins the MVP, they will cite 'bad process, unpredictably good result,' and if he implodes in year three and gets kicked to the curb in year four, they'll declare, 'we told you so; gosh are you stupid!'
The entire fabric of baseball is comprised of 1-2 punches at the TOR, #3/#4 mashers in the MOTO, speed at the top and bottom of the lineup, and solid defense up the middle. There are reasons for this, many of which are opaque to casual (or even intensive) statistical analysis. But anyone who has ever played a team sport understands just how big of a difference having Omar Vizquel playing beside you on the infield can be when compared to someone like Derek Jeter. Your play literally changes because of context, and having Barry Bonds batting behind you will absolutely change your approach and, as an obvious consequence, your results at the plate.
The fact that this is such a gaping hole in sabertistic (new word!?) analysis is a big part of why they haven't gained more momentum. Stats-based analysis is a big deal, and it's a core pillar of the baseball experience from the FO of every ballclub down to the back of the bubble gum cards kids collect with pictures (and statlines) of their favorite players on them. But it is only one aspect of baseball analysis.
Having Nelson Cruz in the lineup makes the M's better, and not *merely* in the WAR/Offensive Runs Created swing that plugging him into the DH role would provide. He will make everyone around him better because he's one of the only hitters we have (maybe the only hitter, in all honesty) who strikes fear into opposing pitchers' hearts.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is not something to be discarded into the 'intangibles' bin and snickered about during water cooler conversation. Edgar terrorized MLB pitchers for his HOF-worthy career, and he made everyone else better as a result. Without a legit #4 crusher in the middle of the lineup (even one as flawed as Cruz) the fundamental building blocks of baseball are out of whack. I'm glad we have another bruiser to carry the MOTO for a few years; the last one we really had was Sexson, and we only got the tail end of his career which unfortunately included a downward spiral into oblivion.
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At Bill James Online -- $3 a month to sign up at this link -- he keeps the most recent 15 "Hey Bills" in front of the curtain. This one is both super Zen and super timely:
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[Background]
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In other words: which way will we spend our time?
- Trying to prove ourselves smarter than the pro's -- or trying to impose our Plato's Cave on them, vs.
- Trying to learn from them
This, in my mind, is Bill James' fundamental advantage, why he sits in the chair he sits in. It's a difference in attitude, not IQ. This seeming 5% advantage has returned a 500% edge for him.
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Let's say that Nelson Cruz is indeed only worth the same 1.5 WAR as Brad Miller projects to be. (I think Steamer projected Miller to more WAR than Cruz, didn't it? ... checking ... Cruz to get 1.5 WAR in 600 PA's, and Miller to get 2.3 WAR in 440 PA's. albeit with Miller at short.)
We would still be interested in, and respectful of, Lloyd's "Cruz Is a Winner" speech. Because we would be fascinated by what overlooked piece of reality it is that drives his thinking. If we found it, we would experience the beauty of enlightenment. Even if it were only a small thing that was driving Lloyd's paradigm.
We would be especially interested in this search, since so many uniformed ballplayers believe as Lloyd does.
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Is Cruz actually a "hard RBI" man who will win games against Jared Weaver when Brad Miller would have been trashed by Weaver? We've done our duty, researching that. 1000's of man-centuries have been spent searching for that, with no resolution. That's why we resort to the question of "WHY does this man think so differently than we do?"
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Today, James had an even better Hey Bill, a long one, referring to Plato's Cave. It's one of his best ever. "stevemillburg" groused about James putting sabermetrics in its perspective and James responded with his version of Plato's Cave. It will probably be in front of the curtain for a few days. A quick excerpt of that Hey Bill:
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.. my core belief is that the external world is billions of times more complicated than the human mind, and that therefore no one understands the world, at all, and we merely achieve the illusion of understanding by creating simplistic models of the world, within our minds, where we can resolve to our self-satisfaction those issues that are beyond our understanding.
The statistical analysts’ view of the world is one of those models; the football coach’s view is another.
When the two are in conflict, in my view, one is no more likely to be right than the other, just as conservatism is no more likely to be right than liberalism or vice versa; rather, both sides are probably choosing ignorance at some point.
The challenge of the thinking man is NOT to choose ignorance, not to insist on the superiority of his little mind-model, but rather, to walk toward the dark issue with his little flashlight, and do the best he can to see the issue itself in all of its complexity.
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One of the SSI features is that you can sort by category. You can easily bring up all Zen pieces at a click if that's your thing.
Warmly,
Jeff
Comments
Preparing to launch my own brand of commentary, including some articles that would be labeled "SABRMatt Scoops" which discuss the actual process that goes on in a big league front office from my admittedly brief time inside of one (and admittedly limited role). Here's an opportunity for three or four different insider-style comments.
1) Big league clubs do not use WAR. Sorry Fangraphs. Big league teams have their models and it varies club to club...and rarely do they assume the positional adjustment can be directly calculated.
2) Big league clubs put a lot of weight on having a player that "scares the other team" - what I frequently call the "supermarginal" players. Guys who are good enough to make the other guy perform at below replacement level.
3) Big league clubs do studies about the impact of having one player on other players...and they find effects, though they are often limited to very specific situations. The Vizquel/Jeter comparison, for example, I studied. I won't discuss my exact methods, but I determined that really bad fielders warp the defensive performance of the adjacent fielders by as many as 8 plays depending on which position you're talking about compared to really good fielders. SS and CF warp by 8.5 and 7.0 plays respectively (on average) compared to bad ones...meaning if you have Brendan Ryan's glove at short, your third baseman AND your second basemen are likely to play as many as 8 plays into outs that they would not if you replaced him with Jeter. That sort of thing is why I reject simple zone defensive metrics.
I could say other things...but there you go.
Thanks for the scoop :) Would absolutely LOVE to read whatever you'd be willing to share on this front (as, I assume, would everyone else who is a part of this community).
And yeah, to clarify somewhat: I wasn't suggesting that big league FO's don't value these things. Obviously they do (which is why Nelson Cruz got the deal he did, and why every 'supermarginal' player ends up with a contract that sends sabertistas screaming into the night), but it does seem that there is *zero* respect for this particular facet of analysis in the recreational sabermetric circles, or even at the upper/upper-middle places like Fangraphs. It is truly fascinating to me that this particular chasm still exists.
I love, love, LOVE the fielding performance info you provided. As a fringe athletic type, I can attest that you're far more willing to 'trust' the great defender with his half of your zone (with Omar to your left, for example, when you're playing 3B) and this results in you cheating toward the line a bit. Even if your pre-play positioning isn't significantly different, you're definitely more poised for a screamer to your right if you've got Omar covering your left. It has always seemed absurd to me that the same would not be true for hitters in a batting lineup, despite the sabertistic protestations which suggest that lineup protection is a myth.
Question: did your fielding analysis discussed above yield any information regarding 'big plays' being more or less likely to be made when a great fielder is positioned near another? The obvious example I can come up with is in the NFL, with our very own Seahawks, where a guy like Byron Maxwell can focus 100% on ball-hawking since he's got Sherman locking down the other side and Thomas covering the deep middle. A guy playing with that kind of support will obviously be able to pin his ears back and be more aggressive than someone playing with a below average safety or CB on the opposite side of the field. I wouldn't assume the impact would be nearly as bigt in baseball, but I often wondered how many of those epic catches Mike Cameron would have made in the RCF gap without Ichiro playing beside him to provide some cover.
Great stuff, Matt.
Particularly in the outfield, there are guys who just play better if they can always go for the ball (or...as often as they even remotely think they can catch it) rather than worrying about the gap and having it get by him. Cameron was good at robbing singles...better than people realize...and part of that was that he could dive more often with Ichiro covering his back I think.
My analysis wasn't that specific about play type, though...it was more of a raw "count the plays the make and compare to what you would expect them to have made given their age arc and overall skill level and the batted ball distribution they faced and then see if there was a relationship with the quality of adjacent fielders" kind of deal.
The advanced statistical techniques I attempted there are rarely seen in casual sabermetric circles (not never...but rarely) and I wasn't thinking along those lines until working for NY and seeing something similar in another experiment being run by one of their full timers.
That wouldn't pick out "big plays"...but I could do something pretty similar with the inside edge fielding data that is now publicly available.
I knew you weren't saying the front offices used WAR...I was saying they didn't as an aside to the folks who say Cruz is 1.5 WAR player..that's not how big league teams operate. It was mostly directed at fangraphs thinking.
That guy was supremely underrated, even by us fans who got to watch him at the time. My dad used to say that Cameron gobbled up a single every game, and while that couldn't possibly be true, it sure *felt* that way when watching him make those incredibly rangy plays in the gaps.
It's cool that you found some stuff along these lines during your work. Obviously it wouldn't be easily accessible, otherwise everyone would have already assimilated it into their proprietary defensive valuation models, but it's great to hear an actual professional nod sagely on the subject of defensive synergy.
Very cool.
Can't remember how many times over the years that you and I have crossed the streams in true Ghostbusters fashion; we generally communicate pretty well. I just thought it was worth mentioning, if for nothing other than to highlight the point you just made in your reply: that big league FO's aren't nearly as feeble as many fangraphers like to think (I know there are plenty of great contributors at Fangraphs, but there are so, so, so many groupthinkers there as well).
...the goal of the model had nothing at all to do with my little side research question. The project was trying to make predictions about minor league fielders, but I figured out that the model didn't work as well unless you accounted for who was flanking a guy at all levels including the majors...accidental genius. :) All of my future attempts to quantify defense will include that factor. FWIW.
in information, science, or technology of any kind was usually met with a researcher's furrowed brow. followed by the muttered worlds, "That's funny..."? Seems apropos here as well ;-)
It was accidental that I would recall my concept of adjacent dependency on defense at that moment when I was trying a series of variables to best explain the progression of defensive scores for each player...but once I thought of it, I said "Oh - I bet this takes 25% off my RMSE" (it increased my R-squared from 0.16 to 0.26 and dropped my RMSE from ~4.8 to ~3.0). Which became a write-up for the minor league scouting data assimilation team.
So...less furrowed brow and more "Eureka!"