|
April is the Cruelest Month |
|
Friday, 19 May 2006 |
By D. W. O’Dell
 I know I don’t speak for all baseball fans, but I am always glad when May arrives. Most fans love the start of the season, when even the Kansas City Royals have hope (at least for a week). It drives me crazy.
It is precisely because everyone has hope that everyone looks at the standings through rose colored glasses. Teams that have no business on the high side of .500 (Detroit) spend time in second place in the AL Central. The New York Yankees spend time in the AL East cellar, or at least that’s where they were a week or so ago. You know it’s not going to last, but you hope. April is a tease.
On April 30th the National League’s leading hitter was Omar Vizquel, a career .275 hitter inexplicably batting .375. Chris Shelton of the Tigers, who came into the season with 18 career home runs, hit 10 in April. The league leaders in games saved were Jonathan Papelbon and Derrick Turnbow; okay, Turnbow had 39 last season (since he played for Milwaukee I have never heard of him), but Papelbon had never saved a major league game before this season.
I also hate it when announcers show off their math skills by proclaiming that someone who hits 5 home runs in the first week of the season “is on a pace to hit” 150 home runs, or a pitcher who wins his first two outings is on a pace for 50 wins. Someone who hits five home runs during the third week of August has had just as good a week, but no one talks about what “pace” they are on.
It’s all about sample size, people. Baseball is the most statistically driven sport, and the core concept of statistics is sample size. You can’t make any projections about the future until you accumulate a statistically significant number of observations. So a player with 5 home runs in the first week of the season isn’t on a pace to hit 150 homers; he isn’t on any pace at all.
You see the same error made when the announcers at a game claim that a certain batter “owns” a certain pitcher because a lifetime .250 hitter has a .380 average against him. The book Baseball Between the Numbers has a chapter that points out the fact that Mike Redmond has a career .438 average (.604 slugging pct.) against the great Tom Glavine does not mean he “knows” something about Glavine. Even Redmond’s 48 at bats against Glavine were not sufficient to provide a truly representative sample. Redmond’s performance was simply a couple of standard deviations above what was expected; interesting, but still possibly the product of chance.
The long season is bound to take a toll on some players and teams. For instance, the San Francisco Giants have an outfield with an average age of 40 (Bonds is 41, Finley 40 and Alou 39, turning 40 this year). The Giants may be hovering around .500 now (good enough to be near the top of the weak NL West), but how much ground will those six 40-ish legs be covering in late August and September?
So now that May is here things can start getting back to normal. Except that all-star voting has already begun! I’m not sure what would be worse—voting for a player based on his aberrant April statistics, or voting for a veteran whose April stats don’t merit his inclusion in the mid-season classic. At least with baseball the phrase “vote early and often” isn’t as bad as it was when it referred to Chicago politics. |
