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What You Don’t Know About Baseball Won’t Kill You |
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Tuesday, 18 April 2006 |
By D. W. O'Dell
 One of the great things about baseball is that it comes with a rich history of handed-down knowledge, axioms passed down for more than one hundred years about strategy, conditioning, and psychology. The problem is that almost all of it is wrong.
That’s not just my opinion. It is also the opinion of the good folks at Baseball Prospectus, and the bad news for you is they have the data to back up what they say in the book, Baseball Between the Numbers. You can complain all you want, but if you want to prove them wrong you’re going to need a slide rule.
Clutch hitters? They don’t exist. Statisticians have searched for clutch hitters more doggedly than the National Enquirer has looked for the Loch Ness Monster, and with about as much success. But perhaps you remember Derek Jeter or David Ortiz getting a game winning hit in an important ballgame - yeah, but those guys get lots of hits, and some of them are bound to be in “clutch” situations. If clutch hitting were a faculty that some players possessed and others lacked, then there would be some consistency from year to year; the fact is that last year’s heroes are likely to be this year’s goats, and vice versa.
The best time to bring in a closer? Not the start of the ninth inning. If your “closer” is your best, most effective relief pitcher, then you should bring him in whenever a game is on the line. The actual decision formula is rather complicated, but it boils down to this: if your team is up a run in the sixth inning and the other team has runners on base and their best hitters coming up, bring your closer in then. Unless you shut the other team down immediately, by the time the ninth inning rolls around your team probably won’t have the lead any more (despite the development of “the closer,” as many games are lost in the ninth inning today as in the 1950s, before closers existed).
Do four-man rotations tire out your starting pitchers? Nope. As long as you make sure to pull your starters once they become tired in a game, four man rotations are just as effective after August 1st as five-man rotations . . . more effective, if you consider that you are getting more innings from your #4 pitcher and fewer from your #5 starter.
Should your team spend big bucks to hire a veteran manager away from a rival, or entice one out of retirement? Why bother? The Baseball Prospectus people examined every possible way a manager could influence team performance (strategy, line-up management, player development, handling the pitching staff) and the net effect of the manager is always negligible. Good teams win because they have good players, and bad teams lose because they have bad players. Sometimes a manager might make a decision that has immediate and apparent consequences (e.g. Grady Little leaving Pedro Martinez in for too long in the 2003 playoffs) but over the span of 162 games it all averages out.
There is also no evidence for the proposition that some catchers “handle” pitchers especially well, or are more adept at getting strike calls because of the way they “frame” pitches.
The answer to the question: Who’s better, Bonds or the Babe? The Babe, once you factor in his five year stint as an excellent pitcher (Bonds still has zero career wins, I believe).
There is also nary a scrap of evidence that line-ups matter at all; Joe Torre shouldn’t stay up nights deciding if A-Rod should bat third or fourth. And speaking of the Yankees, they would have done slightly better in 2004 and 2005 if they had moved Derek Jeter to center field, A-Rod back to shortstop, and picked up an average third baseman to replace A-Rod.
The math in Baseball Between the Numbers can be a little daunting. When the science of baseball analysis (known as “sabremetrics”) began, it was like the ancient Greeks measuring the circumference of the Earth; if they were right with a couple of hundred miles, it was pretty impressive. The first crude measures of baseball performance were more accurate than the old standbys of batting averages and runs-batted-in, but there were slight inaccuracies. Newer methods attempt to account for every extra base taken and every ground ball not scooped up, and this increases complexity.
But the average baseball fan with a modicum of mathematical training should be able to follow the arguments made in the book; whether you will agree with them is another matter.
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