August 9th, 2006 → 8:44 am @ Seth Mnookin
Major League Baseball Advanced Media, the Internet arm of MLB, was formed in 2000 almost as an afterthough; today, its estimated worth is about $2.5 billion, more than the value of the Red Sox and the Yankees combined. But Bud Selig et al didn’t feel that was quite enough, and wanted fantasy leagues to pay licensing fees to use players’ stats.
Yesterday, a federal judge told MLB to chill it out with their “more more more” act. Do you think baseball’s next argument will be a Sprewell-esque “we’ve got our families to feed”? Or perhaps they’ll take a page from the Johnny Damon playbook, with Selig claiming that he’s bought a house he can’t afford?
Post Categories: Major League Baseball & Obscene amounts of money
August 8th, 2006 → 8:27 pm @ Seth Mnookin
“Mark Loretta may be the toughest out in that Red Sox lineup.”
— Royals broadcaster Bob Davis in top of the first inning of tonight’s Royals-Red Sox game. Loretta is fifth (out of eight) in on-base percentage among regular position players–behind Manny Ramirez, Kevin Youkilis, Trot Nixon, and David Ortiz.
Post Categories: Broadcasting
August 8th, 2006 → 11:00 am @ Seth Mnookin
On those days in which Murray Chass isn’t whining about the fact that George Steinbrenner won’t talk to him, he’s apparently trying to see if anyone at The New York Times is paying attention to anything he writes.
Take today’s piece on the Red Sox. As far as I can tell, the point is that the Red Sox should have a “commanding” lead in the AL East. Why? Because the Yankees have been “bruised and bloodied,” while the Red Sox, “until catcher Jason Varitek had knee surgery last week, had not dealt with the extended absence of an everyday player.” Which is true…so long as you don’t count center and right fielders as everyday players: Coco Crisp landed on the DL on April 11, and Trot Nixon has been out of commission with a strained right bicep since late last month. (Wily Mo Pena, the team’s fourth outfielder, was also on the DL for about three weeks earlier this year.) Still, at least the Sox have had a healthy pitching staff…except for Keith Foulke, Mike Timlin, Lenny DiNardo, Tim Wakefield, David Wells, and Matt Clement, all of whom are on or have been on the DL. (Clement and DiNardo are both on the 60-day list, while Wells has been on the 15-day list three separate times already.) In fact, the Red Sox have put a player on the DL 15 times thus far this year, compared to 11 for the Yankees.
This kind of fact-challenged pique is Chass’s specialty. Almost exactly a year ago, he directed his whining toward Carlos Delgado, who had the nerve to sign with a team other than the Mets after the 2004 season; that piece was headlined “Delgado Gets an E-3 for Picking the Marlins.” “The man made a mistake,” Chass wrote. “It’s that simple. Carlos Delgado said in January that he signed with Florida rather than the Mets because he thought the Marlins had a better chance of going to the World Series. He thought wrong.” On September 15, about a month after Chass’s column ran, the Marlins were .5 games behind the wild-card leaders and 6.5 games ahead of the Mets. (A Marlins collapse in the season’s final two weeks meant the teams ended up with identical 83-79 records, 7 games back of the division-winning Braves and 5.5 games behind the wild-card winning Astros. Using WARP, Delgado was worth about three more wins than the collection of folks the Mets had manning first…which still wouldn’t have been enough to propel the Mets into the playoffs.)
Any columnist can state the obvious, so Chass shouldn’t be knocked for telling us that teams would be better with a a two-time All-Star and three-time Silver Slugger winner closing in on 400 home runs than without him: “[Delgado’s] bat would have looked good in the middle of the Mets’ batting order. And with his bat absent from the Florida lineup, the Marlins might have had an offensive shortage.” And it’s a columnist’s perogative to ignore his pre-season predictions while chastising players for theirs. (Last year, Chass had the Twins winning the AL Central and the World Series-winning White Sox coming in third; he picked the wild-card winning, NL champion Astros to come in fourth in the NL Central. This year, he ranked the Detroit Tigers behind the Twins, White Sox, and Indians in the AL Central.)
Chass can, however, be knocked for ignoring reality. Columnists at the Times are given lots of latitude (most the time, anyway). At what point do columns that are contradicted by facts become an issue? Keep reading the paper’s sports section to find out…
Post Categories: Murray Chass & New York Times & Sports Reporters
August 7th, 2006 → 11:28 am @ Seth Mnookin
Last night, the enigma known as Eric Van wrote that Manny Ramirez was having the second-best year of his career, as measured by VORP.
(A very quick primer: VORP stands for Value Over Replacement Player, and measures the number of runs a given player produces over a replacement-level backup at his position, with replacement level being more or less defined as a scrub you can promote from AAA for minimal value, or, to put it another way, someone slightly better than Kevin Millar, circa 2006.)
So far this year, Manny’s clocking in at a 55.1 VORP, tops among batters on the Red Sox* (and fifth in all of baseball). Since VORP measures both quantity as well as quality, this figure needs to be multiplied by 1.47 (the Sox have played 110 out of 162 games; 162/110=1.47) to get the projected VORP for the season, bringing Manny to 80.0 (and David Ortiz to 77.61). The only time Manny has had a better VORP score in his remarkably consistent career was in 2000, his last year with the Cleveland Indians, when he put up a VORP of 81.3, which means that Eric’s right when he says Manny’s having the second best year of his career. And it also means that it’s Manny, and not Ortiz, who should be the team MVP…never mind the league MVP. Right?
Well, that depends. First off, there are plenty of problems with VORP. (One of the biggest ones, in my mind, is the assumption that the replacement for a player will be a scrub. There are plenty of cases — injury history, an inability to hit left-handers, etc — in which a club prepares for a player not being able to suit up for 162 games.) For the sake of this discussion — which is considering whether 2006 is actually the second-best year of Manny Ramirez’s career — let’s focus on the problems with combining quality with quantity. If you look solely at the stats Manny put up in the games he did play (and average out a full season of Mannyness to 155 games, which is exactly what he’s on pace for this year), 2006 is actually the fourth best year of his career, trailing 2000, 1999 (projected 155-game VORP of 82.5), and 2002, when Manny put up a 75.4 VORP in just 120 games, which projects out to 97.4. (Since we’ve only played about 68 percent of the season, it seems more than fair to extrapolate out past years in much the same way we’re extrapolating out the rest of this season.)
As far as MVP goes, one thing VORP does not take into account is the kind of situational hitting that David Ortiz does so well, those situations being the bottom of the ninth inning with the Red Sox either tied or trailing. I’m convinced that there is such a thing as “clutch” hitting; just because we haven’t figured out a way to precisely quantify it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be considered. (There’s obviously the inverse: instances where a batter presses and therefore doesn’t perform as well. Last year, when Jason Varitek hit his first career grand slam, John Henry let out an audible sigh of relief…not only because of the four runs, but because Tek had finally gotten that monkey off his back. See also Rodriguez, Alex.) Another thing VORP doesn’t take into account–and admittedly doesn’t try to take into account–is bang for the buck. Ortiz is making $6.5 million this year while Manny’s pulling in $18,279,000, which means the Red Sox are paying Manny $228,487 for every run he scores over a replacement player, while paying Ortiz $84,440. (There are some reports that indicate the four-year, $12.5-million-a-year contract extension Ortiz signed this past April also bumped his 2006 salary up to $12.5 million. If that’s true, he’s being paid $162,337 for each run he’s worth over a replacement-level DH.)
So is Eric right? Only in a world in which stats are considered more or less devoid of context. And, as Bill James told me for Feeding the Monster, “I believe in a universe that is too complex for any of us to understand. … It is one thing to build an analytical paradigm that leaves out leadership, hustle, focus, intensity, courage, and self-confidence. It is a very, very different thing to say that leadership, hustle, courage, and self-confidence do not exist or do not play a role in on real world baseball teams.”
* All of the links to VORP comparisons (but not VORP definitions) lead to Baseball Prospectus pages in which you’ll need a subscription.
EDIT: Brain fart of the day (thus far): there actually is a formula out there to measure how much a player is “worth”: marginal value over replacement player, or MORP, which, before the season began, showed Ortiz to be worth $8.85 million this year (and Manny to be worth about $9.5 million this year). This figure averages out all players; I’d like to see something that only took into account players who have already reached free agency. In either case, as BP’s Paul Swydan pointed out in an email, if you calculated Manny’s and Ortiz’s projected end-of-year MORPs based on what they’ve done so far, they come out almost identically, with Manny performing almost exactly as expected at $9,242,560 and Ortiz bettering his forecast at $9,526,500.
Post Categories: Baseball Prospectus & Bill James & David Ortiz & Eric Van & Manny Ramirez & sabermetrics
August 6th, 2006 → 9:59 pm @ Seth Mnookin
I’ve been trying to think of a way to divert people from the pain that has been the last week or so for Red Sox fans. Outside the usual bromides — the season is long, good teams have bad spells, bad teams have good spells, etc — I got nothing.
What I can do is point you towards some interesting (and hopefully distracting) work on whether Manny Ramirez is now or has ever been the best right-handed hitter in baseball (or, for that matter, a member of the Communist Party). The guru of graphics known as URISoxFan brings you this, courtesy of Sons of Sam Horn, one of the better virtual barrooms around…and the only one where Jim Morrison would truly get his mojo rising.
(If you’re in need of more diversions, I can heartily recommend Talladega Nights. I might have been able to heartily recommend Miami Vice, except 1. Colin Farrell couldn’t act his way out of a traffic ticket, 2. No Jan Hammer, and 3. No resolution to the MacGuffin. Besides that — and I’m not trying to be all arch and ironic — it’s a pretty decent movie.)
Post Categories: Manny Ramirez & Miami Vice & Sosh & Talladega Nights
August 5th, 2006 → 1:00 pm @ Seth Mnookin
In a blog entry posted yesterday, Matt Sussman — columnist for the Toledo Free Press and editor of The Futon Report — attemtps to show that David Ortiz is not a clutch hitter. Sussman’s piece is for a site called Blog Critics, which, in what seemingly is not meant as irony, advertises itself as being written by “superior bloggers on music, politics, TV, film, books, sports, gaming, science, technology, and culture.”
You’d think by now I would have learned my lesson: it’s not nice to make fun of people who have fundamental misunderstandings about whatever it is they’re writing about (to say nothing of the complaint that the blogosphere is comprised of a bunch of guys sitting in their basements shouting at each other). But this blog is mainly about the Red Sox (and my book Feeding the Monster), and David Ortiz is, once again, pretty much carrying the team on his back. What’s more, Sussman garnered a linky link from Deadspin, one of the best sports site out there. So I feel obligated to point out the extent to which Sussman’s piece is simply moronic.
There are plenty of obvious examples in the piece. After characterizing the Red Sox front office as “a group of intelligent number crunchers” who “buy (a little)” into sabermetrics, Sussman seems to imply (although it’s hard to figure out exactly what it is he’s trying to say here) that Kevin Youkilis, “when measured under the criteria of sabermetrics,” is more valuable than Ortiz. This is absolutely asinine. Ortiz’s and Youkilis’s OBPs are virtually identical (.393 to .395), and Ortiz has an extra 182 points in slugging percentage. Sussman also writes that Baseball Prospectus‘s Nate Silver thinks “hardcore sabermetricians” think “clutch hitting is an illusion, and such an ability doesn’t exist.” Silver actually wrote the exact opposite, saying, “Clutch hitting exists, more than previous research would indicate.” Bill James has also acknowledged that there is such a thing as clutch hitting; as he told me last year, “I’m still not sure exactly how to measure clutch hitting. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Watching Ortiz, it’s hard to think it doesn’t.”
But let’s address the main point. Sussman’s thesis seems to be — and again, it can be a little hard to figure this out since the entire article is written as a discussion (or argument) that Sussman is having with himself — that there are those in baseball (Manny Ramirez, Albert Pujols, David Wright) who have higher batting averages than Ortiz does with two outs and runners in scoring position. After lauding sabermetricians, it’s odd for Sussman to rely purely on BA; OBP, slugging percentage, or OPS would all be more valuable comparison points. And it’s true: Manny and Pujols both top Ortiz in average, OBP, slugging, and OPS with runners in scoring position and with RISP and 2 outs, while David Wright tops him with RISP and 2 outs.
But if you want to try to measure something as ineffable as clutch hitting, you need to be a little more creative than just plugging in numbers from ESPN’s splits page. After all, as a certain third baseman in New York knows, there are home runs and two-out hits, and then there are home runs and two-out hits that actually mean something.
As Allan Wood recently pointed out in the excellent Joy of Sox, Ortiz has, since the end of the 2004 regular season, been at the plate in a walk-off situation 19 times. And, as Wood discovered, Ortiz reached base 16 of those times. In his 14 official at-bats, he’s had 11 hits, with seven home runs and 20 RBIs. Over the last two seasons, he’s 8-9 with five home runs and 15 RBIs.
Think about that for a second. Over the past two years, Ortiz is hitting .875 when he has a chance to end the game with one swing. His on-base percentage is .923. His slugging percentage is 2.556. And his OPS is 3.479.
To be sure, there are other ways to try and parse out Ortiz’s “clutchness.” You could look at periods during which the Sox are scuffling, like right now. You could look at stretch runs, like last September, when the Sox closed out the month going 6-2, an eight-game stretch during which Ortiz had seven home runs and nine RBIs.
With pretty much the entire world acknowledging that Ortiz has had a three-year run that will remembered for the ages, why do pieces like Sussman’s bother me so much? The main reason is that misinformation drives me nuts. And, as I learned in ninth grade when my journalism teacher made my class read Darrell Huff’s 1954 classic How To Lie With Statistics, you can use statistics to prove pretty much anything. One day, much smarter people than me will hopefully find ways to accurately measure the impact of things like baserunning ability and clutch hitting (and will come up with better ways to measure defense). Until then, we’ll need to make do with the statistics we have. And we’ll need to use them intelligently.
Post Categories: Clutch Hitting & David Ortiz & how to lie with statistics & sabermetrics
August 4th, 2006 → 11:34 am @ Seth Mnookin
How about you spend three nights in August on a nice, long vacation
The Cardinals have lost seven in a row and are 2-8 in their last ten games. I blame Tony La Russa. There are plenty of good reasons La Russa deserves some of the blame; mine, however, are fairly irrational. For one, I simply don’t trust a man who takes his fashion tips from Corey Hart. For another, I’m still shocked at how La Russa has managed to skirt responsibility in baseball’s steroid controversy. This is, after all, the manager who pretty much copped to the fact that he knew Jose Canseco was roiding up in Oakland; he then went on to oversee the Mark McGwire era in St. Louis. (And people wonder why there are those who think Albert Pujols should be under a bit more scrutiny.) Finally, any manager who finds a way to get swept in two World Series (with the A’s in 1990 and the Cardinals in 2004) has to be a bit of a dolt.
All hail the greatest hitter of all time
To put Ted Williams’s .406 batting average in 1941 into some perspective: during Chase Utley’s current 35-game hit streak (tied for the 9th longest since 1900), Utley’s hitting .405.
Irrational optimism
It hasn’t been a pretty week for the Sox. Theo Epstein stood his ground at the trading deadline; Trot Nixon and Jason Varitek both went down with injuries; Josh Beckett continues to get lit up like a rigged pinball machine; and the Sox have fallen a game behind the Yankees in the AL East. So let’s look at reasons not to despair. Tek and Nixon’s absence will hurt, but it’s not unreasonable to expect Wily Mo Pena–who is hitting like he has some kind of vendetta against the Wall–to outproduce Nixon–and it’s not like Jason Varitek was exactly tearing up the basebaths. This year, much like last season, has been a testament to the Sox’s depth: despite losing more than half of its starting rotation to injuries, Boston is on pace to win more than 95 games, and a playoff spot. The team isn’t far behind in 2004, when it had a starting five that didn’t miss a start, a healthy Keith Foulke, and an entire team that seemed to put up career numbers. The addition of Javy Lopez should help things behind the plate (or at least spare Red Sox fans the sight of Doug Mirabelli constantly looking in to the dugout because he has absolutely no idea what pitch to call for in any given situation). And the Yankees, while on a tear of late, can’t be expected to play like this for the rest of the year. Every team has hot streaks, and every team has funks. The mistake is assuming that means much of anything in the middle of a 162-game season.
Potentially rational pessimism, Mikes edition
On the other hand, Mike Lowell is hurt and Mike Timlin has sucked as of late.
The stopper
During Schilling’s two healthy years with the Red Sox, one of his most impressive stats has been his numbers after a Red Sox loss. Right now, Schilling is pitching in the rotation immediately after Josh Beckett. Looks like he’s going to get plenty more opportunities to staunch the bleeding.
Post Categories: Albert Pujols & Chase Utley & Curt Schilling & Javy Lopez & Ted Williams & Tony La Russa
