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Jeff Passan: Royals Are Locks To Win The AL Central
I get it: math's not cool. There's no social capital to be gained from knowing linear algebra or Zeno's paradoxes or how to add. But come on: at a certain point some examples of Sports Math are simple enough that they should enter the realm of Sports Common Sense. And fucking that math up is just sloppy, lazy or both. One example: playoff odds.
Jeff Passan has written good stuff. I heartily enjoyed learning that Ichiro gives a profanity-laden motivational speech deriding the National League before every All-Star Game. But seriously, dude, if you're doing a playoff odds piece, just make sure your numbers are somewhat close to adding up to 100%. Otherwise, you end up with shit like this (cut up and pasted):
Chicago White Sox Odds: 8/1
Minnesota Twins Odds: 8/1
Detroit Tigers Odds: 15/1
Now, we know that at minimum, one team from the AL Central will definitely make the playoffs. That's how the rules work. But according to Passan, the White Sox have a 1 in 9 shot, the Twins the same, and the Tigers a 1 in 16 shot. Add those probabilities together and you get 11.11% + 11.11% + 6.25% = 28.47% ... meaning there is at least a 71.53% chance that someone else -- that is, the Royals or the Indians -- will win the Central. Congrats, Royals fans!
This isn't hard. I know it's all funny and hilarious and cool to say "Ha ha, I suck at math" or "There's a reason I didn't become a mathematician" or "I have a math-related learning disability" -- Lord knows I often introduce myself at cocktail parties with the last phrase and always get huge laughs -- but if you're writing a playoff odds piece, then it's inherently, at least in part, a math piece too. Sorry. You chose to build this house made out of shit, now you gotta get your hands dirty forming these shit bricks. Or something.
In other words, the Sox are something like 2/5 shots, the Twins are a little worse than 2/1, and the Tigers are -- hey -- 15/1, or close to it.
BP's numbers leave the Royals at 0.22737% to make the playoffs. Sorry, Royals fans.
Postscript: Kudos, Jeff, on listing run differentials in your column.
Post-postscript: If any reader wants to run all the numbers team by team, division by division to show who Passan is really picking for the playoffs, I will welcome your email and question your life priorities.
Thanks to a reader named Daniel, a little math genius I like to call Phil Rogers, and whichever Chicago Tribune editor passed out drunk and allowed Mr. Rogers to publish this article, we now have the best, most simple formula for determining whether teams have gotten better or worse in the off-season.
While the White Sox paid an extremely high price for Nick Swisher, at least their short-sighted fans should be happy. His acquisition continues a winter in which Ken Williams has done more than almost any other general manager to improve his team when gauged simplistically.
The key word here is going to be: "simplistically."
(For the record, Swisher is a beast who has walked 197 times in the last two years. He's 26 and really good. Gio Gonzalez led the Southern League in Ks last year, but the ChiSox apparently think so little of him they have now traded him twice. Fauti de los Santos is doing well in rookie ball and Ryan Sweeney may turn out to be a good OF someday, but Chicago fans should be effing psyched that Swisher and Carlos Quentin are in their OF now. That's a good young OF. Anyway, back to Rogers's awesome new system.)
There are really two ways for rosters to improve: the ebb and flow of proven players and the development of young talent. The latter is the better way, but it is more art than business—an extremely subjective process to evaluate. The former, however, is easily studied.
New key word here is: "easily."
For the purpose of identifying the most on-the-surface improvement around the major leagues, consider the core players—hitters projected to be regulars and pitchers who either start or work the last two innings of games—who have come and gone. In this simple accounting, the Sox rate a plus-two, having added Swisher, Orlando Cabrera and Scott Linebrink while losing only Jon Garland. That puts them alongside Detroit (plus-three), Tampa Bay (plus-two), Toronto (plus-one) and Houston (plus-one) as the most improved teams in the majors.
Okay. Let's review the system.
If you add a "core" player -- meaning anyone who projects to be regular, or a starting pitcher, or (for some reason) a pitcher who is either an 8th inning guy or a closer, you get one Point. If you lose one such player, you lose one Point.
Thus, if the St. Louis Cardinals traded Albert Pujols and their eleven best minor league prospects to the Texas Rangers for Vincente Padilla and Ben Broussard, the Cardinals would be "Plus-One," and would have improved.
It's an excellent system.
The Cubs excited their fans with the signing of Kosuke Fukudome, but that addition is offset by the departures of Jacque Jones, Cliff Floyd and Jason Kendall. That leaves the Cubs at minus-two at present. The only teams that have lost more are Oakland (minus-four) and St. Louis (minus-five).
Jacque Jones, about which we have written before, is not that good. Cliff Floyd is okay, but he's 35 and plays about 100 games a year. Jason Kendall is a 34 year-old catcher coming off a season where he made an out 69.9% of the time, and who has 7 HR in the last four seasons. So who will replace them? Maybe Matt Murton, who won't set the world on fire, but who's better than Jacque Jones; and Felix Pie, who is 22 and (no matter what that guy says) is not "not a major league hitter" at the ripe old age of 22.
Getting rid of those two old OF to make way for two young guys who seem like they're better (or could be better), and adding Fukudome, makes them "Zorp-7" in my system, wherein I give each team a nonsense word and a randomly-generated number to indicate how well I think they have done in the off-season. Oakland is "Flerm-22" and St. Louis is "Chunktastic-4."
Detroit's plus-three comes from adding Miguel Cabrera, Edgar Renteria, Dontrelle Willis and Jones while losing only Sean Casey. Tampa Bay got its plus-two by adding Matt Garza, Troy Percival, Jason Bartlett and Floyd while subtracting Delmon Young and Brendan Harris.
Just realize, please, what is going on here. I know it came with the caveat that it was a "simplistic" system, but all that is occurring is a count of number of starters and pitchers who have left or come in. Quality = not a factor. Sean Casey counts as much as Miguel Cabrera. Delmon Young counts as much as Jason Bartlett. (In my system, by the way, Detroit is "Slerk-191" and Tampa is "Tpwlgr-00000000."
The Cardinals have lost Jim Edmonds, David Eckstein, Kip Wells, Preston Wilson and Percival while adding no one who played a big role last season.
Eckstein should count as 100 men. He should be the one exception.
The Athletics, intentionally downsizing, are replacing Dan Haren, Mike Piazza, Shannon Stewart and Swisher with kids.
Oakland's new rating: "Charlemagnewwwwww-20." That's what happens when you rebuild.
There's still time for teams to tilt these rankings. About 25 guys who can be considered core players remain unsigned after filing for free agency or being non-tendered.
If I'm the Milwaukee Brewers, I go out and sign all 25. Then they'd be Plus-25!
Though you mentioned Murton and Pie -- and, as a Cubs fan, I'm still really hopeful about Pie -- you forgot to mention Geovany Soto, who last year hit a monster .353/.424/.652 in AAA and, in a very small sample size, .389/.433/.667 in the majors. The Cubs are replacing a 34 year-old who hit 7 HR in the last four seasons with a 24 year-old who hit 3 HR in 54 big league AB. And this is minus-one.
Critics of sabermetrics often cite its impenetrability, or its "arbitrariness," or its newfangledness, or just its like math-ness. Too much math, they say. Too many nerdy numbers. Who needs numbers? What can they ever tell us? Facts? Phooey. I will rely on my eyes, my gut, and a different set of equally arbitrary mathematical cutoffs which aren't nerdy because I am familiar with them.
To those people I say: relax. Because Jon Weisman over at SI.com has invented a new kind of mathematical system for player evaluation. It's a veritable Principia Mathematica for the baseball fan. Here's how it works.
To get a sense of which teams had the strongest rotations, I awarded each pitcher points based on the following categories (looking at three-year trends, with the most weight on the 2007 season):
• 0 points: below-average pitcher • 1 point: mystery pitcher -- wildly inconsistent pitcher or above-average recent track record but with dubious health • 1 point: young, up-and-coming minor-league pitcher with above-average potential in 2008 • 2 points: average to above-average pitcher • 3 points: above-average pitcher • 4 points: super above-average pitcher
Simple! Now you just assign the points to their cut-and-dry, indisputable, category-based participants, and you get to see who has the best staff. This system of pitcher evaluation will soon be all a GM needs to evaluate trades, draft choices, or free agent signings.
"Should we pick up Aaron Fultz?"
"Why? Our bullpen is already set, and he's a below-average pitcher."
"Wrong! He technically qualifies as an average pitcher. Two points, not one. This will put our pitching staff at 16 points, and the next best team in our division only has 15."
"Get it done."
Weisman even anticipates that some nerds might have a problem with this system:
Now, there are certain to be quibbles about the choices I made in assigning point values -- in fact, the entire point system is rather arbitrary. There's a built-in margin for error -- because of how difficult it is to predict future performance, even with the best projections. These are not meant to be scientific.
Don't worry, people. This mathematical formula is not meant to be scientific. Which means there is no benefit to it beyond the benefit you might get from like looking at ERA trends or K/BB trends. Whatever. The point is: it's a system!
My personal favorite point of the apologia is that he says "There's a built-in margin for error." I disagree. I think this is a rock-solid problem-free scale. When you consider that an "average to above-average pitcher" gets two points, and the completely different rating of "above-average pitcher" gets three points, and when you further consider that the difference between most of the teams in the final rankings is one point, well, then you come to the inevitable and time-wasting conclusion that the built-in margin for error is: the entire system.
I know that this kind of off-season article is mostly just goof-off time-wasting before pitchers and catchers report, but goodness gracious.
EDIT:
Many of you have nervously emailed me to report that Weisman created and mostly hangs out over at dodgerthoughts, and is generally a very smart and statistically-inclined kind of a dude. (I have cruised the site in the past and enjoyed it, FWIW, which probably isn't very much.) And like I said in the post, I know that fun distraction-type point attribution systems are all that baseball fans have, sometimes, in the off-season, and I know he caveated the hell out of it, but the problem, to me, is the forum.
If Weisman had limited this baby to dodgerthoughts as a goof-around boredom killer, then that's cool with me. Murbles, dak, some other dudes and I once had a mock draft of rock albums, books, and movies for 9 hours in my apartment in New York. But when these things go national, and people read what they assume is gospel on a mainstream site like si.com, then I get a little annoyed. The same simplistic evaluation could have been done with actual illuminating information on the pitchers' histories instead of a point-attribution system that the author himself admits is arbitrary. And the caveats, while extant, come post-facto, when the system has already been laid out.
(I see that Weisman has just posted about our post. I will conclude only by saying that I like the dude's writing, generally, and I wouldn't anticipate the "jon weisman" label getting too much bigger anytime soon.)
Several of you pointed out that my fictitious GM (or assistant GM) should have said, "Two points, not none" instead of "...not one," based on the points-awarded formula laid out in the article.
Specifically, math nerds who want to read an interesting paper about players' performance in their walk years? Here's a link to a paper from a few years ago that is pretty interesting. (You can download a PDF of it on the HTML page, if you prefer.)
It's only about 15 pages long and you don't need that much math to understand it. It was written by some guy from some kind of college I have never heard of personally, but I assume is an accredited institution.
If you don't want to read it, (WARNING! SPOILERS!) I'll just tell you that it supports a lot of prior research and shows that players' performances do not change that much in their walk years as compared to their regular years.
I should maybe post this in the comments section of Junior's KR post below, but Junior is posting up a storm and I want to jump in.
FJM's Mathematically-Minded Baseball Person of the Month
is Dutch Daulton, former Phillie Catcher and Professional Weirdo.
Dutch, it turns out, is totally into the so-called "new wave" of statistical analysis. To wit:
"Reality is created and guarded by numeric patterns that overlap and awaken human consciousness, like a giant matrix or hologram," writes the .245 lifetime hitter. "They are created by sacred geometry -- numbers, the language of the universe, codes of awakening -- such as 11:11, which represent twin strands of DNA about to return to balance. Eleven equals BALANCE."
Now that, my friends, is what I call solid reasoning. If only some of these hard-nosed ol' timers would think more like Dutch.
Read more of Daulton's metamathematical musings in this article, which is destined to be the wellspring whence will emerge a "Moneyball"-like project for crazy people.
