FJM is a closed forum, but we welcome reader feedback. We're especially interested in corrections of our work, and research (usually number-crunching) that we may not be able to do ourselves. Please check the comments section as well, where we often post readers' opinions, and, less frequently, announce that we were wrong about something.
You can e-mail dak,Ken Tremendous,Junior,Matthew Murbles, or Coach individually.
Friends, we have truly entered a strange era of sports journalism criticism. It's not like the salad days of sports journalism criticism, where all of the sports journalism was straightforward and sincere in its idiocy. Nowadays, it seems to me, the increasing prominence of sports journalism criticism has led to what appears to be ironic sports journalism, which -- again, it appears to me -- seems to be either (a) taking into account or (b) outright like seeking sports journalism criticism, in order to draw attention to itself or get more hits for its specific site, or just maybe to stir some good old fashioned shit. (If these pieces in fact contain what the legal system calls "intent," they might be properly called: sports journalism criticism criticism. This is one of those f(f(f(x))) deals that make Junior giddy.)
Let's go ahead and take it as a given that this turdpile may be tongue in cheek, or at the very least, bait. If it's a parody, it's brilliant. If it's sincere, holy God. And if it's bait, well, I just bit, and it tastes delicious, even though I know the hook is about to pierce me through the lower jaw and drain my lifeforce. Given the state of the economy and all the political mud slinging going on, I probably should be worried about my country these days. But the truth is, I’ve got more important things on my mind, including the most important thing of all.Baseball.
Me too. Love baseball. Love it. Love everything about it. You and I have a lot in common, here, Jimmy. Let's talk baseball. What do you want to hit first? The Tigers' surprisingly bad start? The Go-Go Royals? The Yankees' injuries? How about Johnny Cueto?! Have you seen that guy pitch? Holey moley! Whatever you want to talk about, man -- it's your article. You pick.
No, not the lab rats who play it or the trust-fund babies who run it. Baseball has been around since they used cowpies for bases. It has survived despite itself for this long, so there’s no reason to think it won’t continue to.
So you're not thinking about the players, or the owners, or even the game itself. Seems like those are fun things to think about when one thinks about baseball -- the players, teams, or games. But okay. I'm all ears. What subject tickles your fancy this fine Spring day?
I’m worried about us, the fans. I’m worried that aliens are trying to attack our brains.
If the article stopped right here, it would be my favorite sports article of all time. Armstrong should have stopped right here, and then, as a publicity stunt, run onto the highway wearing only a Green Hornet mask and diving flippers, waving a toy gun and screaming about the Warren Report. He would be a legend.
At least they might as well be aliens. But for the record, they’re lifeless geeks who wake up every morning in hopes of creating a new baseball statistic.
Oh.
Sigh.
Hang on a second. I was half-asleep asleep on this old busted-up futon in my mom's basement, eating handfuls of sugary cereal out of the box and contemplating buying some vintage Ram-Man action figures off eBay, but now I guess I have to struggle to an upright position and try to address this guy's concerns.
Have you seen some of the quote, unquote stats out there?
My man: when you are talking you say "quote-unquote" to indicate sarcasm. When you are writing you can just put things in quotes. As in: Jim Armstrong is a "journalist." He is also "funny" and "smart" and I "want to hang out with him" because he seems to have a lot of "good" "points."
When I was a kid hustling autographs at Wrigley Field, the game was all about W’s and L’s. Now it’s about WHIP and VORP and OPS and BABIP.
Anyone who writes anything for a living should avoid cliché. I think we can all agree on that. This thought is now officially the #1 cliché about the baseball statistics debate. When I was a kid, people only cared about wins and losses. Now everyone is a nerd who loves weird stats and hates baseball. Please, all of you who have this thought, listen to me. Please. Here we go.
There have always been statistics in baseball. Always. Statistics like WHIP and VORP and OPS are better than the old statistics, because they give you more actual pertinent information. This is not up for debate. If you don't like these stats, don't use them. But don't tell me that they aren't interesting or good.
I just don't get it, man. No one ever said: "When I was a kid, if we were going to cut off your leg we'd give you a shot of whiskey and a rope to bite down on, and we'd just take a dirty hacksaw and just hack away, outside, on the ground. Why do all these nerds keep talking about 'anaesthesia' and 'sterilization?!'"
And let’s not forget the most important acronym of them all: HGH.
Has nothing to do with the argument you are developing. Not a stat. Bad writing.
VORP? WHIP? BABIP? Since when did a Harvard physics degree replace a ticket stub for admission to the left-field bleachers?
Since March of 2003. You didn't hear? You need a math/science/engineering degree from Harvard, Cal Tech, Harvey Mudd, MIT, or University of Mumbai. Or a Philosophy degree from Pittsburgh.
I don’t know about you, but I liked the way things were before some self-absorbed numbers cruncher dreamed up VORP (Value Over Replacement Player, whatever that means.)
It's pretty self-explanatory, but here. Read something. It makes you smarter.
Additionally: pandering to ignoramuses is not a flattering character trait. And being a snooty dick is? Hey! How'd you gain the ability to type, Ken's superego?
And while we’re on the subject, didn’t that guy have something better to do that day?
Here we go.
Like getting some fresh air
It's a-comin'.
instead of spending the entire day
Oh my god. I can feel it. It's so close.
in his boxer shorts
Do it!
in his
Yyyyyyyyyyyy...
mother’s
...yyyyyyyyyyyyyy...
basement?
...yessssss! Whoooooooo!
HOLY FUCKING SHIT THAT WAS AWESOME!!!!!
In his mother's basement!!!!!
In his fucking mother's fucking basement!
Holy shit.
Holy shit, you guys.
In his mother's basement!
Boooooooooo-ya!
In his mother's basement.
He fucking nailed it, you guys.
Nailed it. Jesus.
Man. Okay. Just...that was awesome, is all. Awesome.
Let me guess.
Please.
The guy spends every waking moment of every day on his computer. And his only correspondence with the outside world is with fellow self-absorbed numbers crunchers who spend every waking moment of every day in dogged pursuit of the next esoteric pseudostat.
Keith Woolner is his name. He currently works for the Cleveland Indians. I guarantee he has watched more baseball games in the past ten years than you have. Also: they're not "pseudostats." They're just: stats. (They're not even really that esoteric, though I suppose what's straightforward to some might be "esoteric" to someone who never reads anything, or cares to, or has any intellectual curiosity at all.) (When did having zero intellectual curiosity about the world -- and a corresponding sneering contempt for those who have any -- become a positive character trait instead of a flashing warning signal that this person is a stubborn dummy?) (Oh -- right.)
These are the baseball writers of today. Forget Roger Angell and David Halberstam and all those other curmudgeons. They wrote about the romance of the game, the visceral attraction of the game, the simple pleasures of the game. They wrote about the Boys of Summer and the dads who took their sons out to the yard to watch them.
Fantastic writers. Brilliant. I eat 'em up. Most people I know love them.
Today, it’s all about the numbers and the psychos who crunch them.
No it's not. No. Wrong. It is not. Did you read Tom Verducci's piece about Red Sox fans in SI, for their Sportsmen of the Year issue in 2004? Do you read Leigh Montville, or Buzz Bissinger, or Bill Plaschke? Now, I am not personally a fan of some of these people, but they write about the humanistic elements of the game. That kind of writing is out there, if you want it.
They call themselves sabermetricians. I call them seamheads, among other things.
I’m telling you, we need to stop these people before it’s too late. Before we’re all walking around in a cyberfog talking in acronyms that only Stephen Hawking could understand.
Come on, man. Hawking is such a hacky choice. At least go Roger Penrose, or Andrew Wiles, or Max Tegmark or something.
President Bush, your basic baseball junkie, needs to swing into action in the best interests of the country. He needs to have his Homeland Security Nazis break into these people’s homes and take a Louisville Slugger to their computers.
I don't exactly know how this is offensive, but I'm sure it is. Let's figure it out together. He mentions Nazis, which is generally considered offensive. He mentions them in reference to people serving in the U.S. Government, which is probably not supercool. He is asking the President of the United States to order the government to attack its citizens for talking about baseball statistics, which is interesting. Huh. Can't quite pinpoint it. At least it's a hilarious joke, though.
If not, I may have to resort to drastic measures. I may have to become a soccer fan. Think about it. There are no seamheads trying to take over the soccer world.
There can’t be because there are no numbers to crunch. Well, a few maybe, but not enough to get all hot and bothered about.
Also, soccer is cool and fun to watch.
Things are simpler in soccer. There’s no WHIP or VORP in soccer, just a few DOAs after the usual fan rowdiness in the stands. In soccer, all the stats are the same. All the goalkeepers have a .001 goals-allowed average and, at the end of the season, everyone ties for the league lead with one goal scored.
Not in baseball.
Right. Which is why we need more statistical analysis.
In the past few days alone, I’ve come across such stats as OPS (One-base Plus Slugging percentage),
Huh?!?!?!?!
GWRBI (Game Winning Runs Batted In),
Da-whaaaaaa?!?!
DIPS (Don’t Ask),
What'd you call me? You're a DIPS!
QERA (Quantified Earned Run Average),
That looks like "queer!" Heh heh heh heh heh!
WHIP (Walks and Hits per Innings Pitched)
Skler-boink?!?!?!?!
and BABIP (Batting Average for Balls In Play).
(slack-jawed; confused; drools)
Let me just get a few things straight. (a) You just found out about OPS? (b) You just heard about GWRBI, a stat that was so mainstream it was briefly on the backs of baseball cards in the late 1980s before people realized it was dumb? (c) You can't succinctly explain DIPS? Here.
Good thing Casey Stengel isn’t around to see this nonsense. All this numbers crunching might have interrupted his nap in the dugout.
And that...would be...bad?
Or Earl Weaver. He would have been so busy thumbing through computer printouts, he wouldn’t have had time to sneak in a half-pack of smokes in the runway.
Napping and smoking. You know -- baseball. What baseball should be. Napping and smoking while you manage a professional baseball team.
GM: Thanks for meeting with us. Prospective Manager: Thank you for seeing me.
GM: Look. We are one of 30 professional baseball teams in the country. The franchise is worth about $500 million, give or take. We have a brand new stadium, partially financed by the taxpayers of this county. The revenue of our sport last year was roughly $7 billion. You are going to control a roster of 24-40 men, the average salary of whom is north of $3 million. They come from Canada, the U.S., Central America, South America, Australia, South Korea, Japan, and several Caribbean Islands. You have to make sure that they are used correctly, that their egos are in check, that they can withstand the grind of a 162-game schedule, that they don't do stupid extra-curricular shit like go to strip clubs, and you need to be aware of which guys are in trouble with steroids, which guys need carrots and which need sticks, and you'll need to soothe the feathers of the veterans (and rookies) who get sent down, and you have to do all of this while winning at least 90 games.
Prospective Manager: Got it.
GM: So, what will you do during the average game?
Prospective Manager: Nap and smoke.
GM: You're hired.
Prospective Manager: Great.
GM: Now you're fired. I wanted to hire you just so I could fire you.
Prospective Manager: But Casey Stengel napped!
GM: He managed the fucking Yankees from 1949 to 1960. You'd've napped too, if you had those players.
Prospective Manager: And Earl Weaver smoked!
GM: He also used stats. A lot. He famously encouraged his hitters to walk and knew the value of 3-run homers. Get out of my office.
Other than their utter lack of social skills, I’m not sure why all these computer nerds keep dreaming up new stats.
Look. It may be true that I have no friends, no wife, no children, and that I live in a soggy refrigerator crate in my mom's basement. That's no reason to be rude.
I guess my hope is that by dreaming up new stats, I will somehow attract the attention of a nice, introverted, monobrowed nerd girlfriend with bad teeth who will take pity on me and marry me and we can have nerd children who will grow up to be rocket scientists and develop a secret Doomsday Device with which we can rule the world!
In the end, the question is whether their numbers add to the enjoyment of the game. And the answer is no.
Shut up. Seriously, man, shut the fuck up. This is like saying,"I don't like action movies, so no one can ever enjoy action movies because action movies are terrible." If you don't want to use stats, don't use them. I don't care. But for the love of goddamned God, don't tell me that statistical analysis "doesn't add up to enjoyment of the game." You are telling me that my friends and I are incapable of enjoying baseball. I promise you -- I PROMISE you -- I enjoy baseball. I love baseball. This is not a situation where only one kind of person can love baseball. Lots of different people can love baseball for lots of different reasons. In my case, I love baseball every bit as much as you, but -- and here's the difference between you and me -- I also understand it. If you are interested in learning how to understand it, just ask. I can teach you in like 10 minutes. (And I don't even know that much about sabermetrics.)
I’ll tell you what adds to the enjoyment of the game, and I’ll put it in terms these geeks can understand.
(a) Fuck off, again, and (b) hit me...
ABAB (a Beer And a Brat).
Blammo. Nailed the joke. I give up. I will crawl into your cave with you and relearn how to enjoy baseball without using any part of my brain. Just my stomach. And we'll be alcoholics together and high-five a lot and yell "You Suck" at opposing players. Sounds like a good time.
Also -- and this is a giant "no shit, dude" -- but writing about stats and writing about the "humanistic" side of the game don't have to be mutually exclusive. Anyone who's read an ounce of Bill James knows this.
hey guys, it's me. what's been going on? anyway, shouldn't "a Beer And a Brat" be ABAAB? kinda sad that he had us wait for this gem and then flubbed it anyway. okay, cool, see you guys later.
in response to those of you who requested the coveted "Food Metaphors" label due to either (a) "salad days" or (b) "ABAB," I say: these are not, strictly speaking, metaphors. However, we like to reward those who keep an eye out for coveted "food metaphors label" opportunities, so I am going to tag this with the less-coveted 'liberal use of food metaphors label" label.
Second, many of you sent in this better example of sabermetrics-style approaches to soccer:
http://fannation.com/blogs/post/173648
"Better" because it actually involved Billy Beane himself getting interested in the subject.
in Cincinnati. On one side: the Dustyites. On the other side: common sense. Articles are being written every day celebrating the folksy wisdom of a man who thinks bases are only good when there's no one standing on them. This is exactly what happened in L.A. when Grady Little was hired -- "He's folksy! He's down-home! He has a drawl!" (one year later) "He kind of stinks!"
If you could fart into a kind of microprocessing funnel, and the funnel poured the fart into a computer, which converted the fart into words, this is what it would look like.
Baker judges by his senses
Knowing what makes his players tick more important than their stats
Dusty Baker can literally smell whether a guy has a couple hits in his bat. And if his bones ache while a starter is warming up, that means 6 2/3, 4H, 1R. Welcome to the age of divining rods and augurs, Cincinnati.
The best baseball managing is done by the seat of your pants, using good, old-fashioned, pre-sabermetric logic.
If I live in Cincinnati, I have just purchased a one-way ticket to Canada, draft-fleeing-style.
That's another reason to like Dusty Baker. (Beyond his knowledge of single-malt Scotches and Van Morrison lyrics, which is merely astounding and downright Renaissance.)
"It doesn't matter to me if a guy gets on base if he can't run. If he can't run he's just clogging up the bases. Also, in an unrelated matter, it's a marvelous night for a moondance." (does a shot of Lagavulin 21)
If Baker manages by a book, it's one inside his head, not one written by Bill James.
Unfortunately, the book inside Dusty's head is "Lightning" by Dean R. Koontz. This will not help him.
The other day, the Reds manager decided he wanted Joey Votto and Adam Dunn to swing their bats more. "I don't like called third strikes," Baker said.
Can we get an Amen?
That's the thing about saberguys. We love called third strikes. I know it's controversial and counterintuitive, but we think batters should take more called third strikes. Statistics clearly show that offenses are best when the hitters take called 3rd strikes at least 16 times per game. That's why sabermetricians generally put on the permanent take sign for the first seven innings. Here's an equation to prove why this is good:
See? Called third strikes are awesome.
It always amuses when fans defend heart-of-the-order hitters by pointing to their on-base percentage. Wow, look at all those walks.
Yes. And then look at the corresponding runs that those walks create. And then look at the wins created by those runs! We are watching successful baseball! This is fun!
Five of the top six teams in walks last year were playoff teams.
Unless they're intentional walks, or the big boppers are being pitched around, walks aren't what you want from players hitting third through sixth. You want them up there smart-hacking.
You want these guys to brain-swing. You want them to think-swipe. You don't want your 3-6-hole hitters to engage in torque ignorance. You want them to cognitive-swivel.
As Baker said: "(Votto) needs to swing more. I'd like to see him more aggressive."
Joey Votto has hit .289/.385/.476 in the minors. He's ranked as one of the top infield prospects in baseball by nearly anyone who ranks top prospects. Here's Dusty's idea: let's change his plate approach.
By-the-book managing is for men who aren't confident in their ability to read players and situations. It's for managers who don't know their players' personalities. It's what you do so you can say later, after it backfires: "Don't blame me. I went by the book."
What you are calling "by the book managing" is often completely thoughtless, ignorance-steeped tradition. 2-1 count with a guy on first? Hit and run. Leadoff guy gets on? Bunt him over. That's by-the-book managing, and it's dumb. What people like Bill James, and Rob Neyer, and BP, and Billy Beane advocate is: research, analysis, thought, science. But fuck that. Let's read some tea leaves.
The best thing about Baker is that from all accounts, it's important to him to know his players individually: what jazzes them, what scares them, the situations that best suit their talents and temperaments. Contrary to the notions of the seamheads and stat freaks, players are not numbers.
Don't use jazz as a verb, please. Also: stat freaks and seam heads hate baseball. They are fucking ASIMO robots who make managerial moves through NASA press releases. Eric Wedge makes his moves from home, via on-line chats. Terry Francona has never met anyone on his 25-man roster. Joe Maddon is a 2.4 gigahertz Linksys router. Manny Acta is actually M.A.N. eACTA, the black-ops code-name for the Mechanized Algorithmic Numerical (internet-ready) Actionable Computation Techno-Automaton. When his "contract" runs out with the Nats he is going to be launched into space. We are weaponizing space. Deal with it, China.
"Managing" means exactly what it says: the ability to manage people. How Baker runs a game strategically is far less important than what he is able to pull from his employees, 162 times a summer.
"How he runs a game strategically" and "what the results are of his moves?" are somehow mutually exclusive things.
Anyone with a laptop can locate the Web site baseball- reference.com and sound like an expert. Anyone with a library card can pick up one of James' mind-numbing baseball "abstracts," in which the author makes the game sound like a first cousin to biomechanical engineering.
Which is why it boggles the mind that some people don't. Especially the ones paid millions of dollars to operate one of 30 several-hundred-million-dollar franchises. And for the record, I'm not trying to sound like an expert. I'm trying to sound like a dude with a computer who can look shit up and point out that Adam Dunn is doing just fine, thank you, and if you start making him swing at pitches he doesn't like, you're going to screw up your team.
It ain't that scientific.
It's not purely scientific. But it goddamn is kind of scientific.
The NFL does the same thing, in a different fashion. To convince you that pro football is actually a 17-week MENSA convention, The League whips out its 800-page playbooks and offers up oh-so-serious coaches who work 20 hours a day and act as if their jobs involve brain surgery and a red telephone.
QB: What play are we running, coach?
Coach: (furious) What "play" are we "running?" This ain't science, you jackass! You, Johnson. Just run down the field, and kind of squiggle around. Henderson? I want you to just groove. Bergleson -- let your soul take over. I want you to feel it. Smithson? Put this welding helmet on and close your eyes. Run wherever you feel like you should run. And Thompson? When the ball is snapped, I want a long primal scream. Don't worry about "blocking" or "patterns" or "execution." This game is about emotion, people.
Assistant Coach: Have you noticed that everyone on this team is named "something-son?"
Coach: You're fired. I don't pay you to think. Now. Soul-Ball Gut Check 34 on 3.
Possibly, it's less complex. Block. Tackle. Win.
If you try to win a modern-day NFL game solely by telling your players to "Block and tackle" you will lose 100-0.
Baseball's cerebral side involves numbers. While I believe in baseball-card wisdom - you are who the back of your card says you are - it's just a little piece of the whole. When some of us (OK, me mostly) advocated dealing, say, Votto and Homer Bailey for Oakland pitcher Joe Blanton, the Statboys came out flame-throwing numbers:
Homer Bailey: 21, awesome in the minors. Walks too many guys but gave up 6.55 H/9IP at AAA. Votto: potential stud at 1st for years. Blanton: pretty good 27 year-old pitcher, maybe hitting his stride. Also arb-eligible for the next 3 years, and will get very expensive. Chances that Bailey outpitches him in 2009 for 1/20 the price? Decent. This would be a trade you make at the deadline if you are one starter away from the World Series, not if you're Cincy and you have to basically start from the ground-up. Also, if you want to trade Bailey and Votto, you can do a whole lot better than Joe Blanton, I think.
Blanton's a creation of his spacious home ballpark! Look at his ERA, home and away! Blanton's a flyball pitcher! Check out his ratio of groundballs to flies!
This is fucking fantastic. These are his examples of ridiculous, opaque, arcane stat-geek numbers. Home/Away ERA. GB/FB ratio. If you think that's complicated, you are a simpleton of the highest order.
If you shot back that Blanton has won 42 times in the last three years - and that he went 7-5 at home last year and 7-5 on the road - if you suggested that no number matters but Games Won, you were dismissed as an illiterate.
Not an illiterate. I believe you can read. But maybe an ignoramus? Yes, let's go with ignoramus.
(Actually, maybe Blanton won as many on the road as at home, even with a much higher road ERA, because Oakland's hitters worked under the same conditions as their pitcher. Allow more runs, score more runs. And factually, flyball man Blanton gave up only 16 home runs in 230 innings last year. But never mind.)
First of all, if he actually is worse on the road, it would be a dumb idea to make him pitch 16 times a year in Cincinnati, where the RF fence is 115 feet from the plate. However, Blanton did have a very good year in 2007. He may be entering his prime. His HR rate and BB both dipped last year. Good work using numbers to show that.
Numbers are fun to look at but dangerous to dwell on.
But...didn't...you...just...
Baker understands this. If Dunn walks 30 fewer times this year, he'll drive in 15 more runs. His on-base percentage will dip. Oh, no.
If Dunn walks 30 fewer times, he'll drive in 15 more runs. This is thanks to the scientifically proven formula: RBI = (this is nonsense) (I made it all up).
If Votto takes fewer first-pitch strikes, his run production will improve.
You're right. He should hit more 1st-pitch home runs. Why doesn't anyone besides Dusty Baker and Paul Daugherty think home runs are better than walks?
And so on. Here's a stat: Wins as manager: Dusty Baker, 1,162; Bill James, 0.
This...this is the dumbest thing I have ever read.
Here's a stat: U.S. Presidents: All Americans Besides Paul Daugherty: 43. Paul Daugherty: 0. Suck on that, Paul Daugherty! You've never won the Presidency. What a jerk!
At bats are complicated things. The best result of an AB is a home run. The worst is an out that advances no runners. (Or a triple play, I guess, but you get the idea.) In between are several thousand other possibilities. A walk is a successful AB no matter how you slice it. Patient hitters are good hitters, by and large, who help their teams a great deal more than impatient hitters, and the more a guy is patient, the more he will swing at a good pitch instead of any pitch, which increases the chances he will succeed.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to run a level-5 diagnostic on the M.A.N. eACTA. His verillion modulator is on the fritz.
Apparently Mr. Daugherty is not just a complete bonehead when it comes to baseball. Bill points us to this section of his blog, written during Ohio's recent snowstorm:
As for the Global Warming freaks... please deliver my pizza to the radio station at 9 tonight when, if warnings of the apocalypse hold, I will be spending the night, globally warmed by 10 inches of snow. I will be hungry. When you arrive, you can explain to me why it's called Green-land, what's bad about longer growing seasons in northern climates and open shipping lanes where there used to be impassable ice. Because I am the tiniest bit skeptical about melting icecaps, or at least about the catastrophically rising ocean levels guaranteed to drown us all, please show me the data indicating rising water levels in, say, New York harbor, or on the beaches in, I dunno, South Carolina. Then prove to me, beyond reasonable doubt, how all of it owes to greenhouse gases and such.
That, my friends, is the very definition of ignorance.
I'm late posting this, but here it is, from Russell:
Some actual math about Adam Dunn. Let's assume that he walks 30 fewer times this year. It's going to mess with his approach and he'll probably start swinging at pitches with which he doesn't feel comfortable, but let's just go against logic and assume that it won't affect what he normally does. Let's re-apportion those 30 PA according to what he did last year when he wasn't walking and see if we can get 15 RBI out of that.
First off, he walked 16.2% of the time, so we need to look at the other 85.8% of his PA. In 36.8% of those non-walk PA, he struck out, so 11 more strikeouts. That leaves 19 more PA where he didn't walk or strike out, but apparently put the ball into play. His BABIP last year was .309, which means that he would record a hit in about 6 of those remaining PA.
About 28.9% of Dunn's hits went for home runs last year, so let's be generous and say that of those six hits, two of them would be HR. Dunn would get 2 RBI from those HR, so he needs 13 more RBI to reach the 15 that Mr. Daugherty figured he would get. He's got 6 hits in which to do this (laying aside sac flies or the occasional grounder the scores a run... hell let's give him one of those... he needs 12 RBI in those six hits.) Adam Dunn would have to constantly be coming to the plate with two runners on base (at least when he gets his hits) and always drive them in.
Impossible? No. Likely? No.
And y'know, the best thing to do with a guy who averages 7.85 RC per 27 outs is to tell him to stop doing what he's been doing.
This Is Not What I Meant When I Said "Work To Be Done"
Nerds, you did it. Observer effect. I only realized this after I posted, but by linking to that ESPN baseball statistics poll, I totally wrecked the results I was making fun of.
Here were the results of question 3 as of this morning:
3) Which stat do you use the most when evaluating hitters?
43.6% Batting average (AVG) 25.7% On-base plus slugging (OPS) 18.2% On-base percentage (OBP) 10.2% Runs batted in (RBI) 2.4% Slugging percentage (SLG)
And here they are now:
3) Which stat do you use the most when evaluating hitters?
36.2% On-base plus slugging (OPS) 35.0% Batting average (AVG) 18.6% On-base percentage (OBP) 7.9% Runs batted in (RBI) 2.2% Slugging percentage (SLG)
That's right. FJM's asshole readers (readers who are assholes, not readers who read assholes) have propelled OPS into the lead over that mustache-twirling villain, batting average. You guys are doing some work on the fielding question, too.
Before:
5) Which stat do you use the most when evaluating fielders?
69.4% Errors (E) 13.1% Range Factor (RF) 12.5% Fielding runs above average (FRAA) 5.1% Assists (A)
After: 5) Which stat do you use the most when evaluating fielders?
59.8% Errors (E) 20.3% Fielding runs above average (FRAA) 15.7% Range Factor (RF) 4.2% Assists (A)
Begone, errors and range factor!
Um, well done, I guess? Not really the point of me posting that link, but I enjoyed it anyway. Now we'll never know the scientific fact of what percentage of Americans prefer range factor to assists according to a stupid online poll!
Note the inclusion of OBP and WHIP, pretty damn straightforward stats, into the wonky category of "Sabermetric statistics." VORP is going to remain a mystery to most people for awhile, I would think.
Congratulations, America. 73.6% of you think that in 2006, Freddy Sanchez was better than Albert Pujols (higher AVG), Raul Ibanez was better than Travis Hafner (more RBIs), and Jon Garland was better than Brandon Webb, Chris Carpenter, and Roys Halladay and Oswalt (more wins).
I'm cherry-picking, but come on. You're better than that, America.
3) Which stat do you use the most when evaluating hitters?
43.6% Batting average (AVG) 25.7% On-base plus slugging (OPS) 18.2% On-base percentage (OBP) 10.2% Runs batted in (RBI) 2.4% Slugging percentage (SLG)
Whoops! No, you're not better than that. You're really stupid. No wonder you hate Pat Burrell. He batted .258! Send that guy to the minors!!!
(Pat Burrell's OBP was .388. That's better than Vladimir Guerrero's, Miguel Tejada's, Ichiro's, and AL MVP Justin Morneau's. Was he more productive than those players? No. But you have to give it to the guy: he got on base like a motherfucker.) 5) Which stat do you use the most when evaluating fielders?
69.4% Errors (E) 13.1% Range Factor (RF) 12.5% Fielding runs above average (FRAA) 5.1% Assists (A)
I'll say that on this one, there's still not a really good option. Well, no, there is: the best option is to not rely on errors. Judging a player's defense solely on errors is like saying I'm the best firefighter in the world because I've never left a baby inside a burning building when making a daring rescue. (Because my daring rescue count is zero. Okay, one. And I got all twelve babies.)
Now, these poll numbers are already pretty bleak. But consider this: they're even worse when you take into account that the pool of people who would even think about taking an online poll on their computers about statistics in baseball is pretty fucking nerdy. My guess is that the real numbers -- ones that would represent all baseball fans -- are much, much worse.
There's a ray of hope, though.
6) What do you think about the focus on statistics in baseball?
70.5% It enhances my enjoyment of the game 26.9% It doesn't affect the way I watch the game 2.6% It detracts from my enjoyment of the game
