Baseball: Taking on the Vengeful Nerds

Misc. baseball rantings:

From the redszone.com archives 4/7/05

Bill James: "Bad sabermetrics attempts to end the discussion by saying that I have studied the issue and this is the answer."

More Bill James: "what I'm saying is that the Fog may be many more times denser than we have been allowing for. Let's look again; let's give the fog a little more credit. Let's not not be too sure that we aren't missing anything too important."

A certain segment of Reds fans, mostly of the dogmatic Moneyball variety, have slammed the Randa signing all offseason. Moneyball is really a riveting book, Billy Beane is a terrific GM and Bill James is probably more qualified to be comissioner of baseball than any man alive. However, the three have conspired, along with a few smarmy websites, to spawn a relatively new creature: the overconfident hall monitor of the baseball world, the devoutly orthodox sabermetric disciple.

As the self-appointed experts of 21st century baseball analysis, it's more than a little ironic that they blindly accept the truths of their trailblazers. While Bill James made a name for himself by constantly questioning and re-evaluating, his acolytes continue to quote line and verse from their more visible rank and file rather than openly considering ideas that don't dovetail with traditional sabermetric thinking.

It took a lot of audacity in some parts to call Joe Randa a "professional hitter", a term that has been push-button rejected as "cliché" for so long and with so much vigor, I would argue the term has a born-again relevance. What has been missing from the five through eight spots of the Reds' batting order for the past few seasons? Professional hitting. I believe in on base percentage. I believe in Runs Created. I believe most "sabermetric" stats have relevance and value when used correctly. I also believe, given a choice to bat behind high on base hitters like Casey, Kearns and Dunn, a hitter like Joe Randa is just what the doctor ordered. The one through five hitters are going to be on base. With runners on base, more emphasis should be put on bringing the runners home than getting another runner on base.

I think one aspect of sabermetric thinking that has gone largely unnoticed is the proclivity to compare all players to the same OPS standard regardless of their function in the batting order. Yes, the job of all players is to get on base. However, it's much more a function of the lead-off batter than it is of the fourth or fifth batter. Just as it's more important for the third batter to have a high slugging percentage than it is of the leadoff batter. One function of a hitter who consistenly comes up to bat with runners in scoring position is professional hitting. To paraphrase Wilford Brimley as the Post Master General in Seinfeld: Joe Randa's job "is to, By God, get things done." A high walk rate, counterbalanced by an even higher strikeout rate is not going to get things done in the fifth or sixth spot in this lineup. We've seen that over and over again.

Another point that seems to be glossed over in the walk-happy days of the Moneyball era is that there is, and always has been, a brand of plate discipline not based solely on high walk rates. Joe Randa doesn't walk a ton. He also has great plate discipline. Maybe not the otherwordly discipline of Albert Pujols and Luis Gonzalez. But Joe Randa swings at good pitches. He lets bad pitches go. When he gets his pitch, he hits it hard and drives in runners. That's plate discipline. It doesn't lead to the almight walk, but it is professional hitting. It's also highly underrated, as well as undervalued, in 21st century baseball.

I give credit to Dave Miley and Dan O'Brien for recognizing a need and addressing it: another professional hitter, a poor man's Sean Casey, to balance out his high walk rate / high strikeout rate hitters in the middle. I don't expect it to be all wine and roses all the time. But I do expect that philosophy to create a much more consistent basis for scoring runs inning-to-inning and game-to-game than waiting for a high K hitter to make contact once in awhile with less than two and runners in scoring position.

More on the Vengeful Nerds, this time from the footballguys.com baseball forums 4/7/07:

Much like with the clutch hitting argument, you'll never hear anyone actually associated with the game of baseball jump on board with the argument that "strikeouts don't hurt your team, they just hurt your feelings."

I do believe that strikeouts don't affect your total runs scored over the course of the season; however, they certainly do affect the consistency of your output. In addition to failing to consider how run scoring consistency affects a team's won/loss percentage, I've yet to come across the study that measures momentum on a baseball field. Whether they've found a way to measure it or not, momentum is a significant factor in the outcome of a baseball game.

Also, have you ever talked to a baseball player who said he enjoys it when his teammate keeps putting himself in a 2-strike hole with runners in scoring position because he's waiting for his homerun pitch rather than being a good teammate and getting the runner in from 3rd base? Baseball players aren't clueless out there. They know when a guy is playing winning baseball and putting the team first, and they know when a guy isn't on board with the program...whether it be by way of selfishness, habit or ignorance.

This is yet another argument where the sabermetricians will be reversing field in a few years saying they didn't really think it all the way through and didn't consider all of the factors. You know, like defensive metrics, clutch hitting, etc. But the little guys are so darned adamant about it in the meantime...

Amateur sabermetricians -- they run on batteries.

. . .

I whole heartedly appreciate and embrace the advances that expert analysts like Bill James, Eddie Epstein, Rob Neyer, Voros McCracken, John Thorn, Pete Palmer, et al. have contributed to the baseball world. Hell, I've said for quite some time that Bill James would be my ideal MLB commissioner. Even better, Moneyball is one of the top handful of baseball books I've read, right behind Bill James' Historical Abstract and several of his annuals.

What I'm saying is that the legions of nerds that the movement has sprung completely miss the point of the movement. It was started as a way of questioning conventional wisdom. It was begun to combat narrow-mindedness and skin-deep thinking about baseball. Unfortunately, the nerds who like to play at analyst have been bogged under orthodoxy for years (and even more unfortunately, the internet is littered with their species). They don't question sabermetric tenets. They've fallen prone to the same stringent thinking that the movement was against from the beginning. They attack rather than consider. It's no surprise, really. All revolutions behave this way...survival is a basic instinct.

One of the things that really makes Bill James stand out compared to his trekkies is that he is constantly challenging his own thinking. While they dogmatically protect his, he's moving on to new areas and questioning whether he was right all along. That's admirable. Would that his spawn followed his lead on that score...

Like I said, the amateur ones run on batteries. You just have to pat them on head occasionally..