A couple postseason thoughts

• Buck Martinez kept going on and on during tonight's Angels - Red Sox game about how hard closing was relative to setting up. He spouted nonsense about closers being able to pitch "with the game on the line" while setup men can't and how closers "want the responsibility" and feel like they're "carrying their 24 teammates on their shoulders."
  
  Sucks to be a set up man, eh? Not only do you somehow not know how to pitch with the game on the line (because, as we all know, runs in the ninth inning count twice or something), but you are also an irresponsible coward. Honestly, what compels people to talk about closing this way?
  
  Naturally, it gave me much satisfaction to see Jered Weaver, certified non-closer, close out a one run lead in the bottom of the twelfth against the heart of the Red Sox order. Closing: it just isn't that hard.
  
  
• Dustin Pedroia is now something like 0 for 17 in the postseason. He is coming off an MVP caliber season. He will not be accused of choking. Why? Mostly because he's short, white, scrappy, and low-paid. People will point to earlier postseason success instead of dwelling on his current slump. I hope someone can explain to me how this is fair to Alex Rodriguez.
  
  
• The bottom line with these two previous thoughts is that people on both sides of any argument can find anecdotal evidence to support their position. This is why eventually it becomes necessary to either prove a point logically from a set of common assumptions or to provide evidence from a rigorous examination of data. If you cannot do either of these, your argument deserves no respect.
  
  Interestingly, this rigorous examination of data is called "statistics." It is the science of science in a certain sense. It exists preciesly so that arguments can be settled instead of devolving into an endless series of platitudes and anecdotes. They aren't evil. They exist because sooner or later a question has to be settled from an objective basis. For the life of me, I don't understand why more people don't realize this.

20

I'd like to tell you that words cannot express how happy I am for Mike Mussina on securing his 20th win of the 2008 season. I'd like to, but it's not true. Here, let me show you how easy it is:

I'm really freakin' happy about this.

I'm mostly happy because people have unjustly branded Mike an inferior pitcher because that magical confluence of events that goes into reaching this particular arbitrary milestone never materialized for him until now. Those people are now forced to recognize The Moose as one of the best pitchers of his generation. This likely sows up a well deserved Hall of Fame spot. That makes me happy.

On the other hand, it should also give us all pause to reflect on how silly it is that for many, the key cog in Mike Mussina's Hall of Fame case was a meaningless game in September of his 18th Major League Baseball season. To many, Mike Mussina's career is now somehow significantly better because he won a game today; that his previous 535 starts are now somehow more meaningful because of his 536th.

That's a load of crap, and I hope everyone reading this realizes that. Before today Mike Mussina was a great pitcher. He didn't need this to be great. He needed it for other people to recognize his greatness. This win is a drop in the bucket; the garnish on an already excellent season; the signature on a masterpiece of a career.

But a Picasso would still be transcendent even if Picasso never signed it. The signature on a work of art has nothing to do with its inherent quality. It merely signals to otherwise uninformed that it is worthy of their respect and admiration.

People now respect Mike Mussina's career more than they ever have, even if they're only doing it because they saw his signature on what was already a masterpiece before he signed it. Sometimes you have to accept that people will do the right thing for the wrong reasons. Today, I can live with that.

Congratulations, Moose, from a fan who didn't need to see you sign your opus to know how special your career already was.

A-Rod sucks

So say Michael Kay and Al Leiter. It's more of the same "You gotta watch the games" garbage that always gets thrown around.

People, get this through your skulls: perception is not reality. Just because you perceive a pattern does not mean it exists. If I could communicate just one idea to people when it comes to analysis, this would probably be it.

A-Rod hasn't hit with men on base this year. So what? He'll probably finish 25 RBIs off his excellent-even-by-his-own-lofty-standards 2007. The Yankees are going to finish nearly 200 runs shy of their total from last year. Were you expecting Alex to drive in 300+ runs?! Surely there must be some other explanation. In fact, not only is it impossible to find any real evidence that hitting with men on base is a separate skill from simply hitting in general, but the difference between A-Rod's so-called "clutch" numbers and his overall numbers is vanishingly small.

What's the difference between A-Rod's pathetic .232 average with RISP and two out and a .300 batting average?

Five hits.

Five.

Hits.

What could we expect those hits to net the Yankees? Five runs? Seven? Ten? If A-Rod's five missing hits give the Yankees ten more runs, they'd likely be only five game behind the Red Sox instead of six. With six to play. Yeah. That's a huuuuuuuge difference.

With RISP regardless of outs, A-Rod is hitting only .261, a mammoth seven hits away from .300. Yeah. Seven whole hits. A truly gigantic difference.

With runners on base, regardless of scoring position, A-Rod is hitting a pedestrian .274, still seven hits away from .300.

Notice a pattern? Not only is the difference about as far from significant as possible, but as we increase the sample size, A-Rod's numbers become closer and closer to his overall numbers.

Do you want to know something else perhaps even more telling? A-Rod's OBP with RISP and two out is .424. That's higher than his overall OBP. His OBP with RISP regardless of outs is .398, still higher than his overall OBP. Perhaps no one wants to give A-Rod a pitch to hit when he can really do damage. Note that again as we increase the sample size, his OBP retreats to his normal level. This regression to the mean is the hallmark of random statistical noise.

Does this look like the profile of a choker or someone who had "it" last year and lost "it" this year? Or does it look like random statistical variation perhaps coupled with some very cautious pitchers?

Of all the Yankees' problems this year, A-Rod's performance is probably the very bottom of the list (OK, it's more of a problem than Mike Mussina). There is no reason, there is no reason, why we should ascribe A-Rod's "struggles" to anything other than the capricious whims of Lady Luck.

I'm sorry if that makes a worse story.

Is this blog dead?

Nope. Or at least, I hope not. Currently, and probably for the extended future, I am being crushed at work by a large project that does two things to me. First, it takes up more of my time than it used to. Second, it saps my mental energy to the point where I just don't want to think about analysis in any serious way. Whether or not you think serious analysis has been a requisite for posting here in the past, I certainly do not have the heart for it right now.

Nonetheless, there are still things I want to talk about, and I hope that in the future I will again be able to care enough to write about them here.

Some quick thoughts:

• So much for everyone who thought the Tigers were world beaters.
• So much for everyone who thought the Rays weren't.
• I would not worry too much about the New York Yankees going forward. Every team experiences years like this. New York is in an excellent position to recover.
• Joba Chamberlain must remain a starting pitcher.

I'll catch you all later.

Summing up RBI

Keith Law in a chat today on ESPN:

Todd (MA): Perhaps the RBI stat is overvalued, but it's hardly meaningless. The team that scores the most runs wins the game, and the RBI stat helps to identify what players succeed at tallying runs for their team. The ability to hit with runners on base is arguably one of the most important abilities in baseball, perhaps second only to proficiency in getting on base.

Keith Law: All it does is tell us who happened to come up to the plate with men on base. This is not valuable information. And there is no evidence that "the ability to hit with runners on base" is at all distinct from "the ability to hit."

It's that last sentence that basically sums it up. Every single time the issue is really studied, one of two conclusions is made:

1. There is no ability to hit with men on base that is in any way distinct from simply the ability to hit.
2. There is an ability to hit with men on base, but its discernible impact is so small, that you're better off just proceeding as if #1 were true anyway.

I'm not sure if it can be summed up any better than Keith did.

But who will pitch the eighth inning?!?!

Over at the RLYW, SG notes that since May 29th, seven relievers in the New York Yankees bullpen have combined for 128 innings of 2.53 RA baseball. May 29th was the day that the New York Yankees moved Joba Chamberlain out of the bullpen and into the starting rotation.

It's only been a couple of months, but already Joba, with an assist from the baseball gods, has shown people why it was absolute lunacy to consider keeping him in the bullpen. Not only has he maintained his dominant stuff throughout his starts, but the bullpen hasn't really missed him. The team hasn't been hemoragging late inning leads. In fact, as far as my admittedly spotty memory can recall, they haven't blown one game that they might have won if Joba had been available in the bullpen (confirmation bias warning).

That's obviously not going to continue, but the larger point remains: it's just not that hard to pitch one inning of baseball. The difference between Joba and some random reliever pitching the eighth inning is dwarfed by the difference beween Joba and some random starter pitching the first seven. Case closed.

The Uncanny Valley

In robotics, there exists a hypothesis known as "the uncanny valley." In short, the hypothesis is that humans respond with increasing empathy to robots (and other objects) as they become increasingly human up until a point where they are almost human. At this point, humans will instead experience strong repulsion as they now perceive those characteristics that make them un-human instead of those that make them more human. However, this repulsion only lasts for a little while because as the robots become even more human we once again begin to identify strongly with them.

This hypothesis tends to ring true to me. Just look at the reaction that most people have to computer animated characters. We tend to obsess over the things that make them less human. We find them creepy, even if technically they are superbly animated. We don't have that reaction to simple hand-drawn animations. Indeed, much animation is designed to create truly unrealistic characteristics that are designed to elicit a truly empathetic response.

This, of course, has nothing at all to do with baseball. Not obviously, anyway.

I began thinking about this concept with respect to baseball as it pertains to baseball analysis. All baseball analysis is designed to simplify our view of baseball so that we can more easily extract information from it. As statistics become more and more complex, they begin to capture real baseball more and more accurately.

But will we reach a point where the models involved will be so minute that they miss the big picture? Can we create models that are too detailed? Will baseball models reach a point where they are so close to real baseball that they actually cease to tell us anything useful, instead providing us with either totally obvious or totally false conclusions?

One of the advantages of statistics is their coarse-grained nature. By not being bogged down in details, we can cut right to some important if general truths.

Obviously, I don't have an answer to these questions. And really, I probably don't need one. As long as we can measure the efficacy of the models we create, we should be able to discern between useful and useless models. Nonetheless, it's a question that's been eating at me for a few weeks. Thoughts?