Why stats are important

Because I just watched LaTroy @!&*#%!*%#!&^$!(*@#! Hawkins blow a one run lead in the bottom of the 11th inning and statistics are the only thing capable of providing me with an objective point of view to prevent one excruciatingly painful moment from permanently warping my perspective.

Even LaTroy @!&*#%!*%#!&^$!(*@#! Hawkins was likely to convert that save. He didn't. It happens.

*(^#$*&#%*^#$@*#^!

Why don't we see complete games anymore?

Craig Calcaterra over at Shysterball has a brief post up about why we see fewer complete games in the present than we did in the past. His thesis, and that of the gentleman to whom he links, is that because teams have more money invested in young pitchers now than they did in the past, they are more careful with their arms. They don't push their arms to their limits for fear of losing their investment entirely.

I think this is mostly true, but I want to make a finer point: it doesn't really matter how much you paid for the services of a particular pitcher. All that matters is how to extract the best value from that pitcher, or rather, from your system of training pitchers.

Once you've signed a young pitcher, the money that you have paid to him is a sunk cost. You cannot get it back. Thus, the money that you have already paid to pitchers should not factor at all into the training and usage of your pitchers. If the best way to extract performance from your pitchers is to have them all throw 300 innings immediately upon leaving high school and see which ones survive, then this will be the best way no matter how much you paid them. Thus, it would not be correct to alter your system of pitcher training and usage just because your pitchers cost you more money than they did in the past.

However, there is a cost to determining which system of pitcher training and usage is the most efficient. In the past, it is entirely possible that this cost outweighed the cost of paying young pitchers. Thus, teams simply hired as many young arms as they could, worked the hell out of them, and thus found which ones would stick. This may have been cheaper than actually determining how to maximize that value of any given set of pitchers. I think that this is highly plausible when you consider the relatively high cost of data analysis (no computers) and the relative inexpensivenesses of pitching.

Now that it costs a lot more to hire a pitcher (and a lot less to analyze data), the rewards for having an efficient system are much higher. Thus, teams are more willing to invest in research to determine which systems of pitcher training and usage are the most efficient. In the process of doing so, they have apparently determined that it is better for your pitchers to not ask them to throw twenty complete games every year.

Whether or not this is the correct conclusion is a completely different question.

The narrative fallacy

The boys over at River Ave. Blues have absolutely nailed it:

The Yankees are losing now. Many people are trying to fabricate reasons why the Yankees are losing. But there is one, just one reason for their losing games:

Their pitching is allowing more runs than their offense is scoring.

That’s it. That is the reason, in totality, why the Yankees are losing games. Pretty boring, huh? So it’s no wonder why people create these narratives to explain the situation. Narrative is far more interesting, far more engaging than facts. It’s a shame that it gives us zero insight into the game.

This is so amazingly correct that I'm kind of ashamed I didn't post on it earlier.

We love baseball because we love the narrative. There's nothing wrong with that. I love the narrative too. However, it's a mistake to assume that the narrative in any way has any bearing on the decision making process associated with running a baseball team. To run a team correctly, one must be immune to the narrative. One must learn to ignore the story and analyze only the facts. That's hard, especially when it seems obvious to everyone that insert team name here is playing lifeless, uninspired baseball and is in need of a "spark."

Hank: Shut up

Dear Mr. Hank Steinbrenner,

You know nothing about baseball. Spend your money on people who do know something, and then STFU. Your team will actually be better off if you do. For reference, please study the last thirty-five years of Yankee baseball.

Your Pal,

John P. Lynch

Tim McCarver making sense

I like to rag on Tim a lot, so I want to give him some props for his refusal to play along with Joe Buck's idiocy in regards to jinxes and curses during the Cubs - Cardinals game on Fox Saturday afternoon.

Since the Cubs were playing, Joe started rambling on about their supposedly cursed past. That Kosuke Fukudome appeared recently on the cover of Sports Illustrated also served as fodder for Joe's discussion of famous jinxes. Joe remarked that Fukudome had gone 4-4 the day after the his cover issue hit the stand. After musing over Fukudome's ignorance of Cubs history and the variety of curses associated with them, he then asked Tim if he believed in curses or jinxes.

Now, it would be normal for Tim to play along with this silly idea. Tim however chose to rather bluntly shoot it down. "No," he said, "I don't believe in curses or jinxes or anything like that."

Buck then decided to bait McCarver by talking about how poorly McCarver had played after his two appearances on the cover of SI. McCarver responded again bluntly: "Can't a guy just play badly? What can't a guy just not play well? You don't need some curse or jinx to play poorly. Haven't we come far enough as a society not to believe in those things?"

Buck disagreed. He was probably being facetious, but I don't care. This whole superstitious curse nonsense is junk. It was junk for the Red Sox and it's junk for the Cubs. Yeah, it's marginally funny, but only for so long. I'm tired about hearing about the freakin' Billy Goat. I don't want to hear about black cats.

Tim McCarver, at least for five minutes, was a stalwart defender of the scientific way of looking at things, of reason and common sense, of not being an idiot.

Thanks, Tim. I'll lay off the next time you make want to tear my hair out.

Confirmation bias

From BPro's Kevin Goldstein:

Well sometimes prospects just explode, and small sample sizes sometimes are damned, as here is one player from each of the full-season leagues who is exploding, but also has the scouting reports or existing potential to confidently up their stock.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

This is classic confirmation bias. "I thought these guys were going to be good, and, hey, they are good." Small samples are always small samples. They do not add anything to the discussion.* These guys may still be excellent prospects, but that has nothing to do with their performance in a limited set of games and everything to do with the fact that they were already great prospects. This mindset has absolutely got to be stricken from baseball coverage.

* OK, technically they add a small sliver of evidence. If a prospect was 90% likely to be awesome, the small sample tells us that he is now 90.01% likely to be awesome.** If you want to hitch your analysis wagon to that, that's your business.

** Numbers are totally made up for example purposes. You get the point, I hope.

Bullpen strategy

Some thoughts on baseball, having just returned from Jacobs Field (yeah, you heard me) in Cleveland where I watched my Yankees lose 4-3 to the Tribe and a one out single on the bottom of the ninth:

• If you go to a ballpark, and they offer you a choice of a "hot dog" and a "kosher dog" it is incumbent upon you as a lover of the baseball experience to choose the "kosher dog." It will be a much higher quality dog and better cooked too, not one of those pale, limp pieces of garbage you get at the normal concession stands. If this is not the case at your local ball park, you should consider some sort of protest. Furthermore, if you happen to be eating your dog in Cleveland, you get to enjoy this superior kosher dog with their stadium mustard, which kicks the crap out of the normal yellow stuff. Simply put, if you are not having this experience with your hot dog at a ball game, it simply means that you are trying to fill the hot dog sized hole in your heart with cheap imitations. I had two. This may not have been enough.
• The Jake is a great place to watch a baseball game. The park was built with a vertical emphasis, which is how stadiums should be built. It keeps fans close to the action. Tiger Stadium was like this, and unfortunately Comerica Park is not. Between this and the hot dogs, I may start watching the majority of my baseball in Cleveland.
• Finally, the real topic of this post. This one is real simple. In fact, it's so simple that it blows my mind that every MLB manager does not understand it. It's like this:
  
  FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, YOU MUST USE YOUR BEST RELIEF PITCHER WHEN GIVING UP A RUN MEANS NECESSARILY LOSING THE BASEBALL GAME.
  
  For emphasis:
  
  
  FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, YOU MUST USE YOUR BEST RELIEF PITCHER WHEN GIVING UP A RUN MEANS NECESSARILY LOSING THE BASEBALL GAME.
  
  You see, when the game is tied in the bottom of ninth inning, giving up any runs means losing. Always. No exceptions. If you give up a run you will not win. You will lose. It cannot happen any other way. However, many managers prefer to not deploy their best pitcher in these circumstances, preferring to use their closer after they have acquired a lead. There are only two completely fatal, totally obvious, elementary flaws to this thinking.
  
  First, you may never take the lead, losing with your best pitcher unused. Awesome. Second, you may take a large lead, rendering the use of your best pitcher meaningless.
  
  Today, in Cleveland, Joe Girardi, like his predecessor, opted to use an inferior relief pitcher, Ross Ohlendorf, instead of Mariano Rivera (or, I should add, Joba Chamberlain, who may have been being rested for other reasons) in the bottom of the ninth in a tie game and predictably lost.
  
  Let's go over this one more time: if Ross Ohlendorf surrenders even a single run, YOU LOSE. YOU MOTHERHUMPING LOSE. YOU CANNOT WIN. The only reason that you would not use your best available pitcher in the scenario is if you think that using him now will cause him to be unavailable for a more critical situation (which really doesn't exist anyway) in subsequent days. Mariano Rivera can pitch on back to back days. Sometimes, he can pitch three in a row. He was rested. By not using him in this situation, you are essentially betting that you can't use him tonight because you might need him two or three days in a row in higher leverage situations (which really don't exist anyway) immediately after this. This is a nearly impossible bet.
  
  I just can't get over this. Necessarily, run prevention is more important in the tie game in the bottom of the ninth than in any subsequent inning in which you have the lead. This is fact. This is not speculation. It is a mathematical necessity. The laws that govern the entire universe would have to disintegrate for this to not be true.
  
  Pitchers exist to prevent runs. They exist for no other purpose. Therefore, the best pitcher should always be used to prevent the most critical run. And no run is more critical than the run that guarantees a loss.