Baseball ProGUESTus

I understand your ignorance is bliss stance, but I would always rather have insight and knowledge rather than blissful ignorance. Personally, I obsess over things and I crave information to feed my obsessions.

Nice article, I think we all as baseball dorks have had a moment with our father where we realized we are watching the same game differently. Mine was trying to justfify drafting Hanley Ramirez, a player he vaguely knew of, first in fantasy. "Dad," I said, "he's like a late 90s Derek Jeter." And then we were on the same page again.

Father & Son

Two generational gaps!

My father, also a scientist who loved the Pirates, found it a great pity back in the '70's that his scientist-son (then with calculator) wasted the time (between pitches!) by calculating what we now call OPS's!

Although my stepson (to my continuing joy) belatedly discovered SABRmetrics, he has no interest in my earlier (pre-Web) publications!

Dick Cramer (clutch hitting, STATS founder, etc.)

Great to see you hear, Will. I frequently wrestle with the same things you write about, but in the end I'm happy to be eating from the tree of knowledge. This video here frames it pretty nicely:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSZNsIFID28

This is a good article. I'm pretty close to your father's age (6 years younger). I don't necessarily agree that ignorance is bliss; while I don't obsess over sabermetrics, I do understand most of them in at least a general way and appreciate what they add to the understanding of strategy.

Yet, I also get tired of it. In many ways, sabermetrics is making baseball less fun and making it more of a job than a hobby. I think the obsession with understanding can get in the way of enjoyment. Sabermetrics oftendisparages the "little things" that baseball people enjoy, yet these are often the things that make the game fun. For example, most sabermetricians grow livid at the notion that David Eckstein is revered because he is "scrappy" and brings "intangibles." Yet, it's the human element of watching someone like him succeed that makes sports fun. The fact is, no one likes to think their life is out of their control. Yet, we know that much of life, like much of baseball (e.g. BABIP)is essentially random. But who wants to live their life that way? We want to think that anyone, such as David Eckstein, can succeed with hard work and dedication. No one really wants to hear that Eckstein is overrated and has no business being in the lineup.

I respect sabermetrics and will continue to look to them for insights into the game. I despair at baseball announcers that seemingly take pride in their ignorance of statistical analysis. At the same time, it is a game, it's entertainment. I will still enjoy talking about pitchers' wins or hitters' RBIs even though I know they are, to a large extent, meaningless because it's fun. I will accept that FIPs and WAR tell us something significant about how the game works, but I don't have the time or inclination to delve into the intricacies and worry about the difference between replacement level and league average performance.

Thanks for an enjoyable read right before Father's Day.

To me it comes down to this. The more time I spend staring at spreadsheets delving into these wonderful ways to assess effort and potential the less time I spend actually watching the players I'm studying so closely.

Go figure.

It seems like this and some of the comments are just thumb-sucking ways to create a fake problem. Who knows if those who take the simple-minded approach to the game really enjoy it more? Subjective pleasure is a mystery.

And, even if I know the hit-and-run play or the sacrifice bunt are not optimal strategies, I still enjoy those plays if they work and help my team win. Denying oneself the simple pleasures of being a team's fan -- both the sabrmetric and non-sabrmetric types -- is not about sabrmetrics, but much more about the neurotic personality.

To me, Will hit it on the head when he said "small sample size." To me that's the key to enjoying baseball without over-dorking on the stats side of it. Usually when I watch one game I'm not stat nerd. I can separate the overall (X team is good) from the right now (X team is not good right now). But honestly, sometimes its fun to watch a game and know that the one team is winning because they're getting lucky hits. That doesn't have to ruin the game.

In any case, I enjoyed the article. Great read, Will.

I don't relate to this problem at all. My discovery of sabermetrics in the late '90s augmented my interest in macro ideas around baseball, e.g., how do teams win, what strategies are advisable in what situations, etc. But it hasn't changed the way I root for the Yankees, or how much I enjoy doing so. Put another way, my understanding that Derek Jeter is not much of a defender doesn't change the fact that every time a ball is hit on the ground up the middle, I root hard for him to overcome his leaden feet and throw out the runner.

An imperfect comparison: I understand enough about math and odds to know that there's no such thing as a "hot table" in craps, and that in the long run I am very likely to lose more money than I win. That knowledge doesn't stop me from putting down my money and hoping to come away a winner on a particular night.

I like this article. I definitely watch baseball now at 30 differently than I did when I was 7, but I still think I enjoy it the same. It's just hard to be as optimistic as then knowing what I know.

I loved watching Shawon Dunston fly around the bases even though I didn't understand at the time the woeful percentage he was actually on the basepaths. I loved watching Dawson and Grace hit even if the former never drew walks and the latter was underpowered for a first basemen. Sometimes I miss that childlike naivity.

Sometimes, I think there is a false dichotomy between sabermetrics and "observational" baseball. For example, every time I go to a game in person, it's obvious that there are a lot of lucky hits; balls that aren't hit hard that find holes. And, of course, conversely, balls hit hard right at a fielder. Anyone that watches the game should realize that pitchers that don't strike out a lot of guys are susceptible to balls getting through. Same thing with RBIs; it should be obvious that RBIs are heavily team oriented and that anyone decent hitter should get a lot of RBIs if his team is getting guys on base. (One thing I have never understood is why no one ever talks about "cheap" RBIs, such as when a guy comes up with a runner on third when the team is well behind, hits a weak ground ball and gets a meaningless RBI.) Yet, the "baseball insiders" often refuse to accept the logic of what they really should know.

A lot of it is because people are uncomfortable with the idea of luck deciding a game. So, they want to pretend that there is such a thing as clutch hitting because they don't want to accept that hits in these situations are largely random occurances. Or saying a pitcher "knows how to win" gives an illusion of control. Guys aren't losing because of bad luck--they just don't know how to win.

I think the big dichotomous split has to do with the sample size of one. Much of sabermetrics is in quantifying trends over large samples. That's how we get to the nth decimal point. Yet, in a single game, literally anything can, and sometimes will, happen. We can't learn anything from watching one game, other than gleaning how given players can use their tools. This also helps explain why the scouts vs. stats split can be so wide at times. Scouts also make stats, but they don't watch the stats - they watch the tools. The tools may or may not show up in the stats (depends on level and other factors) but they can help explain the stats and work towards building a model that will explain the likelihood (not the certainty) of the tools and the numbers converging over time.