A Theory on the Acceptance of Sabermetrics
Posted by Bill Baer on Saturday, March 6, 2010 at 7:40 am
Pardon me while I think aloud, but this has been on my mind lately. Recently, I wrote a couple of posts (this and this) on my blog Crashburn Alley detailing why I think it would be a good idea to trade Ryan Howard. It inspired a lot of debate and it was linked to heavily on the Internet. I’ve read quite a few of the comments my suggestions drew, both on my blog and elsewhere on the Internet. Most of them were civil and intelligently-written, but as it goes on the Internet, there were a few that were the opposite.
so how does your stupid rating system analyze a down year or an injury. Why would you wanna keep jayson werth over ryan howard? lets see you could have a player putting up historic numbers, numbers that only babe ruth and sammy sosa put up, or you could have a player who had one good season, has a [poor] work ethic, but shows promise. Ill take the garuntee for an extra 8-10 mil. Look at the numbers that worked for a 150 years, not the numbers some nerd made to adjust for bs. how about this stat geeks, why dont you actually watch the game instead of trying to be gm’s. go play mlb the show
I don’t write this to complain about Internet commenters. I’ve been on YouTube. Bear with me while I set up my point. David Murphy of the Philadelphia Daily News recently wrote an article where he highlighted the Sabermetric argument that pegs Phillies lefty J.A. Happ for a mean-regression in 2010. It’s not an outlandish proposition, but you wouldn’t know it by reading the comments. The impolite comments that I had read when it was posted have since been removed but there is a polite one left that will help illustrate my point:
This carefully considered article offers a small window into some sabermetricians’ violation of their own principles. When facts don’t fit a theory, an honest scientist will adjust his theory to better reflect a more complex reality. But there was no adjustment made after Chris Young defied their predictions. Their theory remains the same and is used to condemn J.A. Happ. And that which doesn’t fit the theory? It’s attributed to LUCK!?!? Really? Mysticism is used to patch the hole in the theory? As Murphy’s research into Happ’s walks indicates, sabermetricians like Law are failing to consider all known variables. That’s bad science. And attributing limitations in the theory to luck? That’s anti-science. That’s voodoo.
These comments have me wondering why casual baseball fans are so dismissive of Sabermetrics and the people who study them. I know the traditional claim is that people watch baseball for entertainment and don’t want math to interfere with that. However, they could just as easily ignore Sabermetrics without such an emotional response. For instance, I don’t feel the need to decorate my car with fancy electronic equipment and rims, but I don’t leave negative comments on articles or on message boards, speaking to people that are fans of this hobby.
This observation piqued my interest because people do not have similar reactions to science in other areas. For the most part, people do not question the credibility of other scientists. When a nutritionist is interviewed on the nightly news about a harmful ingredient in a popular dish, people accept the statements on face value and make changes accordingly (despite that the arguments are stripped down to fit into a small window of time). When a meteorologist calls for a blizzard, people stick their windshield wipers up and dig out the snow blower in the basement.
However, when Sabermetricians — who are, by most accounts, scientists in the field of baseball — say that pitchers have little to no control on balls put in play, the reaction tends to be dismissive. One of the hottest-trending Sabermetricians around, Matt Swartz, admits he was initially dismissive of DIPS theory:
My introduction to true baseball analysis came during my first year of graduate school in 2003, when my roommate interrupted my studying and asked me to read a chapter of this neat book called Moneyball. He explained that it was an inside look at how the A’s were able to field such good teams without having much money. He also said there was one chapter that really shocked him, the one that explained the theory of how pitchers do not control their Batting Average on Balls in Play (BABIP), but only walks, strikeouts, and home runs.
“There’s no way that’s true,” I told him, horrified that he knew so little about baseball and thinking that he would understand if he had played the game. He said he believed the book’s hypothesis, and I asked him the question that we all ask when we first hear of DIPS Theory:
“Do you think if I went took a major-league mound that hitters would hit me no better than Pedro Martinez?”
Despite the popular claim that you can always see something new in a baseball game, there are finite events that can occur on the baseball field. They have been neatly categorized into buckets such as safe or out; ball or strike; ground ball, fly ball, or line drive; single, double, triple, or home run; fastball, change-up, slider, and so on. That makes the data much easier to collect and analyze than in other, more prevalent areas of science. For instance, we know surprisingly little about the human body despite the incredible advancements that have been made over the years. Yet the research of neurosurgeons is never called into question by the average person, but the research of Sabermetricians is constantly taken to task. Sabermetric research has been very thorough and very convincing to many people, resulting in sea change in the philosophy found in baseball front offices.
Bill Baer reading "The Book" by Tom Tango.
Why is it that Sabermetrics is held to such lofty standards? I think it’s the ego of the baseball fan. Most fans grow up on the game. Personally, I have been watching baseball since I was two years old, if I remember a talk with my mother from a while ago. When you watch baseball for so long, you tend to think you know a lot about it. On the other hand, people generally don’t know a whole lot about nutrition or meteorology or neuroscience. As a result, they do not have the ability to be critical, to fashion well-constructed arguments, and to ask the right questions.
It’s true that the stats-vs.-scouts debate has lost its luster and Sabermetrics has become much more mainstream in baseball, essentially winning the fight if there ever was one. However, with casual fans, I think Sabermetrics is still making baby steps. Casual fans aren’t going to make the effort to learn a new perspective from which to view baseball; they are not going to memorize more acronyms and their respective formulas; and they are not going to take the time to apply them on an everyday basis. These fans have grown up on the game, have experienced no drawbacks from using AVG/HR/RBI, and see no reason to change.
I am not saying that that mindset is wrong. Making the switch from AVG/HR/RBI to OPS or EQA or wOBA isn’t anywhere near as important as making the switch from double bacon cheeseburgers to salads, or from one medication to another. The need to understand these new stats is much less important than it is to be well-educated in other areas.
That said, I think that the answer to “why do casual fans aim such vitriol at Sabermetrics?” is ego. Of scientists whose research could reasonably go unquestioned (I’m not saying that they should), Sabermetricians would be found among the first on the list. Yet, presumably due to the ego of the lifelong baseball fan, their feet are constantly held to the flame because these fans have adopted a mindset that has worked for many, many years. They can ask (usually unanswerable or irrelevant) questions and fashion competitive (often logically fallacious) arguments which essentially ensures that they will not change their mind no matter what. For similar reasons, most creationists will never accept evolution as a viable theory.
It also doesn’t help that Americans are not good at math. But that’s another story for another time.
What do you think? Is my theory valid? Or are casual fans dismissive of Sabermetrics for other reasons?
Interesting topic. I disagree that it’s all about ego on the part of “traditional baseball people”. My sense is, instead, that the “science” of Sabermetrics is still very much in its infancy. I mean, I was working on projects back in ‘87 at school wherein we did video analysis of roughly the same complexity that “Field F/X” will have, and “Field F/X” is now debuting… in 2010, more than 2 decades later.
My gut reaction is that people who think that the tools of other sciences are being applied in a fully appropriate manner to the field (bad pun intended) of baseball are just folks who have a hammer and see every problem as a nail. One of the more egregious examples is MGL’s laughable claim that he could add 7 wins just by applying some ridiculous principles to the management of a team, and shows a lack of appreciation for the subtleties of baseball.
Fortunately, Sabermetrics is growing. 10 years ago, defense was drastically underappreciated by the Sabermetric community, despite decades of “old school” baseball people harping on it as being a key to winning. Now, it’s “trendy” and “new”. Anyway, it’s a growing field of study, IMO.
The emotional response comes from statements like these: Law wrote that Happ’s season was “a raging fluke driven by an unsustainable performance with men in scoring position that was about luck, not skill.”
Statements like that are a far cry from saying there is good reason to expect JA Happ’s stats will not be as good this year as they were last year. It should also be noted I think instead of saying things like “fluke” and “luck”,you should say that Happ’s stats were an outlier. That way, the writer doesn’t seem to be taking a defensive approach to the fact that a player defied their stats, he simply states that history suggests it will not happen again.