The New Ballgame: Understanding Baseball Statistics for the Casual Fan (5 page)

aseball is the ultimate
second-guessing
game. There's enough time
between pitches to think
about the possibilities.
There's enough time between batters to think about the alternatives. There are
enough strategic moves in a typical game to think about what could have been.
Fans who have "owned" their own salaried players in fantasy baseball leagues
and who have "managed" 1,000 or more games with simulations like Strat-O Matic are sure they know better. They've been there, done that, enjoyed the
same successes and wallowed in the same mistakes as the real managers and
GMs. Second-guessed daily, exasperated big-league managers lament that their
decisions are brilliant when they work and dumb when they don't.

A competitive sport played by competitive people and enjoyed by competitive fans, baseball is fertile for passionate argument and scholarly analysis. But it's tough to win those debates about what we've learned from the past
and what we can expect in the future, or which teams and which players are
the best (now, and all-time). For all of the new data (statistics) we acquire and
the ever-improving means to analyze it, the art of baseball-performance on
the field-stays ahead of the science. Just when we think that 100-plus years
of study means we've seen enough baseball, or at least enough of the game's
box scores, to be immune to surprise, along comes a team like the 2005 Chicago White Sox-who not only out-performed expectations, but even outperformed (in wins) all the statistics they produced. Baseball keeps surprising
us. It's a team game, after all, and team-dependent statistics are serpentine,
making cause and effect difficult to isolate. For every general statement one
alert fan wants to make about the game and its players, another alert fan is
going to be able to cite the noteworthy exceptions that disprove the absolute
truth of the first claim.

This chapter is designed to help you become a more alert fan.

So remember:

• Teams underachieve when star players under-perform. They overachieve when enough lesser players have career years. Before the 2005 season, almost nobody picked the Chicago White Sox to win it
all. Even rarer was the forecaster (general manager, media analyst, or
fantasy-league expert)-if there was one-who predicted that White
Sox pitcher Jon Garland would finally fulfill his potential, winning
18 games, losing 10, and producing a fine 3.39 ERA. In five previous years with the Sox, Garland had a combined won-lost record of
46-5 1, a career ERA of 4.68 (never better than 4.38), and had never
won more than 12 games in a season. A team without a dominant
superstar, the Sox enjoyed career seasons from Garland, Jose Contreras, Neal Cotts, Cliff Politte, and catcher A.J. Pierzynski, who hit
18 home runs after never hitting more than 11 in any other season.
The Sox got dramatic rebound seasons from outfielders Jermaine
Dye and Scott Podsednik, third baseman Joe Crede, designated hitter
Carl Everett, and pitchers Freddy Garcia and Mark Buehrle, whose
performances all had been in decline for one or more years. The Sox
depended heavily on the unexpectedly strong rookie contributions of
second baseman Tadahito Iguchi and pitcher Bobby Jenks.

No doubt, the improvement by some of these players fueled the improvement by others. Starting pitchers, for instance, win more and
pitch more innings if their teammates hit better. They have lower
ERAs if the relief pitchers who succeed them are more brilliant than
ever.

Give much credit for the Sox success to Chicago General Manager
Ken Williams and Manager Ozzie Guillen for assembling the parts
and getting the whole to exceed the sum (if the Sox had won only as many games as their runs scored-runs allowed differential said they
should win, they would not even have made it into the postseason).
But few people are optimistic enough to project so much simultaneous improvement by so many players.

• Trades and free-agency keep changing individual and team fortunes. Despite their first World Series victory since 1917, the Sox
made significant changes after sharing the champagne bottles. Almost every Chicago player who did not improve in 2005-outfielder
Aaron Rowand, designated hitter Frank Thomas, and pitchers Orlando Hernandez and Damaso Marte-started 2006 on another team.
They were replaced principally by designated hitter Jim Thorne and
pitcher Javier Vazquez-who both underperformed for other teams
in 2005-and rookie outfielder Brian Anderson.

Different surroundings-a new supporting cast of teammates, a
new ballpark, maybe a switch between the American and National
leagues that presents new opponents-can have dramatic effects on
player performance, for better or for worse.

• Better described as random variation or better still as Insufficient
Sample (the two most important words in statistics), the classic illustration of Insufficient Sample is probably apocryphal, but here
goes: The chancellor at the University of North Carolina wanted to
know which degree majors produced the highest salaries in the real world. The study he commissioned returned this startling discovery:
geography. It turns out there were only three graduates with geography majors, and one of them was Michael Jordan.

This is not the book to discuss standard deviation, regression to the
mean, and other sophisticated math (you can thank my editor for
keeping me in line), but know this: Much of what happens in a mere
500 at-bats or 200 innings pitched is subject to chance.

Most of Podsednik's batting decline between 2003 and 2004 and his
rebound in 2005 (from a.314 batting average in 2003 to .249 and back
to .290) can be explained by normal statistical fluctuations in the life
of a player his age. It sounds like denial, but when a player dismisses
a batting slump by saying that his line drives "are just not falling in
this year," it's probably true. That's not very satisfying. We'd rather
understand that this guy has messed up his swing or that he's really
not very good. But recent studies show that balls in play behave pretty
much the same for everyone. The players who hit better put more balls
in play (fewer strikeouts) and/or hit more fair balls out of play (home
runs). Pitchers who perform better get more strikeouts, walk fewer
batters, and keep the ball in the park. We told you this stuff is simple.

You won't find such stats in handy places, but players whose percentage
of balls in play produced an abnormal amount of hits one year are good candidates for lower batting averages the next, and vice versa. Similarly, teams that
win an extraordinarily high number of one-run games one year are likeliest to
decline in the standings next season.

The White Sox' 35-19 record in one-run games in 2005-by far the best
in the major leagues-foretold their decline in 2006. The Sox' performance in
one-run games dropped to 24-21 and their win total dropped from 99 in 2005
to 90 in 2006.

Yes, good teams get most of the good luck. "Luck," as famed former
general manager Branch Rickey famously said, "is the residue of design."
But abnormal good luck is one of the toughest things to reproduce. If that
wasn't true, we wouldn't have had seven different teams win the last seven
World Series.

Nothing in baseball illustrates Insufficient Sample better than the postseason.
These best-of-seven-game series are not microcosms of the 162-game regular
season. They are abbreviated competitions that often turn on a single game,
or even a single play. The margin can be razor thin-so thin, that on several
unforgettable occasions, the defining moment has been determined not by a
clutch hit or a player's gaffe, but by an umpire's call or a fan's interference
with a catchable ball. If you have any skepticism about this, just see how long
it takes any fan of the St. Louis Cardinals or Kansas City Royals to recognize
the name of Don Denkinger, any fan of the Chicago Cubs or Florida Marlins
to recognize the name of Steve Bartman, any fan of the New York Yankees
or Baltimore Orioles to recognize the name of Jeffrey Maier. You will not,
however, find these names on your stat sheets.

Major League Baseball began allowing second-place teams (Wild Card
teams) into the postseason in 1995 as part of its recovery plan from the destructive 1994 players' strike and canceled World Series. In the first twelve seasons under that system, the team with the best record in baseball for the
regular season made it to the World Series just five times and won it only
once (and not since 1998). Only twice have the teams with the best American
League and National League records faced each other in the World Series
(and not since 1999).

In contrast, Wild Card teams have reached the World Series seven times
(five straight from 2002 to 2006) and won four, including each year from
2002 (when both World Series teams, Anaheim and San Francisco, were Wild
Card teams) through 2004.

Some see injustice in this. They speak of the integrity of the 162-game
schedule and tradition. From the first World Series in 1903 through 1968,
only the most successful team from each league qualified for the postseason.
From 1969 to 1993, World Series teams first had to be division winners (only
two divisions per league then). These traditionalists are outraged that today,
teams not good enough to even win one of three divisions in their league can
win the ultimate prize just by going on a hot streak.

Others see poetic justice in this. The New York Yankees, who buy new
stars annually with a payroll twice, even five times, greater than other teams,
have won their division almost every year (ten of twelve and every season
since 1998), but have not won a World Series since 2000. Those who are
happy about this speak of the integrity of the seven-game series-that you
can't buy a World Series, at least not with a money-back guarantee.

The grid on the following page shows how the World Series actually
played out over the last twelve years versus how it would have been under
the old rules.

Eleven different franchises have played for the World Series in the past
seven years. Only the Yankees and Cardinals have played in more than one
of those. Every one of those Series would have had a different match-up if
only the teams with the best record in each league had advanced to the Fall
Classic.

Say this for MLB's Wild Card system-the Wild Card is always a good
team. In contrast, by letting more than half of their teams into the playoffs,
the National Basketball Association and National Hockey League create faux
drama for sub-.500 teams struggling to reach the postseason, where they are
promptly eliminated in front of fans who paid double the regular season ticket
prices.

Fans get pumped up over the game's great rivalries (Yankees-Red Sox, Dodgers-Giants, Cubs-Cardinals). They argue passionately about who is the best
player (Albert Pujols? Alex Rodriguez? Barry Bonds? Derek Jeter?). But the
debates that always go extra innings are the ones about the players and teams
who are the best ever. The fascinating fuss over whether Bonds used steroids
is exponentially louder because he has achieved home run records that elevate him to the ranks of Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth.

After death and taxes, the most inevitable fact of life is that baseball
fans will argue the answers to questions like these: Who is the greatest lefthanded pitcher? Who has been passed over for the Hall of Fame? Is Rafael
Palmeiro really one of the greatest sluggers in the history of the game? Does
Pedro Martinez belong in the same breath as Walter Johnson and Christy
Mathewson?

These debates swirl like a hurricane because we want to compare players to those they never played against and to those we never saw.

For this elusive context we need proof, and statistics are the closest
thing we have to scientific objectivity. But big-league baseball has evolved in
many ways since the National League's formation in 1876, both confounding cross-era comparisons and making them more fun to argue. As revered statistical records fall and commentators make their cases for Hall of Fame candidacies and "best-ever" tags, keep in mind that competitive conditions vary by
era, sometimes dramatically. Those changes in rules, ballparks, player usage,
and other conditions can be used to make (or tear down) most any claim.