Goldman’s baseball quotables #13: The Giants and Royals are sabermetric whether you like it or not

Please forgive me for opening a story that is about a quote and how it relates to the current World Series with another quote, but Pete Townshend’s concluding line from his paean to political apathy, “Won’t Get Fooled Again” is relevant to today’s discussion: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” In this case, we can paraphrase that to, “Meet the new stats, same as the old stats.”

As we’ve watched the Royals and the Giants ascend to the World Series one recurrent theme seems to be that these teams are somehow not analytical, or they don’t use statistics to make judgments. They fly by the seat of their gritty, gutty pants and acquire baseball players, not statistical models.

These arguments, such as they are, are incoherent and irrelevant, but are fascinating in that there is a subset of baseball-following humans who feel a need for them to exist. Some clearly don’t accept that whether or not the Giants or Royals wear OBP buttons on their lapels, it’s a key contributor to their success or failure. Similarly, you may or may not believe in cholesterol or fat, may think the nutrition labels on food are part of a government conspiracy that caters to the low-fat lobby, but if you eat a stick of butter at every meal you’re going to have a heart attack regardless.

It would be good if we could get past this point, the one indicated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan when he said everyone is entitled to their own reasons, but not their own facts. A few quick points, in no particular order:

1. As the mathematician Henri Poincaré pointed out, there is more than one way to describe any problem, more than one route to solving it. As long as you arrive at the correct solution, it doesn’t matter how you got there. So long as it’s accurate, there is no such thing as good information, bad information, or too much information. It’s what you do with it that matters. Why would anyone care about the process so long as the end result is positive? Note: You can achieve the right result for the wrong reasons and wrong result for the right reasons. I don’t think the latter is generally a cause for celebration, but I know the former isn’t anything to be proud of either.

2. One World Series appearance in 29 years is nice, but it’s not predictive -- that could easily be one World Series appearance in 58 years depending on what happens between now and 2072 -- other than Kauffman Stadium turning into AT&T Park due to global warming bringing “Eric Hosmer Cove” up to the outfield walls. (“Eric Hosmer Cove” will be the local term for “the Atlantic Ocean,” the way New Jerseyans say “going down the shore” instead of “going to the beach.”) Your chances of sustaining the run and averting the fate of, say, the Cubs, would seem to be better with an informed process that casts the widest possible net over data rather than one that rests solely on subjective perceptions of player quality.

3. That said, subjective perceptions of player quality as the decider in any system is a myth. Everyone uses stats, even if they limit their intake to what was on the back of a 1978 Topps card. Statistics are simply a record of events. You can mix them around, adjust them, use them as the basis for arguments, but at their most basic level, they’re just a record of the multitude of things a player did the 600 times he came to the plate. Did he swing at the first pitch a lot or a little? Did he strike out or put the ball in play? Where did he hit the ball most often? Maybe there’s someone out there who has the mental capacity to remember all those details for one player, but it’s impossible to retain that information for the entire population of baseball players, major and minor. Whether you’re a scout or Andrew Friedman, you need to know this stuff to do your job.

4. Trying to gain an advantage via superior information intake is the goal of everyone from your stockbroker to the CIA agent in the Middle East to the NSA guy who is watching you read this on your phone. It’s not wrong when baseball does it. You can call it “sabermetrics” or “Moneyball” or “due diligence” or whatever the hell you want, but it’s a way of trying to win. “Luck is the residue of design,” Branch Rickey said (and/or borrowed from John Milton, whichever you prefer). I quote this often in this space because what it really means is you can make your own luck, or at least slant the odds in your favor, by way of preparation. Sponging up all the information you can is part of that. Forewarned/forearmed. You’ve heard that one too.

5. Subject for further research: There is a strain of skepticism of the new in Western thought. Just one example: When Joseph Lister drew the proper inference from germ theory and used sterile surgery techniques -- wash your hands, Doc, don’t use rusty instruments that have just been up the previous patient, that kind of thing -- to cut the death rate for postsurgical septicemia by massive numbers, American doctors scoffed and resisted for literally decades. At that time you could get a Harvard MD without ever touching a body, because medicine was more art than science. You could intuitively feel ‘n’ heal without ever knowing a damned thing about how the patient worked.

This art vs. science/faith vs. reason conflict isn’t just part of our modern baseball world but is rooted somewhere in thought going back roughly a couple of thousand years. “Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” Paul wrote to the Corinthians, summing up what would eventually transmogrify into an argument about faith in RBI and muscles over the objective record. To borrow from Charles Freeman’s history of thought in the Fourth and Fifth century (A.D.), we went from Euripides writing, “Blessed is he who learns how to engage in inquiry [,who] perceives the order of immortal and ageless nature [and] how it is structured” in the Fifth century B.C. to St. Augustine writing of “the disease of curiosity... which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature... which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn” in the Fifth century A.D.
Sometime after that we got back to science being a cool thing, and then we got to now, when people crow over the triumph of unreason in baseball, as if that were possible, as if it would be a good thing if it were.

6. Here’s where the Einstein quote next to the picture of Ned Yost comes in. In many cases, the new stats are just the old stats remixed so as to make them more informative. The inputs haven’t changed because the elements of what a player does on the field haven’t changed. Where the newfangled statistics do sometimes differ from the old AVG-HR-RBI model is based on direct video analysis via systems as Pitchf/x. For the most part, that’s objective information. If a team ain’t using it, its leaders are choosing to remain in Plato’s cave watching shadows on the wall. As John Lennon sang, “living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.” If you want to live your life that way, hooray for you -- hey, Lennon also sang about how if he chose to spend his time “watching shadows on the wall” that was his business -- but it’s no way to run a baseball team.

7. Moneyball is just a book and/or a movie (neither of which were written by Billy Beane). It’s not anyone’s religion, it’s not a blueprint that will guide anyone, even the Oakland A’s, to inevitable success. It’s merely the story of a particular moment in the life of a certain front office. There are a lot of good ideas in it, and also some bad ones, and some notable omissions such as, “It’s really helpful, regardless of your philosophy, to have peak-power Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, and Barry Zito around.” If it introduced the public to the notion that on-base and slugging percentages paint a more accurate picture than batting average and RBI, that was a positive thing -- it was time for those of us who had read Bill James back in the 1980s to stop hogging all the smart-kid information. Even if the Royals and Giants don’t know that, they know it. They may arrive there by some other route, they may value other things as well, but they’ve put good players on the field. Since good players get on base and move other runners around the bases, well, it doesn’t matter if you got your information via a book or the back of a bubblegum wrapper. It’s all the same thing.

8. That said, we know a few things that weren’t part of the mainstream discussion then, although they probably should have been given that they were things that are obvious in retrospect. Ol’ Father Bill said 30 years ago that much of what we perceive to be pitching is actually defense, but no one followed up on that thought until much later. Now, although statistical measures of defense come with huge error bars, it is recognized that an exemplary player on defense such as Andrelton Simmons can save enough runs with his glove to offset or even surpass the number you give up by playing his bat. That’s an insight that might have been deducible from 100 years of baseball, but it took statistical analysis to prove the point even if the exact figures are still elusive.

No path to team-building is certain or foolproof. Branch Rickey couldn’t fix the Pirates. Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer haven’t instantaneously turned the Cubs around. Conversely, it’s reasonably certain that at least a dozen of the 100-plus World Series have been won by teams put together by drooling imbeciles. Again, sometimes you get lucky and reach your goal even if you go about it in the most confused way possible. That is not what we’re seeing in this World Series, particularly with the Giants, a team whose veteran-loving GM put together a pennant-winner largely with in-house players for the third time in five years. That shows mental flexibility, which demonstrates the ability to learn, which indicates a willingness to listen to and absorb new ideas.

The same thing is happening with Ned Yost. No, he’s not John McGraw and he never will be, but in this postseason he’s been able to identify his team’s advantages and press them, discarding most of the extraneous stuff that held him back along the way.

That’s sabermetric. That’s Moneyball. That’s being smart, which is all those two words were ever meant to indicate. If you think that’s not what you’re seeing, you’re the opposite of Yost or Brian Sabean -- that is, you’re watching, but you’re not paying attention.