I couldn’t help but notice John Sickels post at MinorLeagueBall.com yesterday entitled “Get Off My Lawn.”
Why? Because I know where he’s coming from with this one.
That said, I did pause, albeit just for a nanosecond, about posting my agreement with it here – just because I know that the public mention of my agreeing with a feature entitled Get Off My Lawn is more than enough ammo to send Lewis Skolnick, and his adolescent alliance, into full-blown twittergasm. But, in the end, as always, “What the hey?” So, here goes…
First a few snips from Sickels post:
I got sick of grad school when the things they wanted us to study (19th century Belgian weavers for example) became so granular as to become meaningless. I’m starting to get the same feeling about sabermetrics sometimes.
…when it comes to the most advanced sabermetric stuff regarding major league players. . .that old grad school feeling is returning.
The newest stuff is becoming so granular that I’m having problems making sense of it.
I don’t want to give the impression of being an old fuddy-duddy sportswriter blithering about intangibles and “players who know how to win.” I have nothing but respect for the leading sabermetric researchers who are pushing the frontier of knowledge. Most of them are far smarter than I am.
But I’m finding that as I read the most advanced sabermetric stuff regarding major league players, my eyes glaze over and I start to get the grad school feeling again: why am I reading this? I’m not enjoying it. I want to watch a baseball game.
So am I just entering my dotage prematurely? Or is advanced sabermetric analysis becoming so specialized that no one but physics and math majors can understand it, leaving us humanities majors behind, let alone the average fan?
Amen John.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for advanced metrics and looking at performance data. And, I know there’s value to be found in evaluating players’ performance in terms of their “component skills.” Don’t ring me up as someone who’s anti-sabermetrics – as that’s far from the truth.
However, do I really need to know trajectory, speed, break and location of a pitcher’s pitches to determine if he’s performed relatively well? Isn’t it enough to look at his Opposition On Base Average, Control and Dominance Ratios, and Runs Saved Above Average? Does it matter if he’s retiring batters, or not, by throwing a 90 MPH curve on the black of the plate 90% of the time or by using a 65 MPH eephus pitch half of the time? What’s more important here – methods or results?
Last time I checked, there are no bonus points in baseball for style, right?
Ditto with hitters and much of the new detailed batted ball data. Do I really need to know who in baseball has the most hits to right field? Yes, I want to know how many hits a batter has, and the frequency of his hits, and even the timing of his hits. But, a hit is a hit – whether it’s to right field, center field or left field. Are you telling me that Ichiro’s 50-something infield hits a season count less because they didn’t make it to the outfield? Really? Betcha Ichiro would be the first to tell you that they’re all line drives in the box score. If I want to know how effective a batter is, I’ll look at his On Base Average, BB/K Ratio, Contact Rate, and Runs Created Above Average.
O.K., before I get too much deeper into this, let me be very clear: There’s a place for all this PITCHf/x and the like data/analysis. And, that’s in scouting/game-preparation. That’s why you see shifts on batters like Jason Giambi and David Ortiz. The numbers show where they hit the ball most often productively, off what types of pitches, and where you should stack your fielders, etc. Along with video use, the new “fine-grained data” should be part of a team’s pre-game war manual. Also, data such as PITCHf/x can be a useful in- and post-game tool for establishing a baseline and measuring variation that deviates from that standard.
But, for fans, and sabermetricians, I suspect that the fascination with (as Sickels refers to it) “granular” stats more often than not will lead to situations where its ardent followers and admirers will lose sight of the forest for the trees. And, those being overly concerned with these small details are ignoring the importance of the bigger picture.
Yes, sure, when it comes to “life,” it’s very often better to remember that “It’s not the destination. It’s the journey.” But, in baseball, it’s all about “the destination” – meaning it’s the results that lead to producing and stopping runs…and winning games. There’s no extra credit for an out because of the pitch type that it came on, or, for a hit because of where it fell on the field.
To me, the overzealous study of these nouveau “granular” baseball stats by fans, analysts, bloggers, et al, is akin to reading a book one letter at a time. Granted, without each letter, you would have no book. But, the letters by themselves cannot tell the story – that’s up to the words, sentences and chapters that result from the letters.
Does one need to study each snow flake, one by one, to truly understand the impact of a blizzard?
Nope. Whether it’s reading a book one letter at a time, or studying each snow flake in a blizzard, or professing that PITCHf/x (and stats like it) are “The Lost Ark of the Sabermetric Covenant,” it’s all just self-indulgent study masqueraded as new wave research.
Bottom line, if the eventual fate of sabermetrics means being absorbed and blinded by the minutiae, then, to quote the Chez Quis Maitre D’, “I weep for the future.”
