The Platoon Advantage:... (09/26)
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October 3, 2012 The Platoon AdvantageWhat We Mean By WorthlessI’ve spent a lot of time recently, much more than I care to admit, discussing the end-of-season awards with casual fans. I don’t know why, but it’s something I do. I think that baseball fans becoming generally more informed is a good thing for all concerned. I have no illusions that my ranting and raving actually accomplishes that, but I keep chasing that carrot (often in blatantly unproductive ways). Anyway, something good came out of it, because I’ve had an idea about how to improve this sort of discourse, from our sabermetrically-inclined end. It’s not an entirely new idea—Bill James, for one, has talked about things like this quite a bit over the years—but it’s one I think it’s worth calling back to mind now and then, and I hope I might have a slightly different way of framing it. You know what the big debate going on right now is—and, no worries, this post won’t actually touch on that whole thing at all—and you can imagine that certain issues are coming up a lot. Things like the value of RBI and batting average. Elsewhere—in discussing David Price vs. Justin Verlander for the Cy Young Award, for instance—pitcher wins come up quite a bit. The most common words statheads use when those types of statistics come up all end in “less”: meaningless, useless, worthless. I’ve used them. It’s easy. And in a way, I think it’s totally right. It’s also terribly confusing to the uninitiated, though, and seems to create an extra barrier that really doesn’t need to be there. The natural response to that sort of language, of course, is defensive and incredulous: “You’re telling me a guy who drove in 120 runs didn’t have a great season? Scoring runs is the whole point!” “When’s the last time a bad pitcher won 20 games?” And that’s understandable. It’s not as though these stats don’t tell you anything; if you see that a hitter has 100 RBI, odds are he’s probably pretty good. The same is true for a pitcher with 17 or 18 wins. Besides, no one wants to hear that the things they’ve grown up paying attention to and caring about are “meaningless.” The average fan, hearing that language, shuts down. Wants to fight back. I would, too, probably. Yet, in a very real sense, those numbers (just to take the two most obvious examples) are totally meaningless. A VCR in good condition will still allow you to watch a tape; a floppy disk will presumably still keep copies of your Word documents or other small files (if you can find a device to read it). These things technically have a use, but are more or less worthless now. We’ve got other things that do their jobs better, and do more besides. It’s the same way with RBI and wins (and the like); these are “meaningless” and/or “worthless” only because we have other tools that do their jobs better, and more. A hundred-plus RBI might tell you that the hitter was probably good that year (not always), but also gives you a bunch of other information—opportunities with runners on, most obviously—and it’s impossible to separate the two. It’s like static or tracking problems on a VHS tape (to stretch that analogy to its very limits). We have many other ways of tracking things hitters do that lead to producing runs—ISO, TAv, and so forth—that also keep track of the good things, but that weed most of that other junk out. The same is true with wins; a lot of wins probably means a good pitcher, but also probably means a good team (or at least a good offense). Other stats do that better. None of them is perfect, of course, but better.
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Nice piece - and good points. I tend to think of the "classic" stats as being more narrative-related, but kind of in a good way. Pitcher wins and RBI don't tell you that much about the quality of pitcher or hitter, but they tell you more about what happened in the game than advanced stats do. And when it comes down to it, baseball is entertainment, so the narrative is part of the enjoyment for fans - and that's why I'm fine with using it to vote for postseason awards and the HOF, if one so chooses. By the same token, I'm fine with people choosing to ignore the "narrative" stats when it comes to those things. I sure as hell don't want my team's GM relying on RBI and Ws, but am fine with them - and the narrative in general - playing a role in the ephemera of the games awards and honors.