Newsgroups: rec.sport.baseball
Subject: Re: Value of Stats
From: grabiner@zariski.harvard.edu (David Grabiner)
Date: 28 Jul 92 12:11:21 EDT
 <3678@blue.cis.pitt.edu.UUCP><Bs29sK.6H0@undergrad.math.waterloo.edu> <3831@blue.cis.pitt.edu.UUCP>
Distribution: na
In-reply-to: dtate+@pitt.edu's message of 27 Jul 92 22:59:10 GMT

In article <3831@blue.cis.pitt.edu.UUCP>, David M Tate writes:

> In article <Bs29sK.6H0@undergrad.math.waterloo.edu> djohnson@cayley.uwaterloo.ca (David Johnson) writes:
>>>
>>>HOW DO YOU KNOW?
>>
>>You can't know for sure but through interviews with players, managers and
>>that player himself, and through *many* media reports (although we should 
>>consider media bias's thats why we look at many reports) I feel we can get
>>a good reasonably accurate opinion of the player.

> How does it help to look at *lots* of biased reports?  They're all still
> biased.  They aren't independent observations, either.

And I don't see how we can trust sportswriters' evaluations of a
player's intangible value when we cannot even trust their evaluations of
a player's tangible value.

Does a batter help or hurt his team by drawing a walk with runners on
base?  Well, his batting average doesn't change, he cannot increase his
home-run total, and he misses a chance to get an RBI, so he must hurt
the team.  (Never mind that the logical consequence of this is that he
should be intentionally walked every time he comes up with runners on
base.)  Evidence of a nearly unanimous opinion: Andre Dawson first and
Dale Murphy 11th, 1987 NL MVP.

If a pitcher goes 18-10 with a 4.00 ERA, what does that say about him?
Sure, he's given up a lot of runs, but he obviously knows how to pitch
well enough to win, and that's what is important.  (Never mind that the
numbers are right there, and you can easily check that this pitcher's
team scored more than five runs a game in his starts.)  Evidence: many
Cy Young award votes (Pete Vukovich, 1982; LaMarr Hoyt, 1983; Bob Welch,
1990, etc.)

I'm not expecting sportwriters to agree with sabermetricians on the
precise importance of walks or relative value of ERA and W-L records,
(after all, sabermetricians themselves disagree), but I do expect a
reasonable measure of competence in evaluating things which can be
easily measured before I will trust them to measure things which are
difficult to measure.

> I'm equally terrified that you seem to think that you can tell what a
> player's attitude and "team spirit" and such are like by watching his
> face during his practice and play.  Give me a break.  Do you believe
> in phrenology, too?  Did you catch on immediately that Steve Garvey
> was a hypocritical sleazeball, back when the media were portraying him
> as Mr. Clean?  Did you know right off that Eddie Murray wasn't the
> sullen, disruptive loner that the Baltimore writers tried to convince
> us he was?

This is the additional problem with measuring intangibles.  Whatever you
know about the value of a walk, you do know that Dawson drew 32 walks in
1987, while Murphy drew 115.

And there are good reasons to be suspicious of attempts to measure
intangibles.  How much was Puckett (or Gladden, or Tom Kelly, or anyone
else) credited with for leadership on the 1990 Twins, who finished last?
How about the 1988 Twins, who won more games than the 1987 Twins?

Wasn't Tom Kelly blamed for a loose clubhouse atmosphere in 1990 and
then *credited* for it in 1991?

> And this still doesn't address the central issue that started the
> whole thread, which was this: even if you *knew*, 100% sure, what a
> player's attitude was like, how would you go about measuring how much
> performance you should be willing to trade that off against?

It's certainly much harder than measuring the value of a walk, and most
sportswriters aren't even capable of that.

-- 
David Grabiner, grabiner@zariski.harvard.edu
"We are sorry, but the number you have dialed is imaginary."
"Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again."
Disclaimer: I speak for no one and no one speaks for me.