Category Archives: Baseball

Bill James comments on the Sestak scandal

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Well, OK, not exactly; but given that people are now defending the White House’s job offer to Rep. Joe Sestak by reminding us that the Reagan White House may have tried something similar in California with Sen. S. I. Hayakawa 28 years ago, I think this from James’ entry on Brewers Hall of Famer Robin Yount in his New Historical Baseball Abstract is very much on point:

In 1978, after Yount had been in the major leagues four years, he held out in the spring, mulling over whether he wanted to be a baseball player, or whether he really wanted to be a professional golfer.

When that happened, I wrote him off as a player who would never become a star. If he can’t even figure out whether he wants to be a baseball player or a golfer, I reasoned, he’s never going to be an outstanding player. . . .

But as soon as he returned to baseball, Yount became a better player than he had been before; his career got traction from the moment he returned. What I didn’t see at the time was that Yount was in the process of making a commitment to baseball. Before he had his golf holiday, he was there every day, but on a certain level he wasn’t participating; he was wondering whether this was really the sport that he should be playing. What looked like indecision or sulking was really the process of making a decision.

This is often true. What Watergate was about was not the corruption of government, as most people thought, but rather, the establishment of new and higher standards of ethical conduct. Almost all scandals, I think, result not from the invention of new evils, but from the imposition of new ethical standards. . . . In the biographies of men and nations, success often arrives in a mask of failure.

I think James’ argument is well-taken, and very much applicable to the Sestak scandal. The irony of it all is that the new ethical standards that the Obama White House is now resisting, with some help from a press corps that really doesn’t much want to go after them, are the product of the Obama campaign. The people now insisting that politics as usual is “perfectly appropriate” are the same people who were telling us two years ago that we needed to vote for Sen. Obama because politics as usual is unacceptable. Maybe it was unrealistic then; it still looks bad for them now. As the Wall Street Journal summed the matter up,

It’s possible that all we really have here is a case of the Obama White House playing Washington politics as usual, which the White House refused to admit for three months because this is what Mr. Obama promised he would not do if he became President. However, this is clearly what he hired Mr. Emanuel to do for him, and given his ethical record Mr. Clinton was the perfect political cutout. So much for the most transparent Administration in history.

Then again, George W. Bush merely exercised his right to fire a handful of U.S. Attorneys, and Democrats made that a federal case for years even though it has since gone nowhere legally. The Emanuel to Clinton to Sestak job offer still needs a scrub under oath by the Justice Department and the relevant Congressional committees.

I believe the phrase we were looking for here is “hoist with their own petard.”

God, game theory, and the inscrutability of providence

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If you don’t read Fangraphs (and if you’re a serious baseball fan, you should), you missed an article recently that was astonishing in both the ambition of its task and the complexity of its argument. Mitchel Lichtman, known to many as MGL, wrote a lengthy post analyzing the Yankees’ sacrifice bunts in the eighth inning of the deciding sixth game of this year’s American League Championship Series and asking the question, “Were they good calls?” His answer was long, involved, complicated, and highly mathematical, and as such would probably be dismissed by many as arcane and pointless, especially since the Yankees (predictably) won regardless. Such a dismissal would be a mistake.

It would be a mistake because MGL answers that question not simply by calculating probabilities but by using game theory. I won’t pretend to understand his article completely at the detail level, but I think I have the essential insight right: predictability is the greatest tactical and strategic sin. Therefore, to maximize one’s chances of success, one must be unpredictable, which means not always going with the probabilities.

Look at it this way. One may calculate out all the probabilities as to whether a given move—such as, say, a sacrifice bunt attempt—is likely to help one’s team win the game or not, but if you calculate them all out, put them in a table, and then rigidly follow that table, what’s going to happen? The other team is going to know what’s coming and respond accordingly, and then all your probabilities are knocked into a cocked hat. For the optimum move to remain the optimum move, one must sometimes do something else; failing that, others will adjust, and their adjustments will turn what had been the best move into a failing move.

Read the post if you want a fuller explanation than that and think you can follow it. For my purposes here, I have to admit that I don’t really care if Joe Girardi made the right call on those bunts or not; I’m more interested in the underlying reality that sometimes the “best move” isn’t the best move, and that sometimes you have to do something that would seem in isolation to be counterproductive in order to best advance your goals.

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The problem of filtered reality

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All hail the Volokh Conspiracy:

I then said something like—“but it does seem like the overall level of defense is improving all over—I see so many great plays these days . . .” before I recognized how stupid a comment that was. Of course I was seeing more great defensive plays than I had 10 or 20 years before—because 10 or 20 years before there had been no Sportscenter (or equivalent). In 1992 (or whenever exactly this was), I could turn on the TV and catch 20 or 30 minutes of great highlights every night, including 5 or 6 truly spectacular defensive plays; in 1980, or 1960, to see 5 or 6 truly spectacular defensive plays, you had to watch 20 or 25 hours of baseball, minimum. [That’s what ESPN was doing, in effect—watching 10 or 12 games simultaneously and pulling out the highlights]. It was just my mind playing a trick on me; I had unconsciously made a very simple mistake. The way in which I was perceiving the world of baseball had, with Sportscenter, changed fundamentally, but I hadn’t taken that into account. . . .

I call it the ESPN Effect—mistaking filtered reality for reality. We do it a lot. All I hear from my left-leaning friends these days is how crazy people on the right are becoming, and all all I hear from my right-leaning friends is how crazy people on the left are becoming, and everyone, on both sides, seems very eager to provide evidence of the utter lunacy of those on the other side. “Look how crazy they’re becoming over there, on the other side!” is becoming something of a dominant trope, on left and right. It is true that we’re seeing more crazy people doing crazy things on the other side (whichever side that may be, for you) coming across our eyeballs these days. But that’s all filtered reality; it bears no more relationship to reality than the Sportscenter highlights bear to the game of baseball. My very, very strong suspicion is that there has never been a time when there weren’t truly crazy people on all sides of the political spectrum doing their truly crazy things. Maybe 1% or so, or even 0.1%—which is a very large number, when you’re talking about a population of, say, 100 million. They didn’t get through the filters much in the Old Days, but they do now. All this talk about how extreme “the debate” is becoming—how, exactly, does anyone get a bead on what “the debate” really is? In reality?

HT: bearing blog, via my wife

I think David Post has an important point here—though I will note one somewhat countervailing point: the people on the right to whom liberals point are generally folks whom most others on the right, and certainly the leading voices on the right, would also disavow, and consider something of an embarrassment; they are truly a lunatic fringe. As the case of Van Jones demonstrated, and as the President’s ongoing campaign organization keeps demonstrating, the folks conservatives point to on the left are usually people whom liberals consider mainstream, at least until there’s some sort of hue and cry to make them pretend otherwise. That’s why Mark Steyn went so far as to say,

what is odd to me, if you look for example at the way Republicans are always being called on to distance themselves from their so-called lunatic fringe, the pattern here is that on the other side of the aisle, there is a lunatic mainstream. ACORN should not be a respectable group, and should not be anywhere near the United States Census. But as we saw with the Van Jones story, no matter how radical you are, on the left, it’s very easy for the most extreme radical to get right up close to the levers of power in the United States. That is where, unfortunately, that is where Obama’s lived most of his adult life, and that is where most of his associations are.

None of this invalidates Post’s point; but I do think it modifies it somewhat.

The invention of the Black Sox

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The common understanding of the Black Sox scandal was fixed in the public mind by Eliot Asinof’s 1963 book Eight Men Out and the subsequent movie adaptation of the same title by John Sayles. As it turns out, that may be a highly unfortunate thing, as an article in Chicago Lawyer magazine by Daniel J. Voelker and Paul A. Duffy reveals. Having gained access to Asinof’s files, the two discovered that his book is not in fact supported by his research; indeed, they’ve concluded that the book is, to a significant degree, fiction.

Those whose reputations seem to have been blackened the worst by Asinof’s fictionalization are the team’s owner, Charles Comiskey, who has been unfairly smeared as a skinflint whose miserliness drove his players to throw the 1919 World Series, and the biggest star among the banned players, Shoeless Joe Jackson, who always insisted on his innocence. Given his stellar performance in the Series that year—he led all qualifying hitters, on both teams, in batting average and slugging percentage, finished second in on-base percentage, hit the Series’ only home run, and seems to have played the field well (at least, he didn’t commit a single error)—I’ve always been inclined to believe him. Given the work by Voelker and Duffy, I think I’ve been justified in that.

Here’s hoping this article is the beginning of a new trial for Shoeless Joe, not just in the court of public opinion but also before the Lords of Baseball; and here’s hoping that the result is the clearing of his reputation and his long-overdue inclusion in the Hall of Fame.

Barack Obama is no John Kruk

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If you’re not a baseball fan, you’ve probably never heard the story, and even if you are, you might not remember it.  Today, John Kruk is a scruffy, rotund talking head, but back in the day, he was a scruffy, rotund hitter for the Padres and Phillies.  He was a good one, too; for all that he walked up to the plate looking like an unmade bed a lot of the time, he could pretty much roll out of bed and collect a hit, so it worked for him.  He was a lifetime .300 hitter with an on-base percentage just south of .4oo, and he had enough power to keep pitchers honest; he made the All-Star Game three times in a ten-year career and could fairly have gone once or twice more.Anyway, I no longer remember the precise situation, but on one occasion, Kruk was confronted by a female fan with a disparaging comment—I think to the effect that he looked too fat to be an athlete (as noted, he was far from svelte).  Slow of foot but quick of wit, Kruk immediately responded, “Lady, I’m not an athlete, I’m a ballplayer.”It was the absolute truth, and dead on point.  Bo Jackson was an athlete.  John Kruk was a ballplayer.  Bo looked a lot better in uniform, but Kruk did more to help his teams win.  Why?  Because being an athlete is about having talent; being a ballplayer is about having skill.  Talent is innate; skill is learned, developed, honed.  Talent limits what you can do with skill, but skill is ultimately what wins ballgames.I got to thinking about this when I read Michael Gerson’s Washington Post column “GOP at the Abyss.”  Ultimately, I agree with Jennifer Rubin’s assertion that Gerson gets the matter backwards; but I also think he gets there in the wrong way.  Gerson writes (emphasis mine),

[American conservatism] has been voted to the edge of political irrelevance, assaulted by a European-style budget and overshadowed by a new president of colossal skills and unexpected ambition.

The vote I’ll grant, but that’s happened before.  The budget I’ll grant, but the mere fact of the budget doesn’t spell curtains for conservatism; if the budget fails, the results are likely to be quite the contrary.  That President Obama’s leftist ambition was “unexpected” I most emphatically do not grant; many people saw that one coming, including Sarah Palin, Stanley Kurtz, and (for whatever it’s worth) me.Most significantly, though, I cannot agree with Gerson’s statement that Barack Obama is a president of “colossal skills.”  He’s a president of colossal talent, of rare political gifts, and few actual skills.  The recent commentary on his dependence on the teleprompter, while unimportant in itself, illustrates this.  He has great ability, but very few political and governance skills because he’s done little to hone them; he’s spent more of his career campaigning for jobs than actually doing them, and it shows—when he needs to accomplish something, he reverts to campaign mode because that’s the only way he knows how to get anything done.  That’s the only area in which he’s done any significant work to develop skills to utilize his talents.  When it comes to actually governing, he’s the Bo Jackson of politicians—he can hit the ball a country mile when he makes contact, but he has absolutely no clue what the pitcher’s going to throw him next.Of course, this is by no means a permanent situation; skills can always be developed, and the president now has a powerful incentive to develop them.  He’s bound to get better, and as he does, the task of opposition will grow more difficult for the GOP.  But that doesn’t mean the GOP ought to buy in to Gerson’s gloomy analysis, because the fact is, Barack Obama isn’t the colossus at the plate that Gerson takes him for.  He might be pretty good with the roundball in his hand, but in this game, he’s no ballplayer at all; he’s just an athlete.  He’ll hit the meatball and the hanging curve, but a good pitch at the right time will get him out.  The GOP just needs to have confidence in their stuff, focus on their control, and go after him.

If you can fake that, you’ve got it made

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Isn’t that what they say about sincerity?  When it comes to getting on in the world, it’s a true statement, with one big “if”:  it’s only true as long as nobody catches you faking it.  Get caught, all bets are off.Unfortunately for Alex Rodriguez, he’s been caught faking it a few too many times by now for anyone to believe much of anything he says.  It’s been revealed that he tested positive for steroids in ’03, and he’s trying to control the damage by admitting the positive test and spinning the circumstances—but why should anybody buy the line?  After all, this is a guy who . . . well, I’ll let veteran Tacoma News-Tribune sportswriter Larry LaRue tell the story:

One day in the visiting clubhouse in Cleveland, Alex called me over to his locker. His grandmother had died a day earlier, and he wanted to tell me how hard losing her had been. He had been close to her, he said, and was devastated by her loss.Alex told me all this without showing emotion. I thought he might be trying not to, so I nodded and listened.“The funeral is Sunday,” he said.“Are you going?” I asked.Alex looked genuinely surprised.“No,” he said. After a pause, he told me he’d had a long talk with Lou Piniella, who’d asked him to play through the pain.It occurred to me that day that Rodriguez might not be feeling anguish so much as wanting me to know he was—and to write about it. I didn’t, in part because I thought it sent too mixed a message and I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt.I still do, but it has gotten harder.Alex Rodriguez never said a spontaneous thing to the media. Ever. On one level, that could be seen as caution. But over the years around Alex, it became apparent he was that way with teammates, coaches, everyone. . . .I don’t know anyone who believes they’ve seen an honest emotion from Alex. When I watched his confessional interview with Peter Gammons and thought we might finally hear him level with the world.Until he said he wasn’t sure what he’d taken, only that it was banned.Alex took something for three years without knowing exactly what it was? Impossible. Alex didn’t get dressed without thinking of the impact he wanted to make with his attire. He never spoke to the press without knowing precisely what message he wanted to deliver.And the steroid cocktail he is alleged to have consumed is not something he could have purchased over the counter at GNC—part of it can’t even legally be sold in this country.What Alex did Monday was confess to as little as possible. He never said the word ‘illegal.’. Only ‘banned.’ He never said he’d injected anything, or been on a program.Alex Rodriguez taking injections without knowing what was in the syringe or how would impact his body? . . .When you think you’re just a bit smarter than anyone who interviews you, things get said that are too easily checked. Alex’s grandmother story, for instance. I talked to then-manager Piniella a bit later in the evening, and asked if he’d counseled his young shortstop about the death in the family.“I didn’t know about it,” he said. “Alex hasn’t told me.”Now, Alex wants the world to know he’s sorry. That whatever it was he took in Texas because of the pressure he felt after signing that contract, he stopped taking when he went to New York—where apparently, there was no pressure.At least this time, he left Piniella out of it.

The thing about trust—and it’s something our president should remember; sure, he’s the golden boy who can do no wrong, but so was A-Rod, once upon a time—is that once you lose it, once people decide they can’t trust you not to spin them, it’s extremely difficult to get it back.

From the library

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A couple days ago, I pulled The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract off the shelf for a little light reading, and was interested to run across this item (the title is original):

YOU’D HAVE A HECK OF A TIME PROVING HE WAS WRONGIn 1960 Jackie Robinson went to visit both of the presidential candidates, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. He endorsed Nixon. In 1964 Robinson worked for Barry Goldwater. He felt that Lyndon Johnson, by politicizing the race issue, would ultimately undermine support for civil rights—as, of course, he did. Robinson realized that civil rights gains could not continue without the support of both political parties. “It would make everything I worked for meaningless,” Robinson told Roger Kahn, “if baseball is integrated but political parties were segregated.”

Make of that what you will, but Jackie Robinson was nobody’s fool. I’m reminded of the question someone asked recently (I don’t remember where I read it), would Americans have been so ready to elect Barack Obama to the White House if they hadn’t grown used to seeing first Colin Powell and then Condoleeza Rice on the news every night as Secretary of State?

Interesting comment on being right

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from this comment thread over on Lookout Landing (on a post well worth reading if you’re a baseball fan), from a commenter named Milendriel:

Bottom line is, there are people who want to be right and approach new information objectively, and then there are people who don’t want to admit they’re wrong—which is necessary to eventually be right; none of us were any good at evaluating from the outset.

Beautifully put, that. To be fair, I think we all need to realize that even the best of us spend at least some time in the second category—this isn’t a justification for beating up on people; we need to keep in mind that this isn’t about better people vs. worse people (which tends to mentally devolve to “us vs. them,” which is completely counterproductive), but rather about differing mental attitudes and approaches. As long as we do that, though, this formulation does as good a job of contrasting the approach that produces real growth and understanding (the former) with that which merely produces pride and folly (the latter) as anything I’ve seen. It’s not that we shouldn’t be concerned about being right; it’s that our concern should be for the real value of truth, and should thus be essentially disinterested and not about ourselves, rather than for being believed to be right, which is not about truth at all but rather about ego.

Sarah Palin’s greatest qualification: integrity

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Thanks to Beldar for pointing this out, because I wouldn’t have found it: the Baseball Crank has a great post on Gov. Palin’s long and strong record of integrity as a politician (one which, along the way, refutes a number of media misrepresentations from primary sources). Apparently, this is the first of a three-part series examining each of the four main national-ticket candidates in this regard, so I’ll be interested to see the next two as well. It truly is a superb piece, and well worth the time it takes to read it (it isn’t short).It should also be noted that the whole site is worth exploring, especially (but not only) if you like baseball; I’ve been a big fan of serious analysis of baseball ever since I first ran across Bill James 20 years ago, so I think I’ll add this one to the blogroll. I was particularly intrigued by his short post on “Bill James, Sabermetrics, Conservatives, and Bloggers” (which, as you can probably guess, generated a heated response from liberal baseball fans wedded to the stereotype of conservatives as nasty, irrational Neanderthals); I don’t know that he’s right in his conclusions, but he offers some interesting thoughts.

This week’s sign that the Apocalypse is upon us

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(to borrow from Sports Illustrated, since it’s an old SI writer)

I’d call this unbelievable, but that’s not strong enough; it’s been a long time, even in this culture, since I’ve seen anything this despicably dishonorable. In this year’s Georgia Class AAA high school baseball championship game, the pitcher and catcher of the losing team (Cody Martin and Matt Hill, respectively) colluded to bean the plate ump with a four-seam fastball (this just a few minutes after said ump called strike three on the pitcher’s brother, Dodgers first-round pick Ethan Martin).

I agree with Rick Reilly: What are we turning into in this country, anyway?