Politics and Baseball: The Death of Hugo Chavez and Cowardice of the Miami Marlins

As some of you may know, and I would guess that many of you, dear readers, do not, the World Baseball Classic is currently taking place.  The WBC is an international tournament that takes place every 4 years during Major League Baseball's spring training season.  It is commonly accepted that "baseball" countries other than the United States take the WBC more seriously than most Americans (both players and fans) do.  This can be clearly seen by the players who choose to participate, with many top talent American players skipping the tournament while players such as Miguel Cabrera leave their major league training camps to represent their home nations.

It is no accident that I bring up Cabrera.  He is a native of Venezuela.   The Venezuelan national team (with Cabrera) played an exhibition game against the Miami Marlins on March 5th.  Prior to the game the Venezuelans requested a moment of silence to honor recently deceased leader Hugo Chavez.  This request was denied, with the cited reason by the Marlins being there was "not enough time". 

I love the game of baseball, but I will also be the first to admit that it is not the most action packed sport for the casual observer.  "Not enough time", is that really the best the Marlins management could come up with?  The 3 hour broadcast must have been too packed with adds for McDonald's "Fish McBites"?  (Which have a ridiculous and somewhat hilarious jingle, you can listen to it here) to include a moment to honor a fallen world leader?

Why do the Marlins, and by association Major League Baseball have such a hard time being honest?  They probably don't want "America's Game" associated in anyway with a leader who was openly critical of American consumerism, of US leadership as well as US foreign policy, not to mention being a self described socialist, and having a record of nationalizing most major Venezuelan industry and conducting major land reform.

I could easily argue that Chavez did a lot of good in Venezuela, and that many people there are far better off than they were before he came to power.  It would be completely in line with the general theme of this blog to make such statements.  For some statistics on the improvements under Chavez please see this chart, posted on a blog I read regularly. 

The truth is that I don't know as much as I should about Chavez and Venezuelan politics, and I don't want to comment where I don't have anything informed to contribute.  What I do want to add is that I think this is just another example of cowardice and poor leadership by the Marlins organization.  Either state that Chavez was not popular in the United States and you don't want him honored in your stadium, or accept that Chavez was a major world leader, and honor the Venezuelan team's request for a moment of silence before the game.

Bottom line; if a US leader was to pass away while in office and one of our national teams was denied a moment of silence to honor him during a sporting event in a foreign country we would likely go to war over it.  I don't think the Marlins ownership has the right to deny something like this to team Venezuela, and if they are going to deny the request, they should at least have the cojones to admit that they are doing it for a reason other than "being short on time".

This is just the latest in a long line of examples of the Marlins ownership/management treating baseball fans like we are a bunch of idiots, that rant will have to wait for another post.  I sincerely hope this becomes a major problem for the team.  From what I know, no one deserves the negative attention more.  Marlin's owner Jeffrey Loria and his management team should be ashamed of themselves. 

Welcome Back Boys!

Spring Training STARTED today!   No more pretending to care about football for a few months.  Praise be to whomever you send your prayers in the direction of.  

The only small down note on this otherwise great day:

A public thank you, and fond farewell (regarding the show only of course) to the hosts, and in general  ESPN's "Baseball Today" podcast. It is now "off the air".  It has been replaced by a podcast version of "Baseball Tonight" with Buster Olney.  I will miss Eric, Mark and especially the "snark" of Keith Law. 

For better or worse these gentlemen have been a major part of my daily life for quite awhile.  The "nerdish" commentary and statistical analysis will be missed.  There is always Fan Graphs, but still.....Thank you for hours of mediocre entertainment, I will miss the show!

Marvin Miller: The End of Slavery in Major League Baseball. Fondly Remembered

Marvin Miller: Fondly Remembering the Man Who Ended Slavery in Major League Baseball

 

 

Marvin Miller (April 14, 1917 – November 27, 2012) passed away a week ago.  I intentionally waited a few days for this post so as to not be lumped into the discussion of his (non) selection (thus far) into the Baseball Hall of Fame despite his massive influence on the history and development of Major League Baseball. Also, if I get on a rant about economists getting into the baseball hall of fame I may never stop. 

Prior to the late 1960s professional baseball players were not represented by a union.  There had been numerous attempts (I believe dating back to the late 1800s) to unionize.  The  first time the players were successful in a unionization attempt was with the formation of the Major League Baseball Player's Association, that according to their website negotiated the first successful collective bargaining agreement in professional sports in 1968.  

Marvin Miller headed the MLBPA from 1966 until the early 1980's.  Prior to running the player's union Miller worked with The United Steel Workers of America. It was shortly after the beginning of his tenure in baseball that Miller won contract arbitration and free agency for players.  This matters because prior to this victory baseball players were essentially operating under a class structure of slavery, owned and exploited by the owners of the team that they played for.  

I am not meaning to conflate baseball with the social aspects of some of the the other slave systems in human history, the US slave trade, modern sexual slave trades, the East African Slave Trade, and lots of other examples of people being horribly mistreated. However, in terms of class analysis baseball players were essentially slaves. Once under contract a player had no ability to "jump" their contract to play for another team (even if a higher money offer was made).  Players in the early era of baseball were paid their salary (just as a slave is typically given room, board, medicine, etc.) but were not free to leave the employment of the club/team that they played for.  

Generally speaking any baseballer who violated a contract could not legally play professional baseball again.  Also, once signed a baseball player remained the property of the team that signed him for the duration of his career.  Like other pieces of property (bats, balls, cars, houses, etc.), the owners could legally sell and trade their players and the player would have no choice in this other than to pick up and move their family and go play for their new team.  

Finally, it was illegal for baseball players to prematurely end their contract with the owner of their team.  There are documented cases of players being forced to return wages, and even going into debt to owners after suffering injuries, or being involved in other life events that left them unable to play baseball any longer under the terms of their contract.   

In terms of the Marxian language of class structures prior to collective bargaining baseball players were slaves.  They were pieces of property (capital) that were employed by their owners in order to realize surplus (generally speaking,  in the form of tickets and concession sales in the early years of the sport.  Players could be bought, sold, traded, with no say in the matter, and were forced to work when and where their owners told them to.  (Not to mention that in this era salaries of players were quite low). 

Returning to Marvin Miller:   Arguably, Miller did more to change the game of professional baseball than any single player / manager, etc. has ever done.  He ended the existence of the class structure of slavery for baseball players.  Players today, (overpaid or not,) function essentially as capitalist workers.  Team owners pay the player a salary, after the player signs a contract.  After the expiration of the contract the player becomes a free agent and is able to sign with another organization.  Through collective bargaining the MLBPA has won the rights to contract arbitration, no trade clauses, and numerous other rights for their member players.  All of these cornerstones of worker's rights in baseball were enacted under Miller's tenure as the head of the MLBPA.  

Today, it is true that baseball players are very well paid at the major league level (this is not so for the far greater number of players in the minor leagues).  In the Marxian theory modern players are still exploited by the owners.  The form is capitalist exploitation, not slavery.  Modern players are paid for their necessary labor.  The owners of the teams are the first appropriators of the surplus generated by the players (through tickets, merchandise sales, television, etc)  My guess would be that a good sized portion of this surplus is then transferred back to the few players with top contracts by the owners, but that does not change that the class structure of Capitalism exists between owners and players today in Major League Baseball.  

It seems fitting that "America's Game"  should be dominated by America's favorite class structure (capitalism) and Marvin Miller was a big part of why that transition took place.  May athletes, in all the major sports, baseball was the first to unionize; (and non-athletic union members as well), in fact, the whole American labor movement owes a debt of gratitude to Marvin Miller.  


If there is a heaven, I am sure there is baseball being played. Perhaps Marvin can help Jesus renegotiate his contract. 

More Post Modern Baseball: The MVP Award

The following is part of an email exchange from a conversation between myself and an employee at a major sports news organization.  He has been surprisingly receptive to my current method of wasting my academic time, still, trying to spread post-structural analysis to professional baseball is an uphill battle at best:

You regularly make the argument that voters should not consider making the playoffs as part of their MVP voting (the Ellsbury example from last year seems to be the most common case cited).  I disagree.  The award is for most valuable player, not "Best Statistical Player".  I will not argue that advanced statistics (WAR etc.) do not matter, they do!, and have added a lot to my enjoyment of following baseball, both fantasy and real.  Also, the movement towards modernism in professional baseball front offices is long overdue.  Why not analyze the players you are spending millions on with all the tools available to you?

The other side of this coin, is that statistics cannot capture all of what matters, in baseball or elsewhere.  If the MVP award was the "best player" award then I would agree with your argument that the voters should not consider the record of the team that the player is on.  It is because of how I perceive "valuable" in MVP that my opinion differs from yours.  A player having a great year on a team that is in contention is more "valuable" to that team than a great year on a team that is not contending. 

On Thursday's show you made that point that it doesn't matter if Houston loses 95 or 120 games this year.  Flipping this around, and taking just one statistic as an example:  A player having a great individual season resulting in a bad team going from 60 to 70 wins (10 WAR) is, in my opinion, less "valuable" towards that player's organization than a player that finishes with a WAR of 7 on a team that wins their division by 2 games. Value in terms of "most valuable player" is not independent of the record of the team.  I would argue that the closer as team is to contending the more "value" can be added by strong performance.  Also a great year on a great team means less than to a team that is just barely contending.  A player having a WAR of 4 in the remaining games of the Yankees is less valuable than the same performance on the White Sox. I know this is not quantifiable, but neither is winning a baseball game in the broad sense. 

I understand why you make the argument that finishing in the playoffs should not matter for an MVP award, as far too many of the people who do vote for MVP are statistically ignorant "old time" baseball guys who just look at "good player on good team, therefore, MVP. However, you are in danger of taking this argument too far in the opposite direction. Statistics, for all their use in analysis of the game we love, cannot fully capture the value of a player to their team.  "Value" and "Most Valuable" are complex and overdetermined concepts that cannot be considered independent of the ultimate goal of any professional sports franchise, winning, and all the revenue that comes with it.  Until the MVP award is changed to "Best Statistical Player", it is not appropriate to ignore the situation of the player's team when handing it out.

Saber Metrics and Baseball Being Late to Modernism

In a case to being late to the party FanGraphs (a leading baseball statistics company) published "Power Rankings" this week in which they listed the Kansas City Royals as the 4th best team in Major League Baseball.

The Royals are currently 5 / 14 on the season, and I don't see them getting a hell of a lot better any time soon.  Do I know how the Royals will preform moving forward?  Of course not.
But...
 
The FanGraphs analysis was based upon the WAR (wins above replacement) statistic and nothing else.  Basically the case can be made that if you add up how many wins each player on the roster will add (or lose) compared to what that player would be replaced with if they get hurt, retire, etc. the Royals come up with the 4th highest number. 

This analysis completely misses the point that baseball is essentially a sequence of independent statistical events, in which the sample size (even over an entire season) often is too small to regress to the mean.  On top of this, there is enough variation in the random noise to mess up even a large sample.

I won't make the case for returning to just "watching the game".  Statistical analysis has a place in the modern baseball.  The thing is, that many "sciences" including the dismal one that I study for a living, have to some degree accepted the limits of statistical analysis and moved onto dialectical modeling and epistemology.  Baseball is 30+ years late to this party (which is no great surprise).

In that vein, the overdetermination of any specific independent event is something that can never be captured.  Everything from relationships with domestic partners, to fan noise, to seasonal allergies, to direction of the wind, impact individual player performance in any given event.  Not to mention the dialectical relationship of prior events in the same game, season, career, impacting the present, and future events. Causality is complex and omnidirectional in baseball and otherwise.  Previous statistical performance is just an, arguably small, part of the story of any given event. 

Essentially statistics can provide a jumping off point for baseball analysis that provides a more "scientific" way for teams to spend money and manage players, but statistics can never capture the complexity of the game and all its variation.  A reason to keep watching I suppose?  But the Royals are NOT the 4th best team in baseball and any claim to the contrary is based upon analysis so flawed that it does nothing useful other than to motivate people such as myself to write.  

The Economics of Ozzie Guillen (for Luke)

So good ol Ozzie has been in the news again.  Here is a quick synopsis from the Huffington Post:
Because a lot of my readers are not baseball fans a quick background:
Ozzie is a former player, then the manger of the Chicago WhiteSox, now the manager of the Miami Marlins

(Miami Marlins as in Miami Florida, home of a huge Cuban refugee community).

Last week Ozzie said this:
"I respect Fidel Castro. You know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years, but that son of a bitch is still there."

My temptation is of course to attempt to explain to non-Cuban Americans how I think Cuba is better off with Castro then it would have been without him.  But....that will have to wait, and the man did cause a lot of damage as well. 

For now, The Marlins response to Guillen's comment is where my problem lies. 

This is a team with a new stadium, a new name (formally Florida Marlins) that is attempting to build a new image.  This type of thing is exactly the reason they hired Guillen.  This is the first time in my baseball loving memory that the Marlins have been national news for more than 12 hours (other than winning the World Series).  Suspending Guillen for 5 games, when behind closed doors he was probably given a huge bonus for drawing attention (exactly what they are paying him to do), assumes that all baseball fans are ignorant asses that can't grasp why the Marlins would hire a loudmouth ass to be an ineffective on-field manager in the first place. 

Sorry for the rant, but it was promised!

Dodgers Sale. Quick Hit...

Lazy reporting, Magic Johnson is just one of the members of the Chicago based financial group (* the only one that anyone has heard of I'm sure), not the "head" of the group.  

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mlb-big-league-stew/magic-johnson-group-buy-dodgers-2-billion-050903869.html

Regarding the sale:  I'm pretty sure part of the 2BILLION includes the parking lot as well (makes it all worthwhile).  Pretty much finishes my dream of ever owning a team though. 

Baseball and Economics Cross, Or, Another Thing Wrong With Mainstream Economics

To paraphrase Keith Law of ESPN's 'Baseball Today'

Something that pretty much sums up neoclassical economics in its modern manifestations:

"When stupid people use a meaningless stat it does not give the meaningless stat meaning, it means that stupid people are stupid."

Outstanding....

Americana, Baseball and Giant Food

This guy should be proud of himself.


 On the food and beverage staff of the Washington Nationals someone thought this was a good idea?
http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mlb-big-league-stew/stephen-strasburg-gets-8-pound-hamburger-strasburger-named-053627358.html
This is the blog equivalent of a retweet, I don't have anything to add to this.  What else really needs to be said about an 8lb hamburger?
"Hard to digest" on so many levels....but I do want a giant food named after me some day.

Has the Era of "Moneyball" Analytics Made Spring Training (even more) Redundant (and Potentially Harmful)

Major League Baseball preseason, "spring training" has historically been akin to the American dream in the minds of baseball professionals and fans.  For the "rookie" it is a chance to show what you have to the "big club", to become a long-shot overnight success. Preforming with the big boys of summer, instead of putting in your work in the minor leagues, to earn your shot, more cliches, etc. 

It is my opinion that in the current incarnation of professional baseball, where statistical analysis can, and is* done at every level from high school on to the show, that the chances of "playing your way onto a big league team" in spring training are pretty much over.  The chance of going from zero, to big league hero in the preseason was always slim, just like becoming part of the 1% in terms of American capitalism, but there have been enough success stories over the years to keep the masses (of minor league players) believing. 

Now that analytics are king, and even people who are just Brad Pitt fans, and don't know shit about baseball, know that being able to draw a walk in junior college generally is strongly correlated with your ability to draw a walk in big league baseball, and drawing a walk is damn important to winning, what are big league teams really learning about their prospects from spring training games?  Any positive/negative/neutral performance in February and March is not a statistically relevant sample, and even if it was, it is often a sample against other minor league players who are trying to "make it" on the other team. 

What are coaches really learning from spring training games?  How players behave socially, and how they respond to situations such as playing an infield spot beside their childhood hero? 

Yes,  I am sure they are learning some of these less quantifiable things about their players, but these things can't be entered into a spreadsheet, and baseball has just recently become modern in its epistomology.  I can't imagine that front offices are close to making the leap to postmodern, overdetermination in analyzing players.  If any team is someone ought to give me a job offer any day now in the scouting department.

So a player's projected statistical performance is what determines their potential value as a professional ball player.  Stats are generated over seasons of high-school, college and minor league baseball.   So, what is the purpose of spring training now that we have computers?  Possibly for established players to find their "groove".  Isn't this what practice is for?

Spring training certainly isn't for the fans.  The only people who follow spring training are residents of Florida, Arizona, and super dorks like myself (and industry professionals, even if they shouldn't).  The average baseball fan is still trying to pretend they are interested in hockey or basketball to avoid spending time with their family at this time of year.   Even the family is more interesting to most than watching a bunch of players never before seen compete in games that mean nothing.  

Which brings me back to why we have spring training for more than a week and a half at all?  In this era of pitch counts, innings limits, and players (including hitters) asking their bodies to do more than the human body was ever designed to do (we are not physiologically designed to throw a ball 100mph, or to take whatever chemicals Ryan Braun is putting in his body), the length of spring training could possibly be doing nothing other than shortening the length of player's careers?  Certainly this argument is made in "higher impact" sports like professional American Football.  I concede that concussions in football are more of a hot button issue than a pitcher in his early 20s needing Tommy John surgery.   Still I have to wonder if more than a month of spring training games are doing more harm than good to the bodies of the players?

Teams have the stats to evaluate players without such a lengthy spring season, and 2 weeks of "meaningless" games should be enough to get timing, etc. down for current big leaguers as long as the players have stayed in shape in the off-season?  Or not?  Perhaps I should do some regression analysis to find out?  

But first thing is first.  I think someone, (myself if I find the time), needs to run the numbers, to find out if the number of young players that "make the team" each spring has declined as statistical analysis, instead of "gut feeling" has become a bigger part of scouting and player development over the past thirty years. 

Either way, it has been great to listen to the Tigers on the radio the last three days.  That being said, I  wish that I only had to wait another week instead of 6 before I start to actually care what happens on the field. ..

* at least by the teams that realize that a whole pack of statisticians being paid less than $100 000 a year each, more than pay for themselves, with the first contract improvement of the year. 

Is There a Future for Mainstream News Coverage?

Sure, but the role is shifting.
I find myself getting more and more of my news from sources that are completely secondary. 
For example; I get most of my Detroit Tigers updates from:
http://www.blessyouboys.com/
Someone still has to pay the original reporter though right? 

Consumerism, Pizza and the Detroit Tigers.

Major League Baseball's winter meetings are concluded. 
What have my beloved Detroit Tigers done? 

They have signed Octavio Dotel....

That's right, not a damn thing.  Would someone please go buy some Little Caesar's Pizza? 

I personally can't stand the stuff, but Michael Ilitch's empire seems to be struggling.  At least one percent of the profit on that pizza will go to help the tigers (I think Ilitch actually stated something along that line back in the 80s, but I can't find the quote).

What good is capitalism if it can't even land the Tigers a decent #3 starting pitcher? 

Random Plug

Next post will have to be about rum I suppose.
I generally hate the "human interest" side of sports but, Tigers fan, Yankee fan, or general baseball fan, Curtis Granderson happens to be the rare combination of professional athlete and decent writer (at least entertaining). Check it out if you have some time.

http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/blog/big_league_stew?author=Curtis+Granderson