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.  

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....

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. 

A Role for Empirics

I have not written in a while and this will be just a short post on contradiction in my views around empirical analysis.

I ask, is it fair of me to constantly minimize the usefulness of empirical analysis in economics while doting over baseball statistics?

This site is a must see for any fan of baseball or empirical analysis!

http://www.baseball-reference.com/

It looks a little "90's", but search for a favorite player and go from there...this website is truly a triumph of data collection.