Small Sample Size Craziness
Note – none of these numbers mean anything. They have zero predictive value, and you shouldn’t draw any conclusions from them at all. Seriously, don’t believe that there’s any information in here that should change your opinion about anything. It’s just interesting to me. These numbers come The Hardball Times and Fangraphs, by the way.
Edwin Jackson, in his two starts so far, has allowed 18 flyballs. 14 of those 18 flyballs have been infield flies. That’s a 77% IF/F rate. Last year, the major league leader in IF/F rate was Bronson Arroyo – 15.4% of his flyballs were infield flies.
It’s not just Edwin Jackson, either. The league average IF/F rate is 18% in the American League and 13% in the National League. While it’s almost certainly early season random variation, that AL infield fly rate is absurdly high, and is probably one of the main reasons offense is down across the league.
Fausto Carmona has thrown 13 innings, walked 9, and struck out 7 in his two starts so far. He has a 0.69 ERA. A 78% ground ball rate covers a multitude of sins.
The San Francisco Giants, as a team, are hitting .230/.276/.331. That’s a .607 OPS. As a team. Willie Bloomquist’s career OPS is .642, and in his worst season, it was .613. The San Francisco Giants, as a team, are hitting like a slumping Willie Bloomquist. That’s what you get for having a Molina hitting cleanup.
Speaking of the Giants, Jonathan Sanchez has the best strikeout rate in the majors through two starts. In fact, his season line of 10 IP, 10 H, 1 HR, 4 BB, and 18 K suggest that he’s been one of the more dominating starters in baseball so far. His ERA is 6.30. 6.30! Yet another reason why ERA is useless as any kind of predictor of things to come.
Okay, one more reason ERA is pathetic. Steve Trachsel couldn’t be any less effective if he tried – 12 innings, 6 walks, 3 strikeouts, and a 36% GB rate. He’s not throwing strikes, missing bats, or getting groundballs. He’s doing exactly zero things that lead to sustained success. He has a 6.32 xFIP during the part of the season when team’s aren’t scoring runs. His ERA? 3.00.
The average velocity on Barry Zito’s fastball in 2008 – 82.7 MPH. Seriously, Bill Bavasi should send chocolates to Brian Sabean every day for the rest of his life for outbidding him for that disaster of a contract. Zito is teetering on the edge of replacement level, and the Giants are on the hook for $18 million per season. This is the cost of not learning the lesson of the uselessness of ERA.
And, I’m off my soap box now. Go M’s.
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Is Barry Zito going to be the worst contract signing of all time?
I’m talking pure, didn’t deserve anywhere close to what he got type of contract and not so much the got hurt and never played contract.
I can’t think of a worse one….but if it happens once, it could (and probably will) happen again, particularly if baseball expands any more, making pitching more rare.
“Jonathan Sanchez['s] . . . season line of 10 IP, 10 H, 1 HR, 4 BB, and 18 K suggest that he’s been one of the more dominating starters in baseball so far. His ERA is 6.30. 6.30! Yet another reason why ERA is useless as any kind of predictor of things to come.”
After a couple of years reading this site, I understand what you’re saying here. But couldn’t those stats be turned around to indicate that it really doesn’t matter what a pitcher’s peripheral numbers are, if they’re still giving up a ton of runs they’re not helping the team all that much?
Obviously, if a guy’s ERA is 6 or 7, he hasn’t helped his team all that much. But the point of analysis is rarely to figure out if a guy “has helped his team”. Anyone can look at the days a guy pitched and asked if his team won that day. The point is to try to determine how helpful he will be going forward. A pitcher’s ERA is not particularly helpful in that respect.
There’s something wonky with the Fangraphs velocity data. PITCHf/x has Zito’s average fastball so far at a strapping 85.
Not that this changes your point. He still sucks.
CCW: The point is to try to determine how helpful he will be going forward. A pitcher’s ERA is not particularly helpful in that respect.
I get this, and no doubt his high ERA is due to his teammates not helping him much in the field.
If Barry Zito’s contract isn’t the worst, then Mike Hampton’s contact has certainly got to be the leading contender. Eight years of misery. At least the Rockies found others to share the pain. The Giants are just plain in a world of hurt, as no one will want to take any part of that mess off of their hands.
ooh, some more timely numbers
Maybe they need ponies.
“I get this, and no doubt his high ERA is due to his teammates not helping him much in the field.”
Not necessarily. It could just be random bad luck, which is very possible given that its only 10 innings, a very small sample size. It could just be that he gave up all those hits and walks in bunches rather than spreading them out in an even manner. In a large sample size, this fluke variation in one direction would be less likely. So you really shouldn’t pay attention to the ERA here, because there is a good chance that it is influence by other factors than the pitcher’s actual skill.
Jonathan Sanchez has recorded 4 outs less than expected and given up 4 more runs than expected.
Go go Giants defence!
Yea – it’s likely that distribution is the cause here, and this hits at something else I need to write up eventually. One of the big things that fans get wrong is buying into consecutive strings of outcomes as a pattern, and then they expect that pattern to continue. When it does, it “proves” their theory, and when it doesn’t, well, the player just snapped out of his slump or made some adjustment or something.
It’s confirmation bias at its worst, and we’re seeing it right now with Wilkerson, O’Flaherty, Johjima, and Sexson. All of them are making a lot of outs, and it is being interpreted as a pattern that is likely to continue. This is why we see people calling for O’Flaherty to get sent down or Morse to play right field or whatever bad option they’ve adopted for the day. But there’s no evidence that, in most cases, this actually is a pattern. It’s much more likely to just be random distribution of events.
People need to stop seeing patterns in every piece of data. In a lot of cases, there is no pattern – it’s just random, and the recent results don’t tell you anything about what’s going to come next.
Also, we really need to stop believing that “a pitcher’s job is to prevent runs from scoring.” It’s not – their job is throw as many good pitches as humanly possible – the overall results that stem from that on any given day are largely out of their hands. If Felix throws an 88 MPH sinker at the knees on the corner, and David Ortiz manages to bloop it in front of Raul Ibanez for a hit, that doesn’t change the fact that Felix executed his job perfectly.
When you judge Jonathan Sanchez by the results of his ERA, you’re ascribing to him a job description that really has nothing to do with his actual responsibilities. We need to evaluate people on the basis of how well they do what they can, and not on some larger goal that they can’t achieve alone.
Does this mean you’re a fan of my pitching work, Dave?
Absolutely – tRA is really cool.
What’s tRA? And where can I find more information?
Graham’s been posting a lot of his work on improving fielding independent pitching metrics over at Lookout Landing. With all the good information being written over there, it’s like they’re not happy being the #2 Mariner blog or something. We might have to put them in their place. Know your role, LL!
I meant to mention this back when it popped up, but a nice NY Times piece on baseball and ‘randomness’
Why must I fail like a Barry Zito fastball?
Link
That article is atrocious. I’m amazed at what is presented as “journalism” these days.
I’ve seen better comments than that on the PI blog.
I think Zito needs to seek out Moyer.
Go to firejoemorgan.com for a brilliant critique of Armstrong’s article.
I meant to mention this back when it popped up, but a nice NY Times piece on baseball and ‘randomness’
Great article. Makes me wonder how likely it is that Ichiro happens to hold the season hits record.
That Armstrong article is maybe the most blatant example of ignorance towards a subject in a “professional” news article that I’ve ever seen. It reminds me of some bitter old man who won’t get a cell phone because “it’s the devil.”
Question. Want to make sure it comes out right, as it’s my first. When do you start looking at the results and using that info to make decisions regarding a players abilities going forward. Would 20% of the season give a fair sample? More? Less? I feel very comfortable that for some, such as Johjima or EOF, this will be a season similar to previous and look forward to a regression to a mean. I am concerned that for others this is the beginning of the suckiness that didn’t surface as much last year, such as Vidro.
Dave: Good stuff. I take it your disclaimer in the first paragraph doesn’t apply to the paragraph about Zito?
You can have a lot of fun comparing short-term ERAs with short-term K/BB ratio. So far in 2008:
Pitcher K/9 BB/9 ERABedard 8.2 6.6 3.27 (and 2.5 HR/9!)
Greinke 3.0 2.4 0.60
Bonderman 2.4 4.8 3.97
On the unlucky side:
Robertson 9.7 3.5 7.84Vazquez 10.5 3.8 5.25 (no HRs, either!)
Chico 7.2 2.4 5.56
Early BABIPs are fun, too.
.469 for Sanchez
.370 for Derek Lowe
.162 for Joe Saunders
.195 for Kyle Lohse
***
Jonathan Sanchez has always had spectacular K-rates and decent BB-rates, but it’s been HRs that have done him in. I just picked him up in my no guts-no glory fantasy league, though.
The best evidence of ignorance in that Armstrong article? He lumps in GWRBI as an advanced stat.
When or has the future forty been updated?
Sanchez’ .429 BABIP isn’t helping. Last season wasn’t much better for him at .374. Lincecum is also at .367 this year.
Question. Want to make sure it comes out right, as it’s my first. When do you start looking at the results and using that info to make decisions regarding a players abilities going forward?
I don’t, really. I’m not particularly interested in results based analysis. Skills analysis is far better in predicting future results. You can use some results to infer things about certain skills, but even then, it’s best to rely on established skillsets and not assume that they change rapidly simply because the results do.
Misinterpretation of random strings is one of my favorite topics. It takes several forms: we see patterns where none exists, and we don’t recognize random when we see it.
The classic example is “the hot hand”, where fans think that, for example, making six basketball shots in a row means you’re “hot” and you’re more likely to make the next one, until you go “cold” and then you’re more likely to miss. The truth is, it’s a random pattern. People think random means “fifty percent chance of making it”, but that’s not necessarily true — you can (and in fact will) have a random pattern around a 60% probability, an 80% probability, 20% probability, etc.
This is the one you see in articles like that one you tore apart yesterday, that players are “hot” or “cold”. Jojima is “cold” right now, so he “should sit”. The truth is, he’s just as likely to get a hit as he ever was, he’s just run up a string of bad results. (And before you mention it, yes, it’s possible there are other factors involved, like injury or whatever).
If you flip a coin, you’ll get strings of tails and strings of heads. Ten in a row isn’t uncommon. This is the other fallacy; when people are asked to produce a string of results that “looks random” they start by writing down “heads tails heads tails heads tails heads tails” etc., which is actually a profoundly unrandom result.
I prefer to think of baseball players as complicated dice. Ichiro is a die that comes up “single” more than 30% of the time, “walk” less than 10%, “double”, “triple”, and “homer” X percent of the time. The whole point of having sample sizes is to give the strings time to average out. It’s not uncommon to get ten heads in a row, but it’s REALLY uncommon to get 50, or 90 out of a 100.
Old-school fans with no probability understanding, and a large investment in the “desire struggle” school of baseball thought (I’m sure there’s a word for it), where every event is the result of a struggle to see “who wants it more”, absolutely hate every word I’ve written above.
Armstrong’s stat phobia is as old as the hills. He doesn’t know ANYTHING about stats; that’s why he’s talking about GWRBI. These guys always mock stats with the “left handed batters against LHP in day games on Tuesdays” splits, and of course they’re right about those kinds of “stats”; they’re straw men. What they DON’T get is the WHY of it — “what are we trying to discern?” and “is this number useful for that?” being operative questions. More importantly, he just doesn’t understand what he’s seeing when he looks at baseball — or rather, he doesn’t understand that what he’s seeing IS THE STATS.
And not grasping basic logic about the world around us is a common, dare I say, essential, part of American life.
Question. Want to make sure it comes out right, as it’s my first. When do you start looking at the results and using that info to make decisions regarding a players abilities going forward.
There are a couple of different parts to the answer. One part of the answer is that some stats (i.e. results) do a better job of factoring out luck than others. If you use these stats, you get a better predictive value for a given sample size. That’s why Dave likes to use K rate and GB% rather than ERA. Although there’s still some random variation (luck) involved in getting strikeouts and grounders, there’s much less that there is in giving up runs.
The second part of the answer is, you’re always dealing with a probability range. For any given sample size, what you have is a probability that the player’s skill level is withing a certain range, e.g. there’s a 95% chance his true batting average skill is within .050 of .280, or some such. As the sample size increase, the range decreases.
One obvious problem is, the underlying skill we are trying to measure can change over time. If you had an entire twenty year career’s worth of ERA, you might have a sample size large enough to evaluate a pitchers true talent (if you don’t mind mushing his defenders skill into the equation), but it would still be a fairly useless value because it wouldn’t really represent any specific skill level he ever had, but rather a composite of his skill level as it increased, plateaued, and decreased over his career.
The Book covers this pretty well.
I think the Zito situation in SF will be one of the most interesting subplots in all of MLB this year. I am morbidly fascinated to see how his season goes. Nothing good can come of an 82 mph fastball and an $18m/yr contract that goes 7 years, and goes bad so…immediately. For his sake I hope he can turn it around but man, it looks hopeless right now with that unexplained loss of velocity.
If Felix throws an 88 MPH sinker at the knees on the corner, and David Ortiz manages to bloop it in front of Raul Ibanez for a hit, that doesn’t change the fact that Felix executed his job perfectly.
Right on. I think anyone who’s played little league understands that good performance does not lead to positive outcomes, and that dumb luck can make almost anyone a hero. It baffles me how mainstream announcers and analysts – even ex-players – don’t acknowledge this randomness more often. Isn’t it amazing how “professional hitters†always seem to receive so much credit for their seeing-eye or bloop singles? Or how a good pitcher can miss the catcher’s target and pipe a fastball that the hitter just misses, and still be “a battler who just knows how to get people out.â€
From firejoemorgan.com in response to Armstrong:
That’s just fucking hilarious right there.
I agree that Trachsel sucks, but he’s got a career 100 ERA+ and has had a few decent seasons. To be an average MLB starter for his career, he must have been doing something right. (I know that ERA+ is a function of ERA, which is useless, but it seems like over an entire career it should be enough to show how good someone was.)
Was, not is. I don’t care about how good Steve Trachsel was 10 years ago. He’s currently awful.
If we’re going to talk worst contract of all time, I have to point out (with an asterisk) that in 2000, the Tigers offered Juan Gonzales 8 years and $140 million.
That would easily have qualified–if he hadn’t turned them down.
And, what added insult to injury was the fact that the Tigers traded like seven or eight guys to Texas to get about 100 games of his whining — clearly right up there amongst the worst moves of all time.
Wait, that can’t be right. Maybe I’m not understanding something, but people are not dice. It might be true that a person has an underlying skill level, but that skill can be more or less actualized at different times, for many reasons. In my job, I do a lot of writing. Sometimes, my skill at writing comes through, and I get on a roll, and I am able to write easily and well. At other times, it just doesn’t work that way. Moreover, it is not random when this happens. The factors that determine it are complex, but they are definitely there.
From my own experience, the same thing happens in sports. I play racquetball. Sometimes, my skill is actualized and I play very well. At others, I can’t put anything together. And this continues over the course of many days, until I either work though the problem or find out what I am doing wrong.
I see no reason to accept the assertion that there is no such thing as a “hot hand” or a “slump”. No one has offered any evidence that performance of a skill is random rather than streaky, and it seems to me that experience clearly shows that it is streaky. When Ichiro goes through a hot streak, that is real. Similarly, when Johjima can’t do anything to get a hit, that is real also. Maybe he is unlucky not to be finding holes in the defense, but neither is he hitting scorching line drives or home runs. If Jamie Burke is hitting home runs, then he should play more.
I love this blog. Love the #2 Mariners blog comment by Dave. I did read that tRA, very nice stuff.
I think the problem is people outside the sabermetric community think because we predict seasons and try to perfect stats that we must think that is the only result that can happen. Where it is really a case of predictions and stats are just better ways to evaluate players. “Statheads” see a weighted coin and guess heads and will be right 70% of the time, knowing that random 30% will happen but should not affect the decision to be right 70% of the time. Non-statheads see a regular coin and think Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln, or Roosevelt are gritty enough to will a coin to their likings.
I see no reason to accept the assertion that there is no such thing as a “hot hand†or a “slumpâ€. No one has offered any evidence that performance of a skill is random rather than streaky, and it seems to me that experience clearly shows that it is streaky.
Yes, they have. You should pick up a copy of The Book.
42: People have done work on that very subject for quite a while. Writing isn’t really a good parallel, but racquetball is. I know what you’re talking about there; some days you put every ball in the corner and some days everything ends up either on the floor or right in the middle of the wall. That represents, in my experience, a change in approach or mechanics. I have games where I hit everything either straight up or straight down and it’s because I’m rolling my wrist over as I swing, just like Richie could go through a bad stretch because he’s trying to imitate Craig Counsell or holding his bat backwards and trying to hit the ball with the knob or whatever.
42- Wouldn’t you find what puts you on a hot streak and never stop doing that? Your racquetball swing for instance is a skill you have. Your inability to repeat the prefect swing (skill) every time keeps you from being a pro (I am assuming you’re not a professional player). ARod has perfected a repeated skill (his swing) very well. ARod isn’t on more “hot streaks” then anyone else. He simple repeats his skill more often due to his talent level. Random events mark up and down numbers.
I haven’t read The Book, but that is my understanding of explanations of it.
Seriously?
For my part regarding streaks in athletics (I don’t play baseball or racquetball but I do fence), there are times where I may FEEL like I’m on a hot streak; I’m parrying everything my opponents throw at me and riposting like a madman. Every call is going my way. I’m on a roll.
(sorry, I don’t get to geek out about my fencing on here very much, so I take what chances I can!)
The difference is, after the adrenaline wears off, I realize it’s just my normal talent level interacting with random chance, and that it doesn’t tell me anything about my predicted future performance. I’m still a scrub, just a scrub who had a lucky day.
Fair enough; I’d have to read the book in order to evaluate its argument.
But let me say that what looks like randomness or probability at a distance might in reality determined by something on the smaller scale. Whether or not Johjima gets a hit tonight will be determined by a variety of factors. Some of those factors are out of his control (where the pitch is pitched, where the ball goes in the field, who happens to be there) but some of them are in his head and body. If his swing or timing are off, or if he’s not transferring his weight properly, or if he’s having trouble focusing correctly, that will affect how he is able to perform and whether he can perform up to his underlying skill level.
To take another example: Eric O’Flaherty is having trouble placing his fastball. That’s not random–it’s because of an inability in this particular case to actualize his skill. So he’s in a slump.
My point is that even if statistics show that a particular sequence of results is “random” or “probabilistic”, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t really determined by something in the player corresponding to what people typically refer to as a “slump”.
47- I’m not saying that Burke has got to the point where he’s a better option than Johjima. But it seems to me to be theoretically possible.
46- But suppose ARod goes through a period where he fails to get a hit (a supposed “slump”). There are two ways that might happen. It might happen because he keeps (unluckily) hitting the ball at people. Or it might happen because he’s lost his rhythm and isn’t getting a good swing at the ball. In the first case, it’s nothing to do with him, and in the second case it is.
Now, suppose it’s not ARod but a player (player A) for whom the team has a slightly worse replacement (B). Player A’s swing is screwy, and he isn’t hitting well. Player B is fine. I would say that, for now, Player B is a better option than A.
That having been said, I don’t think there are any cases of that happening on the Mariners, except with O’Flaherty and RRS.
50- How about we use Adam Dunn to make this easy. Adam Dunn is not having the best start to they year. You can actually look at BABIP and see it is .190 and realize he is just unlucky and will eventually start hitting again. There is no reason to think Adam Dunn lost his timing. Now if another 3 months into the season Adam Dunn is still hitting .172 you can start to look at other factors, eyesight, swing mechanics, whatever. But to look at 29 AB’s and think his swing must be broke isn’t right when you can see he is being unlucky with his balls in play.
Someone who has read The Book can help me with this, in a study done on “slumps” I am guessing 80-90% of them deal with luck rather then a inability to perform a skill.
Sure, but “80-90% are not x” is a lot different than “there is no such thing as x”. That’s all I’m saying.
By X I am saying that skill is gone. As in Barry Bonds lost the skill to steal bases because his knees went bad and he got slow. He didn’t “slump” in stealing bases. He lost the ability to perform the skill.
DMZ,
When you say high GB% covers a multitude of sins, do you mean that in the obvious sense, or did you mean in terms of Carmona specifically? If so, what are the holes in his game? Just curious…
Does anyone have any recommendations about billjamesonline.net? I know 3 dollars a month is very small, still would like to know any feedback on the site as I am looking into a subscription. As I am sure topics like this are covered.
smb: Dave wrote this post, not DMZ.
I’d need a lot more than one home run to convince me of this.
I like Burke as a backup catcher, but that’s all his playing history leads me to believe he has the potential to be.
48- I couldn’t agree more. Players may go in a slump because they HAVE experienced a series of random events where they got the short end of the stick, and maybe had a couple of games hitless. The player starts to try to do too much to get a hit because he’s struggling, his mechanics go a bit out of wack, and bam, until the mechanics are back, that’s a tailor made slump.
Same with pitching. You get a couple of calls that don’t go your way, maybe a couple of strikes are called balls, you walk the bases loaded, and it gets into your head. You try to overthrow, and instantly everything is belt high and above.
What I’m getting at here is the mental aspect of the game cannot be measured with statistics. Having played sports for the majority of my life, although obviously not at the level of professional athletes, I can say that often “slumps” or having a “hot hand” is very self propagated. Of course, if no one ever changed their mechanics at all, and never got it in their head that they need to do something different, which could be true for many players, than I could see the randomness, but that isn’t the case. I absolutely believe in “the zone” and I feel like level of focus has a large effect on performance. For instance last year Lopez had to deal with the death of his brother. His focus probably wasn’t on baseball as much as it should have been, and I believe he underperformed because of it.
Now I suppose it depends on your definition of “slump,” and exactly how much time has to pass for a player to be in a “slump.”
*shrugs*
Also
joser,
Thanks for pointing it out. Bonehead mistake, sorry.
I apologize in advance for the length of this:
People need to stop seeing patterns in every piece of data.
The trouble is, seeing patterns is what defines us as a species. It’s what we do. Birds fly, fish swim, and humans find patterns. More than opposable thumbs or bipedal locomotion, finding patterns is the defining human trait. It may have started as just a better way to find food and avoid predators, but it’s the thing we do better than anything else. Without patterns language is just noise. But patterns in noise became language, and so we piled pattern onto pattern, abstraction onto abstraction; patterns scratched in the sand, hammered into rock, stoked onto papyrus, turned that patterned noise into writing and broke our knowledge free from a single lifetime in a single place, giving us culture and institutional memory, institutions and constitutions, math and science, civilization. A baby can identify the faces of everyone it knows, can tell a sad face from a happy face, and discern one voice from another; eventually it figures out what those voices mean. That’s nothing but pattern recognition. We still have trouble programming computers to do that, and humans do it almost from birth.
And it never stops. Pattern recognition has worked so well for us, for so long, that we can’t give it up. It operates below the level of rationality, often below the level of consciousness. We see patterns in everything, and if there is no pattern we’ll find one anyway. We can find the landscape in a Monet, but we also see shapes in clouds and faces on Mars and the man in the moon. In the real world, governed by physical law, there’s very little that is truly random — and it is easy to tell when we found it, because we’ve historically given it supernatural agency. Lightning really is random, so of course there must be a god tossing it around — a god implies some intelligence, and with intelligent agency comes some pattern even if it is unknowable to us (and — who knows? — if we are devout, perhaps the pattern will be revealed).
So confronted with truly random data, we don’t just throw up our hands and admit it’s random — at least not until we’ve tried everything else. Numerology, astrology, the Da Vinci Code. The “hot hand.” Perhaps we no longer invoke Zeus or Athena, but we still look for explanations, for correlations, for patterns. And of course there are patterns in random data, sitting there for us to find. The coin really does fall heads-up ten times in the row sometimes. You really do sometimes get a series of good outcomes when you’re wearing your lucky socks. Sometimes your “system†for betting on craps really does pay off. It goes against everything we are as a species, against our very nature, to not take the next step, to not think we have an insight, to not extend correlation to causation and conclude it means something. There’s a pattern there, right? Patterns always mean something. It can’t just be noise, an empty signal, a permanently blank spot on the map. There lies monsters.
It takes stern stuff, and a cold firm grasp of rationality (and a denial of millions of years of our primate selves) to step back, wave our hands, and say “there’s nothing there.â€
I think anyone who’s played little league understands that good performance does not lead to positive outcomes, and that dumb luck can make almost anyone a hero. It baffles me how mainstream announcers and analysts – even ex-players – don’t acknowledge this randomness more often. Isn’t it amazing how “professional hitters†always seem to receive so much credit for their seeing-eye or bloop singles?
Because people don’t want to think it is dumb luck, bad or good. People want to have control over their destinies. It’s why people have lucky charms, or habits, or superstitions. It’s why people pray. When the tornado takes out one house and not another, people don’t want to chalk it up to non-linear atmospheric physics and chaos theory and simple bad luck. It’s “god’s will” (with the implication that if they had done something differently, god would’ve willed otherwise, or if they change their ways going forward, god will smile on them in the future). Baseball, it has been said, is a profoundly humbling pursuit, where even the best players fail more often than they succeed. It takes incredible ego, and faith in one’s abilities, to continue in the face of that. So when a player does succeed, he doesn’t want to ascribe any part of it to luck. It may be better to be lucky than good, but we want to be fans of a good team, not a lucky one, and players think that “good†is under their control and know that “lucky†is not. Nobody wants to believe that some portion of their success is random, that a few bad bounces are all that separate them from the next guy, the also-ran. And it’s true, over the course of a season, of a career, talent does win out. But in any given game, on any given play, there’s an element of randomness, an element of luck. But it’s against our nature to see it, and we certainly don’t want to want to admit it.
Good post, joser, despite being long.
We all want to think we can understand and attribute causes to everything, and it’s difficult as a species for us to get our heads around the concept of randomness.
Awesome post joser. The content definitely justified the length.
Because people don’t want to think it is dumb luck, bad or good. People want to have control over their destinies. It’s why people have lucky charms, or habits, or superstitions.
And baseball players are notoriously superstitious.
But let me say that what looks like randomness or probability at a distance might in reality determined by something on the smaller scale.
Studies have been done on this. There is such a thing as “being hot”, but it’s too small to warrant any attention. A player’s performance over the past three years is a far better predictor of how he will perform over the next few games than his performance over the last few games. A hitter on a “hot streak” might expect his OBP to be 3 or 4 points higher than his “normal” average.
So, if Brad Wilkerson, based on his career, is expected to have a OBP of .363 and is on a cold streak, and Willie Bloomquist, based on his career, is expected to have an OBP of .313, then if Wilks is cold and Willie is hot, Cold Brad is still likely to be 40 points better than hot Willie.
Yes, there’s predictive value in hot streaks. It still doesn’t matter. Play your best players.
Every player is bound to get a hit at his next at bat, because all players are either hot or due.
That Jim Armstrong article has to be an intentional troll / satirical piece. There’s no way somebody like that still exists.
Another thing that’s hard for old-school fans to grasp is this: if it looks random, it IS random. If it is indistinguishable from what a random toss would suggest, given an underlying rate of probability and so on, IT IS RANDOM. Even if it’s accomplished with mega effort.
Or, if that’s too painful to accept, then think of it this way: it adds nothing to the understanding to think about the non-random aspect. Nor anything to prediction of the future, which is even tougher.
@67 — I would bet that about 90% of all the fans in the ballpark on any given day would agree with him 100% — which is why that sort of thing gets published.
We might have to put them in their place. Know your role, LL!
Little does Dave know of our master plan to infiltrate USSM by posing as volunteer moderators. Heh heh heh.
Well, now that LL is flush with corporate money, they should be able to do more than infiltrate.
Of course, they may not bother now that they’re watching M’s games from their solid platinum hot tubs filled with champagne and endangered salmon.