Room To Hope

This is good. My father is coming for a visit on Friday, and when he is not paying attention to my daughter, I expect that we will talk about statistics in baseball. He thinks looking at stats takes the fun out of the game, and I am a fan of know more about the sport I love. I’ve picked some articles out of the Hardball Times Annual for him to read that I think highlight what I enjoy about sabrmetrics. We’ll see how it goes.

via advanced sabermetric stats and/or principles has all that much of an impact on things like ‘hope’ for the coming season, or similar things. Ignoring anything beyond batting average, home runs, and RBI, one would have quickly come to the conclusion that last years, starting team was not going to be going places, individual players weren’t magically going to be turning over new leafs, and so on.

If anything, I think that, for me personally, delving into the more advanced sabermetric stats and principles has, overall, increased my “love for the game”. Do they make it more pronounced that we’re likely not going to be winning champtionships? Somewhat, yeah, but I think the person whose interest/like of baseball is that much vested in winning championships, their priorities for liking baseball are somewhat off. That’s not to say I like constantly losing and being let down, but there’s more that is fun and interesting in baseball than just the W/L column.

yeah we are without Johan to start the season but

a staff with Dickey, Young, capuano or Gee is better than one with Perez, and Maine

but I am very sceptical with Beltran now, and hate to think that Reyes may be in his last season as a Met

I believe Pagan will hve a few good years, and Thole will get better every season until he hits like LaDuca. I am confident that Bay will bounce back and think we will see an awesome season from Wright again. Castillo beter be sitting or gone, because Murphy or Emaus will only get better

Maybe it’s because I’ve played hockey at a fairly competitive level so I (mistakenly or not mistakenly) feel I have a good understanding of the game without the over-reliance of traditional stats. Not sure.

Sabermetrics has helped my understanding of the game a great deal, but it’s also made me way more cynical about things.

You obviously don’t want to be like Jon Heyman, an uninformed moron….but then again, you don’t want to come off like Dave Cameron.

I kind of like the cynicism that the stats have left me with. It makes those moments where something truly random happens much more enjoyable to me. Just think of last year as an amusing example. Were we not statistically-minded as we are around here, would every Jeff Francoeur walk have brought an incredulous laugh to so many of us? I’ll take as much cynicism as statistics can provide for me, it makes the outliers more fantastic.

and a ballgame is a ballgame. As fatalistic as sabermetrics can be about a player’s career, it has almost nothing to say about an at bat. Or the next pitch. It’s funny: some think the regular season’s bad because it’s too determined, and some think the playoffs are bad because they’re too random.

I guess sabermetrics might drain the color out of “who’s better” discussions, and “who should make the roster” decisions, but it has other things going for it, like teaching me to think empirically about one of the most cut-and-dried things on earth, and still finding it surprising.

Well you could buy our book, in which I exhaust this topic, but knowing the cheap, ungrateful bunch that you are, I’ll summarize.

I don’t think it was unfair of you to expect Frenchy to make something decent of his career. People long held that he was a talented hitter who needed plate discipline. Fine. While plate discipline isn’t necessarily something that can be taught, it’s something that one can to improve upon, at least a little bit. In spring training Frenchy said that he’d try to work 50-60 walks into his game. Just by trying to take some pitches, Francoeur was doing better. He was hitting well for the few weeks of last season and even walking (!!). If I recall correctly, he walked once in the first 4 games.

It’s when he hit a slump—a really deep slump—that he gave up everything he was working on. His instincts took over as he became impatient with his results at the plate. Maybe if Francoeur hadn’t slumped, he wouldn’t have went back to swinging at everything. I’m not saying he could have hit 50 walks—I don’t even know if it’s possible for him—but if he was smart enough to take a step back and understand that he can’t swing at everything to be successful, he’d at least be better than what he is now.

have you checked out advanced metrics for basketball? Cross sport comparison is exactly what the doctor ordered in my opinion and the “less discrete” sports (than baseball) should give us some perspective and tell us a lot about how sabermetrics works. i am curious to hear what you have learned from hockey. So i guess i’ll stop waiting for my free review copy of the AA annual and purchase it to read Sam’s article.

My understanding is that, while there was a lot of public domain advanced basketball metrics work being done 5 yrs ago, APBRmetrics are studied largely within organizations now and so much of the good work is less available to the public. In contrast baseball sabermetrics had a hard time being embraced by clubs, and thus a lot of its work is on the internet, publicly available. This was told to me by the guy that runs Basketball reference who i thought was pretty knowledgeable.