February 10th, 2008
Dipping my toe back in the pool: on Johan and Schill
Some loyal readers have pointed out that there’s been an usually long period of silence coming from this corner; in fact, January was the first month FTM was quiet since we started (virtual) publication. There are some good reasons for this: I’ve been obsessing over my rapidly shrinking bank account; wondering why I felt compelled to buy real estate last spring; wondering why I felt compelled to buy tech stocks in the spring of 2000; wondering if I can make a career out of forecasting when bubbles are about to burst…well, you get the idea.
I’ve also been waiting for news–real news, news that’s worth talking about–to come out of Yawkey Way. There have been some minor developments, but call me crazy, I didn’t think Eric Hinske signing with the Jays was of true, earth-shattering importance.
I know what you’re thinking: what happened today? Did Curt’s shoulder actually fall off? Did Coco jump Jacoby in a back alley somewhere? Is Pedro coming back to the Sox as a bullpen coach? No, no, and no — and in fact, the news that brought me out of my winter hibernation was as commonplace as can be.
It was the staggering stupidity of our favorite punching bag: Murray Chass.
Chass has been, for as long as I can remember, a uniquely horrid sportswriter, one of those buffoons that make you wonder how folks like him manage to be gainfully employed. It’s not just that he’s lazy. It’s not just that he uses a column in a national newspaper to browbeat subjects who dare not talk to him. It’s also that he understands next to nothing about baseball.
Take today’s column, which, by the way, is buried, as always, deep within the Times’s sports section. In a section titled “Giving Up Early,” Chass writes that the Sox “may yet regret that they were not more serious in their effort to win this winter’s Santana sweepstakes.” Chass implies that the Sox interest in Santana was because “their primary interest preventing the Yankees from getting Santana,” but that now, with Schilling’s shoulder trouble, the Sox need a starter. (He then floats one of those conspiracy theories that make no sense to anyone save for the little monkey living in Murray’s brain: “Players these days are supposed to have physicals before signing contracts. If the Red Sox found no shoulder problem in November before Schilling signed an $8 million contract, why does he have a shoulder problem now?” Does he think Curt’s faking — you know, because he doesn’t care about playing? Or that the Sox secretly sabotaged their own efforts and blew $8 mil in the process? Anyone who can figure this out gets a free prize.*)
Now, since neither Schill nor Wake is going anywhere, the Sox are guaranteed of having two 40+ starters on their team. They also have Dice-K, Beckett, Lester, and Buccholz. You could reasonably assume that the team’s brass figured that one of their older starters were likely going to be in the shop for repairs at any given point…but that their stable of young arms protected them.
The Sox might also have decided that, at the end of the day, paying Santana $140 mil through age 35 might not make sense - the team does, after all, know a little something about the durability of hard throwing aces that weight in at under two bills once they hit, say, age 32.
But it’s ridiculous to say that Ye Olde Towne team was never interested. Any package that includes either Jon or Jacoby is clearly a serious one. (For the record: I was never in favor of a Santana deal.
So there you have it. Happy new year, folks. I’ll be seeing you again real soon.
* Note: There is no prize.
December 23rd, 2007
How to lie with statistics, academia edition: Here’s what your $40,000 a year is paying for
In yesterday’s New York Times, a pair of academics — Columbia professor of sociology Jonathan Cole and University of Chicago professor of statistics Stephen Stigler — published an article titled “More Juice, Less Punch,” which aimed to ask the question: “Do [PEDs] make a difference sufficient to be detected in the players’ performance records?” Their answer, not surprisingly, is no (otherwise there wouldn’t have been any point in publishing their story in the first place): “An examination of the data on the players featured in the Mitchell report suggests that in most cases the drugs had either little or a negative effect.”
I feel sorry for the students that are forced to sit through these boobs’ courses.
Cole and Stigler try to prove their point by comparing stats from before and after a given player is accused of using roids (or HGH, or whatever). They explain their methodology thusly: “For pitchers identified by the report, we looked at the annual earned run average for their major league careers. For hitters we examined batting averages, home runs and slugging percentages. We then compared each player’s yearly performance before and after he is accused of having started using performance-enhancing drugs. After excluding those with insufficient information for a comparison, we were left with 48 batters and 23 pitchers.” The results, they say, show no net gain in performance.
This in itself would seem to intuitively demonstrate that PEDs do, in fact, work - baseball players, like mathematicians and physicists - show a dramatic tail-off at a very young age (for the geeks, their best work is usually done in their 20s; for ballplayers, the peak years usually come between 28 and 32) and if players with extended careers don’t show any decline in performance, that would indicate an unusual pattern.
Anyone who had any slight degree of sophistication would also realize that it’s next to meaningless to compare raw data - you need to make sure you understand what the data you’re looking at actually means. In this case, that means realizing that comparing stats like ERA or home runs or OPS or anything else tells you much less about a player’s relative performance than ERA+ or OPS+. (OPS+ normalizes OPS for the park and the league the player played in; ERA+ shows the player’s ERA in relation to the league’s ERA. This explains why Pedro’s 1.74 ERA in 2000, when the league ERA was 5.07, earned him an ERA+ of 291, while Sandy Koufax’s 1.74 ERA in 1964, when the league ERA was 3.25, only garnered him an ERA+ of 187. It also helps show why Pedro’s 2000 season was arguably the best ever. It resulted in the highest ERA+ since 1880, and the second best ever. Koufax’s top season ranks as 56th.)
Let’s drill down a little more. Cole and Stigler write, “The Roger Clemens is a case in point: a great pitcher before 1998, a great (if increasingly fragile) pitcher after he is supposed to have received treatment. But when we compared Clemens’s E.R.A. through 1997 with his E.R.A. from 1998 on, it was worse by 0.32 in the later period.” As I pointed out last year, the salient point here is how Clemens performed in his late 30s compared to his mid 20s. In the 12 years from Clemens’ breakout year in 1986, when he was 23, he had an ERA+ above 180 twice; in the 10 years from age 35 to 44, he had two more. Compare that to other Hall of Fame pitchers from this era like Greg Maddux, who had four years with an ERA+ of 180 or higher before age 35 and none afterwards, or Tom Glavine, whose five best years all came before age 35. Heck, compare it to Tom Seaver, the guy who was voted into the Hall with the highest percentage ever: his six best years all came before age 34.
Cole and Stigler are just as ignorant when it comes to hitters. “What should not be overlooked,” they write, “is that Bonds’s profile is strikingly like Babe Ruth’s high performance level until near the end of his career, with one standout home run year — a year in which other players on other teams also exceeded their previous levels.”
Actually, what should not be overlooked is the fact that Bonds has put up an OPS+ of greater than 200 in three out of the last six years, compared with comperable numbers in three of his first 14 years in the bigs. Ruth also had an OPS+ higher than 200 in three of his final six years…and another eight in the previous 14. (Another thing that should not be overlooked: Bonds has played the majority of his career in a home ballpark that has a spacious right field, unlike Ruth, who got to hit in Yankee Stadium.)
I know it’s not a shocker than a pair of academics don’t really understand baseball; it has taken autodidacts like Bill James to help illuminate the game. What is shocking is how little Cole and Stigler — professors who not only deal with numbers but teach at elite institutions — seem to understand about analyzing data.
December 17th, 2007
The Sox and the Bruins, dragging down the locals
Boston’s four pro sports teams–the Sox (11-3), Pats (11-0), C’s (20-2), and Bruins (18-11-3)–are a combined 60-19-3 since October 1, which is good for a .732 winning percentage. Take the B’s out of the equation and the three first place teams are a combined 42-5, which is good for approximately 9 wins for every 10 games. Back in 1986, I remember thinking that Boston had had a pretty decent year–the Sox and Pats both played for the championship and the Celts won their 2nd title in 3 years. Let’s see how this year ends up…
December 16th, 2007
Meet the new boss, redux: I say yes, I say no
“This is not a bluff; it’s just reality.”
– Hank Steinbrenner, December 2, 2007, when asked about his “firm deadline” of midnight, December 3, for the Yankees and Twins to complete a deal for Johan Santana.
“No. It’s over. When it’s over, it’s over.”
– Hank Steinbrenner, December 4, 2007, when asked if the Yankees were willing to continue negotiations if the Twins became willing to accept the Yankees final offer.
“We’re still thinking about it. We haven’t ruled it out completely. We’re still considering it. I haven’t closed the door completely on Santana.”
– Hank Steinbrenner, December 14, 2007
December 16th, 2007
Day Three: The situation’s looking worse all the time for Roger
Roger Clemens, through his lawyer, has been sticking with his Casablanca-evoking outrage that he was fingered as a ‘roids user. He shouldn’t be surprised, and neither should anyone else. (Compare this picture of a middle-aged Clemens to this one when he was in Boston. It certainly looks like his body went through a Bonds-like transformation.) I’ve been curious as to why more people weren’t asking questions about Clemens since last January, when Boston was in the hunt for his services.
In the last two days, the situation for Clemens has, remarkably, gotten even worse. There ex-big leaguers like C.J. Nitkowski defending Brian McNamee after he was called “troubled” by Clemens’ lawyer–a remarkable breach of the unspoken code of omerta among current and former ballplayers. There’s Curt Schilling, who looks up to Clemens as an idol, saying “I believe it” when asked about the contents of the Mitchell report. There’s the results of ESPN’s Jerry Krasnick’s informal poll of Hall voters–a full two-thirds of whom say they either wouldn’t vote for Clemens or are undecided.
And now there’s Andy Pettitte’s classy confirmation of McNamee’s revelations about his use of HGH. (Classy so long as his statement that there were only two times he used are, in fact, true.) Not only did Pettitte not say that McNamee was troubled, he confirmed exactly what McNamee had told investigators.
The steroid mess isn’t going to be one of those Watergate/Monica situations where the cover-up is worse than the crime…but it may be a case where the public, and the press, is a lot quicker to grant absolution to guys who come clean on their own. I’m willing to be dollars to doughnuts that Pettitte gets the biggest ovation of any player when the Yankees are announced on opening day at the Stadium.
December 16th, 2007
In defense of the Yankees dynasty
The presence of Clemens and Pettitte–and, to a lesser extent, of the likes of Chuck Knoblauch and David Justice–has predictably caused some people to question the Yankees ‘96-’00 dominance. I’ll add myself to one of the voices for the defense. No one will ever know what the Mitchell report would have looked like had there been a strength and conditioning coach in every clubhouse that talked, on the record, about what happened while they were with their respective teams…but it’s a safe bet that more teams would look like the Yankees, with more than a dozen players named, than like the Sox, who don’t have a single major player cited for actions during his time in Boston.
December 13th, 2007
What - you want more on the Mitchell Report?
Lots and lots and lots and lots of actual and virtual ink will be spilled on the Mitchell Report, which is going to make life hell for a whole mess of people. I’ll resist added too much of my drivel and will instead limit myself to some few quick points on issues such as…
Roger Clemens. Why, you might ask, would a sure-fire Hall of Famer risk his reputation and legacy over these last five or so years by taking PEDs? People asked me that question again and again during the pre-season frenzies of last season and 2006. I have no way of knowing; for some reason, Clemens won’t talk to me. But I do have an idea: because he has never, in his entire life, had to deal with the consequences of his actions. He can act like a teenage mutant ninja freak and throw broken bats across the field and it’s chalked up to competitive fire. He can demand ludicrous contract clauses like Hummers and private transportation and he’s indulged. Why, after years and years of this, would he suddenly think that the rules applied to him? (Clemens is far from alone in this regard; this is something that crops up again and again in ballplayers, who are constantly reminded that the normal rules of society–stay faithful to your spouse, clean up after yourself, don’t eat McDonald’s for breakfast–don’t apply to them.
I Love (the fact that I’m not playing in) New York. Plenty of teams’ fans are going to be crowing/letting out a huge sigh of relief…so long as those fans aren’t rooting for the Mets and the Yankees. A quick scan of what is destined to become known as the list shows current and former New Yorkers including Kevin Brown, Paul Lo Duca, Mo Vaughn, Todd Pratt, Ron Villone, David Justice, Chuck Knoblauch, Clemens, Andy Pettitte, and Lenny Dykstra. Does that mean that other teams–like, say, the Sox–are (or were) any cleaner? Hell no. It just means no-one else had a clubhouse attended that got popped.
The non-inclusion of any of the Idiots: Earlier today, what turned out to be a fake list was leaked; that one included names like Nomar, Johnny Damon, and Trot Nixon, along with other usual suspects like Pudge, Pujols, and Milton Bradley. (Later in the day, well-circulated rumor had Varitek also on the list.) Back in 2005, a member of the Sox’s front office physically shuddered at the thought of what would happen in Boston if news ever broke about someone on the ‘04 team roiding up. It looks like that won’t happen…for now, anyway. That brings us to…
Eric Gagne. Gagne, as everyone now knows, was on the list, which can’t be a surprise to anyone. (Also included in the report is news that the Sox inquired about Gagne’s supposed doping before acquiring him at the deadline.) It turns out that the biggest favor Gagne may have done Boston is sucking ass for the second half of the season–now, at least, no one can point to him as one of the reason’s for the team’s success.
That’s all for now. I’ve written plenty about steroids in the past, including last August, when I wondered why no one was wondering about Roger, and way back in October ‘06, when I mocked the press’s surprise that Clemens had been fingered in he Grimsley affidavit. I also tagged Jason Giambi a gutless punk, ripped into the Players Union for defending the players’ right to destroy their livers, lamented the fact that Jose Canseco seemed to be the only honest guy around, and talked about how Bill James compared steroids to going through a divorce. (Sort of, anyway.)
More later, I’m sure.
