As much as I love spring training’s promise of baseball every year, I can’t help but feel frustrated with what passes as news during the annual warm-up. San Francisco Giants ace pitcher Tim Lincecum, coming off repeat Cy Young Award Winning seasons posted a 9 + ERA after his first two starts of spring training. Meanwhile Cincinnati Red’s rookie Aroldis Chapman and Washington National’s first-round draft pick Steven Strasburg are lighting up batters left and right.
Strasburg just got sent back to the minor leagues for a tune-up. Chapman is a big question mark, and Lincecum is still penciled in to be the Giant’s opening day starter. Doesn’t seem to matter to some sports reporters who can’t wrap their heads around these kind of decisions. If Lincecum is throwing 9.28, isn’t he washed up? Chapman is throwing 1.28, how is he not going to make the roster?
Here’s the problem with these stats. They rely on very little information and very little evidence. This is what’s called in sabermetic terms, “small sample size.”
Small Sample Size. The bane of sabermetrics. You ever watched a baseball game only to hear a commentator remark something random like, “this guy is batting .400 with runners in scoring position during night games at Wrigely Field.” Do you know what this statistic means? Nothing. It means that a particular batter strung together 4 hits out of ten at bats under completely unrelated circumstances that someone cobbled together. This statistic doesn’t take into consideration who was pitching, who was fielding, what time during the season, or even how long ago the player in question accomplished this. It is completely meaningless and arbitrary.
Well, those are Spring training statistics in a nutshell. Meaningless. Is Tim Lincecum really going to have a horrible year? It’s possible, but extremely unlikely. A guy doesn’t just win two Cy Young awards and then let a horrible spring training ruin his career.
Granted, Washington doesn’t have a lot of depth in pitching when it comes to their Strasburg situation, but no one is really expecting Washington to compete this year. Instead, they’re giving their future ace as much care and development as possible.
Just like useless strung together statistics don’t count for much during the regular season, either do spring training stats. When the first pitch is thrown in Fenway Park on April 4, that’s when it counts.
For the first time in many months I broke a sweat while walking on campus this weekend. Surely, my double jacket-sweatshirt combination I’ve been wearing since October was a little too much to combat the conditions for today – namely, a bright, mild and sunny day.
At the risk of cursing it, spring is coming, and it isn’t just the weather that is an indication. Anyone who watches ESPN as obsessively as myself knows that Spring Training just started for Major League Baseball, and nothing puts me in a better mood then the start of every baseball season.
So-called America’s favorite past time, baseball is most often seen as the most traditional of all sports in our country. It’s the only sport where numbers from a bygone era are still considered benchmarks for modern day players, calls by umpires are pretty much based on biased judgment, and from year-to-year you can expect the game of baseball to be played pretty much the same.
For some, that’s what makes baseball great, but I disagree with the view that it is a static never-changing game. In fact, I think on the fringes of the sport people are working on some of the most progressive ways of thinking about our most beloved game.
I’m talking about Sabermetrics, statistics in baseball the go beyond outdated “mainstream” statistics such as Batting Average, ERA, and, worst of all, wins. Sabermetrics argues that these statistics are mostly based on luck, and serve no real indication to how good a player usually is.
One only has to listen to Joe Morgan talk for about three minutes to realize that not everyone thinks sabermetrics are great (or understand Joe Morgan is an idiot), but sabermetrics is growing in popularity. On Base Percentage used to be a rarely discusses stat, but now on Baseball tonight you can regularly hear the likes of Buster Olney and Tim Kirkjian talk about things like OPS (On-base plus slugging) and WAR (Wins Above Replacement), stats that no one had ever heard of five years ago.
This off-season the two teams everybody was talking about were the Boston Red Sox and Seattle Mariners. Terry Francona and Jack Zduriencik were making the biggest, strangest and most controversial trades and deals. Both General Managers gave up arguably their biggest hitters (Jason Bay and Russel Branyan respectively) to pick up new defensive wizards like Mike Cameron and Chone Figgens. Both also spruced up their pitching rotations with big name acquisitions in John Lackey and Cliff Lee.
How well are these two teams going to do this year? You can check out different predictions here and here(both based on sabermetric research) but we won’t know until October. However, if Boston and Seattle pull off successful playoff runs, you’ll likely see a shift away from teams paying huge contracts for big power hitters and maybe save a little more to pick up some gold glovers. Chances are, if that happens, something else will come along that some pioneer realizes are cheap options, and the process will begin all over again. Baseball is only a static un-evolving game to those who don’t want to get to the underbelly of the sport. For those who do, sabermetrics are the stats of the future, and the more you understand them, the more you might find yourself enjoying America’s game.
Interested in learning the basics of sabermetrics? Check out this great site here.