Gammons and Cyberspace

A nice column yesterday by Peter Gammons on the impact of the Internet on the sports as well as the political culture (similar to another column he wrote back in 2006). Two quotes in the column in particular caught my eye (other than the mention of this blog, Baseball Prospectus, and The Hardball Times albeit sadly not in that order) that deserve a few comments.

First, Gammons says:

I make no bones about my strong feelings about the human element. Pure numbers cannot do justice to character and drive and energy. They cannot measure the impact Robin Yount had on teammates when he ran down the first-base line at the same breakneck speed (one scout had nearly 90 Yount games in a six- or seven-year period and claimed he never got Yount faster than 3.9 seconds, or slower than 4.0).

What a wonderful anecdote and one that relates to what I found when looking at the baserunning exploits of Yount in last week's column. To summarize, Yount was the only player who was a career leader (from 1956-2007 anyway) in multiple of the five baserunning metrics. Overall Yount contributed +54 theoretical runs ranking him 13th in total number of runs. However, he was first in advancing on hits (EqHAR) at +39 runs and first in advancing on fly balls (EqAAR) at +17 runs. He did this despite costing his team 7 runs in stolen bases (EqSBR) and a half run in advancing on passed balls, balks, and wild pitches (EqOAR).

Below you'll find Yount's career baserunning statistics.

Year   Opps EqGAR  Opps EqSBR  Opps EqAAR  Opps EqHAR  Opps EqOAR  Opps EqRuns
1974     24   0.8    15  -3.0    19   1.0    38   2.1   203   1.2   299   2.1
1975     42  -0.9    17   0.1    37  -0.2    42   1.1   317   0.1   455   0.3
1976     33   0.6    31  -3.9    49  -0.7    42   2.2   311  -0.6   466  -2.2
1977     39   0.0    24  -0.5    49   0.5    63   0.4   397  -0.1   572   0.4
1978     27  -0.4    21   0.5    32   0.4    41   0.9   278  -0.7   399   0.7
1979     30   0.9    23  -1.1    47   2.5    43   2.6   311   2.0   454   6.9
1980     39   1.2    27   0.7    46   1.7    46   2.5   353   0.0   511   6.0
1981     26  -0.2     5   0.1    30   0.8    29   1.5   199   0.0   289   2.2
1982     46   0.9    17   0.9    60   2.5    47   3.5   399   0.3   569   8.0
1983     29  -0.8    15  -0.4    53   0.9    47   3.3   343  -0.8   487   2.3
1984     43  -0.7    18   1.1    56   0.9    64   2.6   386  -0.1   567   3.8
1985     20  -0.2    15  -0.7    24   0.1    51   3.5   252  -0.8   362   1.9
1986     40   0.7    20   0.6    42   1.8    47   1.8   367  -0.4   516   4.6
1987     39   0.0    26  -2.2    50   1.0    32   1.3   406   0.9   553   1.1
1988     25   0.2    24   2.4    49  -0.6    45   1.1   397   0.1   540   3.2
1989     29   1.5    21   1.6    53   0.5    61   0.4   402  -0.9   566   3.1
1990     23   0.7    21  -1.6    46   2.1    52   2.6   360   0.6   502   4.4
1991     16   0.5     9  -1.2    43   0.5    39   2.1   277  -1.2   384   0.7
1992     32   0.0    20  -0.7    47   0.9    44   2.3   311  -0.6   454   1.9
1993     16   0.3    11   0.4    30   0.2    48   1.5   258   0.4   363   2.7
        618   5.3   380  -6.8   862  16.7   921  39.4  6527  -0.5  9308  54.1

Yount managed to turn in a positive run value in EqHAR in each of his 20 seasons - a rare feat to say the least.

I was also interested by this comment in Gammons' piece.

Bill James is trying to define clutch, what made George Brett so different, or sets David Ortiz, when healthy, apart in swagger and presence. You can present me with 4,765 pages of anti-Derek Jeter material; it won't work, I watch him too much.

Although he mentions in the column that he was reading The Hardball Times apparently he didn't let Tom Tango's excellent piece titled "With or Without Derek Jeter" sink in. In that article Tom uses Retrosheet data to demonstrate without a doubt (at least to me) that Jeter is among the worst fielding shortstops of his generation by showing that when Jeter is on the field, regardless of the other context which Tom does a great job of neutralizing, fewer batted balls are turned into outs. Period. And one would think that should be the bottom line when evaluating defense.

In tomorrow's Schrodinger's Bat at Baseball Prospectus I go one more round with the fielding system dubbed Simple Fielding Runs (SFR) that I developed for use with Retrosheet style play by play data. In the article I compare SFR to UZR (Ultimate Zone Rating) as well as John Dewan's Plus/Minus system. Not coincidentally both Plus/Minus and SFR rate Derek Jeter as the worst shortstop in baseball from 2005 through 2007 and of course UZR is no fan either. For my part, here are Jeter's SFR numbers since 2002 (ExR is expected runners, Rn is actual runners, and Balls are the number of balls allocated to Jeter's area of responsibility).

Year     Balls      ExR      Rn    Diff     SFR
2002       461       14      10       4       3
2003       479      119     139     -20     -15
2004       637      154     151       3       2
2005       721      183     195     -13      -9
2006       625      163     174     -11      -8
2007       615      168     194     -26     -20
          3538      800     863     -64     -47

So over the course of six seasons Jeter is worth -47 runs by handling 64 fewer balls than would have been expected.

What I find interesting about Gammons' comment (and his take on Jeter is of course not a rare one and so I'm not just picking on Gammons) is the almost absolute faith in observation over other evidence when the evidence from every analytical tool available concurs as to the quality of Jeter's defense. Perhaps people are simply wired differently with some inherently more skeptical of what they see (or think they see) and therefore more willing to let other kinds of input shape their opinions. I'll admit it's kind of a mystery to me.

NCAA Limits Live Blogging

Thought this story on blogging sporting events and the NCAA, sent to me by a colleague, was pretty interesting. I agree that making rules like this only hurts the sport in the long run. Of course the technology will advance to where, using a handheld device, you could essentially simulcast the game from your seat with commentary etc. but blogging is still a long way from that...

Father's Day Links

Here's a few interesting things on a Father's Day.

Dialing Long Distance - In the Rockies/Devil Rays game here at Coors Field today Carlos Pena his a 452 foot homerun into the third deck in right field (only the right field section has a second or third deck of course). It was the 27th time a homerun had been hit into the 3rd deck and the first time since July 7, 2005 when Todd Helton performed the feat. Johnny Gomes hit two homeruns in the game, the first of which came in the second inning and was a 442 foot shot to left-center. His homerun in the sixth was 415 feet and was a line drive. For the Rockies Matt Holliday hit a 428 foot homerun to into the Rockies bullpen in right-center and Kaz Matsui lofted a 386 foot fly ball down the left field line as well but the longest hit of the afternoon belonged to Brad Hawpe. Hawpe, who hit a grand in last night's ballgame and now has 12 homeruns in his last 27 games putting him in the company of Prince Fielder, Alex Rodriguez, and Gary Sheffield, his a ball of the facing of the third deck in the 8th inning. The blast was 452 feet.

That makes 14 homeruns hit by the two teams in a three-game series that saw the Rockies go unbeaten in their 8th straight series (7-0-1). Does this mean Coors is back to being the homer haven it once was? Here is a graph of the runs scored and homeruns per out at Coors Field historically and up through yesterday's game.



Overall, run scoring is right at the 2005 level while homeruns are closer to 2004. Still, however, we're seeing levels of run scoring in the humidor era reduced from those prior to 2002.

Credentials - This is an interesting article from Tim Marchman in the New York Sun calling for internet writers to be granted credentials. This is certainly a trend that is likely not to be reversed. In the short term, however, it's ironic that overall anyway, blogs probably make it more difficult for baseball writers whose work is published on the internet to obtain the access because the sheer number of nodes make it difficult for teams to determine who is serious and who isn't. The fluid nature of the internet also means there is not a clear line of demarcation sometimes between serious and longer term sites and blogs. Right now teams use the fact that you can print a paper as a proxy for your seriousness and your promise not to abuse the access. Note that readership or quality of the content produced are not criteria, which in large part is what Marchman is arguing. I've always argued that the outsider's perspective is valuable and in one sense getting access would change that. But on balance there is no doubt that with access comes more information and more nuanced writing and that can never be a bad thing.

Defense - David Gassko at THT posts defensive metrics derived from Baseball Info Solution's Zone Rating data. Is it just me or do these numbers look really high (and low)? There's little doubt that the leaders and trailers he lists are the best and worst fielders but the magnitude of the numbers (+20 at first base for Albert Pujols and +24 at third base for David Wright particularly) seem a little excessive. Perhaps I'm not understanding what these are based on and someone can correct me :) Update: See David's comments to this post for an explanation.

Monkey See

Inspired by BP's new look I've finally spent the requisite 30 minutes and updated the layout of this blog. In addition to the new look you'll also notice on the right hand side that we now have feeds from Baseball Prospectus and Ballbug (news from the world of baseball), the list of categories and posting contained therein (I only started categorizing back in October so you'll have to bear with me as I update older posts), a different view of the archives. Enjoy.

1000

In September of 2003 I authored my first post on this blog at the urging of my friend and co-worker Jon Box. In that post I noted that I chose the title "Dan Agonistes" in reference to Milton's famous poem Samson Agonistes written in 1671. Agon in Greek means "to struggle" or "wrestle" since this blog was intended to discuss my struggles or wrestling with various issues.

At the time I had intended to write mostly in my field of Information Technology with a fair dose of history, Christianity, natural science, and sports. What I quickly found in my next three posts was that I rather enjoyed writing about baseball (I did start another blog to discuss a service oriented software development project) and although I have from time to time written on other subjects the content has increasingly skewed towards baseball. Writing about the national pastime on this blog certainly helped me hone my writing skills and led directly to first writing for The Hardball Times and now Baseball Prospectus.

Well, this is now the 1,000th post (much to the mortification of my dear wife) and I have to admit that I'm a little surprised I'm still writing. Like many bloggers I think that writing about a topic helps me to think systematically and logically as well as come to opinions or conclusions on various issues. And so contrary to the notion that blogging is all about ego (it certainly is to some degree) I prefer to think that blogging is a form of self education. At least it has been for me.

Over the course of the last three and almost one half years there have been several posts that were my favorites. You'll notice that more than two hundred of those are listed on the right. But there are other posts that clearly the favorites of others, judging from the traffic reports I look at occasionally anyway. Some of those are:

The series of posts I wrote on C.S. Lewis' Miracles

The series of posts on Run Estimation

Sabermetrics 101

What is a Normal Career Trajectory?

Old Pitcher Skills?

Thanks for reading and I hope to keep the conversation going...