Baseball Prospectus and the Importance of Fanship

Maybe the best thing about the internet is that it allows people with shared interests to converse. I'll touch on why this makes Twitter so damn cool in a post later this week at PMI, but it's not just Twitter. The homepage of Meetup at this moment features such clubs and groups as the Baby Boomers Social Club, the Raleigh Horse Riders, and The Greater Boston Asian Professionals Meetup Group. Being a fan of something has never been easier and it's never been more important. Here's Matt Bucher, from a paper originally delivered at last year's Footnotes Conference:

This small group of dedicated fans is also a key resource for translators of Wallace’s writing. Members of the list have answered questions and helped with translating challenging passages for Italian, Dutch, Spanish, and German editions of Wallace’s fiction and non-fiction. This is a practice that seems commonplace on the list now, but would be inconceivable in the world of contemporary fiction even forty years ago. For example, were fans of John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse consulted on its Russian or Japanese translations? Before the Internet age, this would be almost impossible to do, but it is also unlikely that a translator would know of a group of John Barth fans and trust their understanding of his use of the language. If anything, the translator might discuss a tricky issue or two with a fellow translator or a Barth scholar at a conference. In terms of how Wallace is perceived around the world, this use of the hive-mind cannot be underestimated. It not only attracts an international population to the list, but furthers the understanding of the most idiomatic and idiosyncratic parts of Wallace’s writing.

However, this gets us closer to the question of what kind of people join the list, and it brings up larger issues about communities and intellectual discourse and group psychology. The list includes English professors, writers, musicians, mathematicians, artists, lawyers, bloggers, women who have deep and abiding crushes on Wallace, and every stripe of over-educated young man dying to talk about “important” literature. 

I'm still amazed at how The Grammys enabled music fans to become collaborators in a very real way with the musicians they emulate.

And so we come to my second annual trip out to a Baseball Prospectus book reading.

You know how Intel has rock stars unlike the public's rock stars? It's just as true with a Baseball Prospectus reading. These folks are the nerdiest baseball nerds who ever nerded. And that's why they're great.



Aside from learning that Stephen Strasburg is the highest rated pitching prospect in history--higher than Mark Prior, higher than Kerry Wood, higher than Brien Taylor, higher than anyone--I got to participate in one of the world's great niche language communities. At one point, an audience member mentioned that one of the problems with watching a baseball game on TV was that the camera angles don't allow the viewer to see the route an outfielder takes to the ball, missing completely an essential aspect of the defensive game. Judging just from the information available on TV, we have no idea how circuitous a route he may have taken. At this point, one of the panelists agreed and then mentioned the name Terrence Long. Without elaboration. Everyone chuckled. Here's why this is great: Terrence Long is a fairly obscure outfielder who last played in 2006. He most recently accrued 500 at-bats in 2003. He hasn't been a regular in a long while, and he wasn't all that notable even when he was earning a Major League paycheck. But the audience recognized both who, exactly, Terrence Long is and that his defensive reputation is, let's say, less than stellar. We were having a conversation through references, via a shared body of knowledge. And while Baseball Prospectus can still be depressing as hell, it's totally worth it for the language games I got to play.

The Great Rivera

Baseball's in the air. At least in Florida and Arizona. But even up here in chilly and rainy New York, now is prime time for baseball annuals. I'll have more on Baseball Prospectus 2010 sometime soonish, but, for now, I'd just like to point out how lucky Yankee fans have been since 1995, able to watch the great Mariano Rivera pitch an average of 67 times per annum. From the Baseball Prospectus 2010 non-numbers section on Rivera:

Rivera has had an entry in every edition of this book. Superlatives we have employed: "something special" (1996); "amazing...the most important player in baseball" (1997); "completely unhittable" (2000); "the best closer of his generation" (2002); "otherwordly" (2004); "a one-trick pony [but] the best of all time (2005); "splendid...like Fort Apache: The Lead" (2006); "the-by-acclamation Greatest Closer of All Time" (2008); "the closest thing baseball has to Fred Astaire" (2009). Get the picture?

But maybe the most important thing Baseball Prospectus has said about Rivera comes from the 2009 version. It's not quoted above because it is more a piece of advice than a superlative: "We don't know how many more years of this Rivera has in him, so enjoy it while you can still see him without having to schlep up to Cooperstown."

When Great Things Collide

From the 2009 edition of Baseball Prospectus, in the player profile of Scott Campbell, 2B, Toronto Blue Jays:

New Zealand native Campbell is on a quest to become the first Kiwi to reach the major leagues...Too bad it didn't happen in time for his baseball card to make its way into Murray's office in the second season of Flight of the Conchords.

I love this book.

A guy who wonders both who will be the next president and what the heck is up with Miguel Tejada and Alex Gonzalez?

The man pictured at left is named Nate Silver. (You can tell he's smart because the newspaper or whatever that published this photo decided to have Silver sit near a computer.) Until a few months ago he was best known for his work at Baseball Prospectus, where he wrote articles with titles such as "Is David Ortiz a Clutch Hitter" and "Binomial Distribution (or What the Heck is Up with Miguel Tejada and Alex Gonzalez?" Also, he invented PECOTA, which the BP website defines thus:

Stands for Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm. PECOTA is BP's proprietary system that projects player performance based on comparison with thousands of historical player-seasons. Analyzes similarities with past player-seasons based not only on rate statistics, but also height, weight, age, and many other factors.

This is pretty smart: there's just about nothing in baseball that hasn't already happened in it's 100+ year history, so let's let that mound of data help inform our conclusions. And it's pretty clear that PECOTA is just about the best thing out there for predicting what will happen in baseball.

Mr. Silver decided to bring his predictive genius to the world of politics, starting a blog called fivethirtyeight.com (named after the 538 electoral votes in the presidential election), with the confident byline of Electoral Projections Done Right. He wisely declines to divulge his exact methodology, but Silver does explain some of what goes into his projections:

Firstly, we assign each poll a weighting based on that pollster's historical track record, the poll's sample size, and the recentness of the poll. More reliable polls are weighted more heavily in our averages.

Secondly, we include a regression estimate based on the demographics in each state among our 'polls', which helps to account for outlier polls and to keep the polling in its proper context.

Thirdly, we use an inferential process to compute a rolling trendline that allows us to adjust results in states that have not been polled recently and make them ‘current’.

Fourthly, we simulate the election 10,000 times for each site update in order to provide a probabilistic assessment of electoral outcomes based on a historical analysis of polling data since 1952. The simulation further accounts for the fact that similar states are likely to move together, e.g. future polling movement in states like Michigan and Ohio, or North and South Carolina, is likely to be in the same direction.

Silver is becoming a big deal. Appearances like this don't hurt.




Silver's latest projection: a win percentage of 94.7% in favor of Obama, meaning that if this election was run 100 times, Obama would win nearly 95 of those times.

I'm happy that this dude who has produced amazing work in a somewhat limited field is getting the exposure he deserves. He's smarter than maybe all the people who get paid to sit on TV and talk about politics; it's time his talent is recognized. But I'll be satisfied as long he keeps writing about baseball.

Baseball is Exhausting

Like all good bloggers, I spent my vacation reading through the 600 page, 2008 edition of Baseball Prospectus. I still don't know how to calculate MLVr or VORP, but I understand basically what those numbers represent, and, crucially, that having high ones of those means that you are a good baseball player.

Leitch reported these feelings from his nerdy escapades:

the cumulative effect was to convince us that everyone in baseball over the age of 28 is doomed. Nothing makes us feel older than Baseball Prospectus; everyone freaking peaks at 28 in that book. How depressing.

While Leitch took the perspective of the ballplayers, leading to depression, I identified more with the decision-makers responsible for determining which of those ballplayers are good, leading to exhaustion.

Since I love talking about the Rockies on these here interwebs (and might just get the chance to see them in Coors during my Denver-vention), let's take a look at two of their middle of the order hitters from last season, Garret Atkins (3B) and Brad Hawpe (RF). Atkins is entering his age 28 season, coming off a year in which he was worth about 35 more runs to his team than that offered by a replacement level standard. Hawpe, entering his age 29 season, bested Atkins with a VORP of 37.4. These numbers aren't the best in the league, but they're solid. And according to BP, both these guys are expendable. Not that they're killing the Rockies this year, but that these guys are finished products, not liable to improve, which means they're going to start getting expensive in arbitration/contract negotiations.

My thought is this: O'Dowd just put together the team that won the National League, led the organization to believe that it was a good idea to trademark Rocktober, and still, it's time to part ways with two of the guys responsible for getting him that far.

It seems much easier to just resign these guys, instead of breaking in some cheap replacements. No wonder Washington is paying Dmitri Young $5,000,000 this year.