You’re Wrong; No, You Are!

As I’ve mentioned before, the comments section of the Hardball Times is a barren wasteland. But Matt Swartz’s latest treatise on being an idiot with a stats software package attracted some controversy, mostly because he’s an idiot with a stats software package. I’ve archived the SABR fight in case the comments disappear as things sometimes do on THT. And I’ve even highlighted the best parts.

Mike Fast:

The community has shown with certainty that there is little difference between pitchers? I would say that my study of HITf/x data indicated exactly the opposite.

And similarly for team defensive efficiency, a large portion of it is due to how hard the team’s pitchers allow the ball to be hit.

Single-year BABIP is a crude measure of pitcher skill, and it’s leading you to conclusions about the game of baseball that are very wrong.

Matt Swartz:

I’m not coming to any wrong conclusions. I don’t know what you think I’m doing with single season BABIP, but it’s not leading myself to wrong conclusions.

There IS little difference relative to the difference between pitchers in strikeout rate, which is why it takes more than a season to stabilize.

What your study showed was that how hard balls are hit is persistent, and that it is correlated with BABIP. It didn’t widen the spread of pitcher BABIP skill levels in the MLB, which is and always has been minimal compared to the spread in strikeout rates.

I find your comment about “leading you to conclusions about the game of baseball that are very wrong” to be fantastically indicative that you haven’t really read and understood this or anything else I’ve written on the topic of pitcher BABIP. If you did, you could certainly understand your own findings better, and you’d know they aren’t contradictory.

The reason that single season BABIP is a crude indicator of pitcher skill is sample size. The variance in an individual’s BABIP skill level due to randomness is going to be about [.21/sqrt(number of batted balls)]. Knowing this, we can actually pin down that about 75% of single season BABIP variance is due to luck for pitchers with >=150 IP. The rest of it comes down to know the other 25%. We know that regressing team BABIP by the same process would yield another 13% of the variance in BABIP, which means that there is 12% for pitching.

Using single season BABIP to understand that 12% will due a pretty poor job. However, using peripherals and running a regression as I have will eliminate a lot of that noise. In fact, you can explain about 10.4% of that 12% by knowing peripherals. What your study likely did is duplicated some of the effort in understanding the first 10.4% (hard hit balls or correlated with peripherals; check your data, I’m sure it’s true) and supplemented a good portion of the remaining 1.6%.

In other words, nothing you found negates anything I’ve found at all. You’ve come up with a way to use propietary data effectively. Unless you have that available, using peripherals does a pretty good job. I can’t even imagine what it is that you disagree with here, or what you think I don’t understand.

MF:

I’m not disputing your statistics. I’m disputing your conclusions about the game of baseball.

“What your study showed was that how hard balls are hit is persistent, and that it is correlated with BABIP. It didn’t widen the spread of pitcher BABIP skill levels in the MLB, which is and always has been minimal compared to the spread in strikeout rates.”

Right. But I did show that BABIP is a poor way to measure pitcher skill. We sorta knew that already, but some people had taken the BABIP findings to mean that pitcher skill was also minimal. I established that that conclusion from the evidence was wrong.

You are correct that strikeout rate picks up some of the hard-hit ball skill that pitchers have. However, it does not pick up nearly all of it.

Moreover, batted ball categories are pretty good at picking up vertical launch angle effects, but they are lousy at picking up how hard the ball is it.

So your regressions are still missing some pretty important data.

Yes, the ways we have found to measure that data so far are proprietary. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t learn about the reality of baseball from that data and let that effect how we frame questions, though. I would certainly wonder why BABIP doesn’t better reflect how hard the ball is hit.

I found that almost half of team BABIP was due to how hard the ball was hit. So when you say it’s 12 percent pitching skill, that’s what I’m disputing. You could say that you can only detect that 12 percent of the team BABIP is due to the pitchers, but it’s a leap of logic to say that you’re looking at pitching SKILL there. And HITf/x data indicates in fact that you are not.

Also, I don’t understand why you insist on looking at single-season pitcher/team BABIP to determine that number. It is simpler to calculate, but it’s deceptive. Being rooted to single-season numbers is one of the big failings of modern sabermetrics.

MS:

Which of my conclusions about the game of baseball do you dispute?

You found that how hard a ball is hit is highly correlated. This is a self-contained statistic that is only useful inasmuch as it can teach you about singles, doubles, triples, home runs, outs, and errors. It doesn’t do me any good to know the statistic otherwise, except for how it relates to outcomes that affect games. So BABIP is a logical skill to try to infer from how hard a ball is hit, and your numbers do a nice job of hitting on that.

I think when you say “half of BABIP was due to how hard the ball was hit,” you’re either using same year data or R instead of R^2 or doing both. I’m guessing you’re doing correlations, while I’m doing R^2.

But if it’s just same year data, you’re including luck in terms of how hard a ball was hit (of course pitchers will deviate around their true talent rate in this category as well). That doesn’t measure skill. That measures outcomes.

My regressions are not intended to be the end-all summary of a pitcher’s true BABIP skill. They pick up about 80% of the possible variance that could exist in BABIP skills.

Since this seems to be a point of contention—how much variance in true BABIP skill there is to find—I’ll prove to you that R=0.5 or even R^2=.25 is insane for one season of data.

Take all pitchers with 150 IP or more in a single season from 2003-2011. They average 592 BIP. There true BABIP skill is about .30, give or take, so the variance in luck HAS to be .21/592 for the average pitcher in this group. It’s impossible binomially for that not to be true. That’s a random variance if .000354. The actual variance in BABIP for that same group is .000457. That means randomness HAS to explain 77% (last time I got 75% but same diff)! I don’t know how much you think is team defense, but you’re it’s not 0%. If you look at how much variance is explainable by defense seriously, it’s about 13%. That’s just regressing the data.

So my original 12% number is the maximum explainable by differences between pitchers. That’s not what my regressioun found. That was 10.4%. Obviously give or take here or there, but you get the point. Most of it is explained by peripherals.

And just because you’re saying I’m looking at single-season numbers to prove that point, that has nothing to do with the implications of that 12%. The 12% means the standard deviation is pitcher skill is about .007 of BABIP. It can’t be much greater than that, and it has nothing to do with choosing a single season. The same analysis on careers or half seasons or whatever would give you about the same conclusion. I look at single-season because it’s the easiest to run these tests on quickly.

So what exactly do you think are my wrong conclusions? Where in that description of variance will you determine that BABIP skill level has a higher spread than about .007, and where as about .005 or .006 can be explained by a regression on peripherals, tell me what’s wrong here. If you want to say there is value in the last .001 or .002, great, keep at it. It may only be attainable with propietary data, and good for you if you can use it to your advantage. But nothing that I have found here is wrong.

And there it ends, without even a snide remark from Fast on Twitter. I feel like Matt Swartz took Nate Silver’s Baseball Prospectus columns a little too much to heart.

Great/Horrible Moments in FanGraphs Trolling

Dave Cameron announced he has acute myeloid leukemia, which it goes without saying, is sad. FanGraphs trolls managed to keep the comment thread respectful for three and a half hours.

Mike:

If you die, can I have your spot on the staff?

DAVE CAMERONS WIFE:

WOOF! WOOF! WOOF! WOOF! WOOF!

Lou Keemia:

A lot changes in a year…Mariners from 6th best organization in baseball to the worst. Dave Cameron from alive and well to dead as a doornail.

Lou Keemia:

OMG JUST KEEP FIGHTING THE GOOD FIGHT, DAVE. YOU MEAN SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO MUCH TO ME EVEN THOUGH I HAVE NEVER MET YOU BEFORE. YOU’RE PROBABLY THE MOST INFLUENTIAL PERSON IN MY LIFE AND I WILL NEVER FORGET YOU. WORDS CANNOT BEGIN TO DESCRIBE MY FEELINGS FOR YOU. AFTER EVERYTHING YOU’VE DONE FOR ME AND MY FAMILY, INTRODUCING US TO WAR AND UZR, I FEEL LIKE I’D BE LOSING MY FATHER OR MY BROTHER. PLEASE DONT DIE ON ME CHIEF, I CAN’T HANDLE IT. I MIGHT HAVE TO OFF MYSELF JUST TO BE WITH YOU.

HOW DO I LIVE WITHOUT YOU
I WANT TO KNOW
HOW DO I BREATHE WITHOUT YOU
IF YOU EVER GO
HOW DO I EVER, EVER SURVIVE
HOW DO I
HOW DO I
OH, HOW DO I LIVE

Garrett:

Hope you get better. Though this article sucks. Considering statistics will have a meaningful impact on whether you die or not, probably you should choose another anecdote to talk about how statistics are useless. (I’m sure since you don’t use statistics you won’t write a will either. Or make any preparations in case of death. The same as if you were a healthy man in your mid-20s.)

Either way. I look forward to mocking your complete lack of knowledge of personal finance for years to come.

Say My Name Bitch:

Dave, I just want you to know that I am in your corner and I am rooting for you….TO DIE!!!!!!!!!!!

I think Telo summed it up nicely:

And I thought I was the douchebag of Fangraphs. What the hell is wrong with you people?

I must say that I love FanGraphs’ comment rating system. Other sites with an up/down voting system use those votes to determine whether to show or hide a comment and sometimes the order of the thread, too. Even Baseball Prospectus, with a website stuck in 2001 does this. But FanGraphs just displays a big red number next to poorly-rated comments and does nothing else with them. Which is great for me. If I’m skimming through a lengthy thread, I make sure to stop and read all the red ones.

The Soul of Sabermetrics

Graham MacAree tried to shock the SABR world with his screed “The Problem with Sabermetrics” but I’m not buying it. After wasting a few paragraphs pointing out that baseball analysts can’t conduct controlled experiments (gee whiz!), he drops a few thinly-veiled insults.

Data analysis methods are being misapplied and sold to readers as the next big thing.

Didn’t I just cover this?

Articles are being written for the sake of sharing irrelevant changes in irrelevant metrics.

That sounds familiar, too.

Certain personalities are so revered that their word is taken as gospel when fighting dogma was what brought them the respect they’re now given in the first place.

Maybe he’s just stealing my material. Anyway, MacAree at least has a way to fix the sorry state of sabermetrics.

Sabermetrics shouldn’t be so incomprehensible so as not to call up the smell of fresh mown grass in midsummer, or the crack of the ball off the bat, the blur of seams as an outfielder whips a throw in towards his cutoff man. Statistics shouldn’t be sterile and clean and shiny and soulless. They shouldn’t just be about baseball; they should invoke it. Otherwise, they run the risk of losing the language which makes them so special.

I’m happy someone has finally made this point. What I love most about good sabermetrics is that when I look at

I see a hit-and-run executed to perfection; I smell the hot dogs and popcorn, chewing tobacco and sweat; I hear the umpire calling “Steeee-rike three!” That’s what makes tRA maybe not the best ERA estimator, but my favorite ERA estimator. And that’s what sabermetrics is all about.

Baseball Prospectus Disowns the Idiot with the Stats Software Package

No doubt inspired by my comments on Matt Swartz’s harebrained relaunch of SIERA, Colin Wyers officially called out Swartz for his shoddy work and ignorance of statistics. It’s awesome, really. I’m not being ironic when I say it’s exactly what sabermetrics should be. And he managed to do it in 3,000 words, instead of the millions Swartz has written so far about his idiotic stat. I’ll link it again for everyone; please go read Wyers’s article.

Things J.C. Bradbury Is Wrong About

• The role of academic peer review in sabermetrics
• Aging curves and peak ages
• Replacement level
• The effect of pitch count on a pitcher’s next start
• Salary projections
• Whether teams “knew” about DIPS before the SABR did
• The relationship between payroll and wins
• Pretty much everything

The Gift That Keeps on Giving

MGL calls Dayn “Dayne” Perry “supposedly smart” and then says his article is “dumb”. And he misspells his name to boot! The cherry on top, though, is this gem from the comments:

The sad part is that Dayne Perry used to be one the regulars at BP. Surely he knows this is poppycock…

It turns out he has a history of declaring things poppycock. So don’t get too excited, Dayne. Nevertheless, I’m excited to break out the “poppycock” tag here for the first time.

MGL Channels Travis Bickle

“Do your research; find the actual memo next time.”

You talking to me? What exactly did I get wrong? Not that it matters in the least. Who the hell are you?

And that’s why he gets to be in the header. MGL hasn’t written a more devastating put-down since this gem (one of the best paragraphs on the internet, in my opinion):

Spike, chill! I don’t get a “pass” because I am MGL. My projections are annually in the same league as the best on the planet. That is why I get a “pass.” And because I am considered one of the pre-eminent sabermetricians in the world. You? I didn’t catch your name?

AndrewN, you’ve been MGL’d.