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You can log on to BJOL here.  You can subscribe, super cheap, here, and ax your own inane questions.  (If anybody's actually doing that, I'd be interested to hear about it.)

My idea of a win-win scenario is to poach a few of his insights, but then to deploy them to his advantage as well as ours.  Hey, it's what I'd want done if the roles were reversed.  :- )

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Hey Bill - You've said that "we do not have near-perfect measurements of baseball players. To assume that we do is foolish." Couldn't agree more.

 

How about the issue of "Why An Active Player Had an UP or DWN Season." Beyond the ILLUSION of an up year - e.g. park effects, lucky balls in play that we can measure - any thoughts on what might ACTUALLY cause a hitter to perform above or below his norms in a given season?

 

Do you consider that attitude / state-of-mind (divorce, death in family, getting sober, big teammate hates him, new coach, contract, etc) is one of the many variables driving a player's UP or DWN year? If so, can you *conceive* of any way to measure or *predict* state-of-mind, or is this simply a good place for the sabermetrician's humility to enter in?

Asked by: jemanji

Answered: 4/11/2012

There is no bad place for humility except in the bedroom.  

 

What seems obvious is that there are tens of thousands of things that can cause up/down fluctuations in performance; therefore, these fluctuations are not ulitmately predictable at an 80-90% level EVER.   

 

On the other hand, we can predict fluctuations in performance up and down with SOME accuracy--more than 51%--NOW, and obviously more knowledge of more factors could be used to improve the projections.    Knowledge of how hard the player has been working, how stable his life is, that sort of thing. .. .it's potentially useful, but limited also by respect for the player's privacy.  

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Add to say:  this is a prime reason that I hate to see sabermetricians label contracts "correct" or "incorrect" as often as they do. One example... 

(1) Following the 2010 season, the 35-year-old David Ortiz looked to be fading, but the Red Sox exercised a $12M option for him to DH.

(2) When the Red Sox paid Ortiz in the 2010/11 offseason, the very best baseball site in the world (other than James' and ours, of course!) --- > effortlessly assigned Ortiz the comps of Hideki Matsui and Vlad Guerrero, and labeled the contract woefully incorrect.  

(3) Dr. D's reaction?  Hey, is there no room here for the Red Sox' prerogative in expecting an UP season from David Ortiz?

(4) I watched this all year, and Ortiz in 2011 promptly slammed down a .398 OBP and .554 SLG, for a 154 OPS+, earning not $12M but $19M in DH performance.

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The best website in the world, seriously, a great site with a guy who could argue himself the world's #1 sabermetrician ... never re-addressed this issue, simply because it didn't come back up.  

I'm sure if the editor read SSI (which we're guessing he does, since there are local ties) he'd say, "Hey, a thought-provoking point."  But there are other local authors who would sniff, "We used the best info we had at the time.  The 2011 Red Sox were stupid, but even blind pigs find acorns once in a while."

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We should be slow to call a GM's decision "incorrect."  It's perfectly reasonable, and sufficient, to say that it wasn't the one we'd have made, but we'll see how it goes.  We hope that this respect for alternative thought process is always understood to be implicit at SSI, even if the shtick is often written with stylistic gusto.

SSI will continue to argue that human beings are too complex to be completely captured by mathematical formulas.  Predictions are seldom "correct" or "incorrect."  At best, predictions can be insightful and more-likely-than-not.  

As Craig Wright said, if your predictions are 60-40, you lead the field.

Cheers,

Jeff