Impatience is a uniquely human failing.

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=== Ackley from #2-3 to #1 ===

Going into Monday's game, Dustin Ackley had played six games from the leadoff slot and his OBP had been... wait for it ... .444.  He had visibly throttled down his over-ambitious swing, presumably because he now sees his job as becoming Johnny Damon, as opposed to Stan Musial.

Dr. D is all too habituated to the "SSS Alert!" shtick that is epidemic in the blog-o-sphere.  Permit him to pivot away from the elevator shaft while the SSS tackler plummets headlong into the abyss of batting orders, sample sizes and Tigers pitchers who decide, in their 707th career games, that sports psychology does in fact exist.

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1.  Ackley's six leadoff games aren't a small sample size.  They're not a "sample" at all, of anything.  If Dr. D sees one more "SSS Alert" malapropism he's going to build a monster with bolts in its neck to come over and discourage the practice.  A scientific sample is a portion of a population that represents ALL A-L-L ALL specimens of the population it purports to sample.  

Dustin Ackley's skills are evolving.  What occurs this month won't represent what is going to occur next month.  Would you take a "sample" of a St. Bernard puppy's weight to decide how much food a random St. Bernard eats?

A sample is like when you have 100,000 ball bearings, same diameter and material, out of the same machine, at the same temperature ... and you test 100 of them.  That's a scientific "sample."  Thirty ball bearings taken from Dustin Ackley's May 2012 wouldn't represent Dustin Ackley's June 2013, even if he faced exactly the same pitchers, which of course he hasn't.  There are very few aspects of baseball data that qualify as scientific "samples."

So KNOCK IT OWFF with the "small sample size" cliche already.   We're misusing a science cliche to reject baseball analysis that isn't from science, proper, anyhow.  It makes Dr. D want to write Super Two posts and Chone Figgins articles.  Let sleeping dogs lie.

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2 /rant  Okay.  All scientific models begin with a first hypothesis, such as "what if space curved?"  These hypotheses aren't born having data attached at the umbilical cord.  The hypotheses are still part of science.

My hypothesis is, increasingly, that some players, especially young players, perform differently in different contexts.  Test it or don't.

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3.  Let's associate some data to the hypothesis here.  Ackley's EYE ratio before he was moved to leadoff was, for his career, 52:101.  This year it was running lower, 7:19.  Since being moved to leadoff, Ackley's EYE ratio has jumped to 1.6, five walks against three strikeouts.

Take Ackley's 2012 EYE ratio in spots other than leadoff, 0.27.  Assuming that 0.27 was Ackley's "true" eye ratio going into the lineup change, what are the odds that by chance he'd walk 4 or fewer times in his next 8 walk/strikeout events?  That figure is 96.23%.  Boom, there's your 95% confidence interval, LrKrBoi29.

Or, let's take the higher pre-leadoff figure, a career eye ratio of 0.34.  Assuming that 0.34 was Ackley's "true" eye ratio, what are the odds that by chance he'd walk 5 times in his next 8 walk/strikeout events?  Only 9%.

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There are all sorts of things that go in here ... the pitching is different, the home-road mix is different, he had more salsa in his food this week, a million things.  Pseudo-science is fine as far as it goes.  It's when we package it in cellophane and ribbons, and present it as The Fourth Great Branch of Science that we wind up shooting ourselves in the feet.

We think there was a point back there somewhere... ah, right.   Moving Dustin Ackley to leadoff is a great way to try to help him to get real about his swing, and to find his natural groove as a HIT-first player.  It's a great try, whether Fangraphs cosigns or whether it doesn't.

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NEXT

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