einstein performing the wave

On April 6, 1973, Ron Blomberg stepped to the plate at Fenway Park; just another opening day between Blomberg’s New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox. But it was more. Blomberg became the first ever Designated Hitter and baseball’s soft core civil war grew a new branch.

On one side were the National League purists who argued that pitchers must bat. The American League only DH was a gross corruption of the game and some even questioned if the American League was a major league at all. The DH diminished strategical maneuvers; just kick back and wait for the three run homer.

beyondearthseries.com

Two distinct identities emerged. The clash came to a climax every October in the World Series. The debate raged on until the mid 1990’s when lion maybe didn’t lay down with lamb, but they shared a cup of coffee. Inter-league regular season play was launched and the tension dispersed.

But there is no baseball without controversy and debate. The us versus them hooray for our side changed venues. Number crunchers versus those who trust their own instincts and eyes surfaced again. The debate is as old as baseball itself.

Sabermetrics is often referred to as a revolution and that makes sense to me as I google the Latin origin of the word; revolvere “turn, roll back” as in nothing new, as in returning to the way baseball was once perceived by a controversial minority way back when Henry Chadwick walked the baseball earth, way back when baseball was in its formative days.

Chadwick championed the base on balls. He questioned why errors were considered negative. You reach more balls on defense, you logically make more errors. Chadwick was blown off and for what? To keep baseball simple? To not alienate the masses, To sell tickets? To make money?

It wouldn’t be the first time power trippers reduced complicated realities into simple black and white explanations, appealing to emotions through colorful imagery. Demagoguery.  

The number crunchers didn’t disappear. They continued to toil away in makeshift labs; sharing information through snail mail and the backs of baseball digest. Data collected and analyzed. Formulas, calculations, player evaluations integrating dozens and dozens of variables so we could better understand what just happened and forecast what might happen, separate the “signal from the noise.”

Allan Roth; sabr.org

Allan Roth attended Montreal Royals baseball games in the 1940’s. The Royals were the AAA affiliate of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Roth approached Dodgers GM Branch Rickey and offered him his statistical services. He was hired and OB% was soon integrated into the Dodger evaluation of players. Roth became baseball’s first full time statistician.

Bill James worked as a third shift janitor in Kansas during the 1970’s; a perfect job to crunch numbers and carry the torch onward. There were many others.

The internet brought their underground “subversive” findings to light and over the last 15 years or so, sabermetrics went mainstream with kids no longer just collecting baseball cards. They preached about WAR and BABIP and ISO. The best of both worlds, no? Numbers, formulas, and percentages sharing a place with our own eyes and instincts and yet, some continue to be angry and hate one side or the other.

In one corner is the revolution deepening every day with new formulas and evaluations. And in the other corner are those who question if these math whizzes even watch the game. It smells like a dissing. If something is too complicated, then call it stupid; dehumanize it and champion your own cause, desperation.

My math IQ is sub high school level and so I listen to these math whizzes. I’m in awe of them.The proliferation of sabermetric research feels like an apocalypse in the old Greek sense of the word, as in Apokalyptein, as in “uncover, disclose, reveal” bring us closer to the reality of a baseball game.

A revolution as we return to an ancient time when our ancestors could maybe see and perceive more than we can today; revealing what was always there. We just couldn’t see it. I find the attempt remarkable. Nowadays, all major league teams use some form of sabermetric research when drafting players, filling out a batting order, aligning a defense, and so on.

The number 105 flashes across the TV screen. It’s not a radar clocking  the pitch of Aroldis Champam. It’s the speed of a ball hit by Carlos Gomez. I don’t know how long the data has been available  but it must have added a new wrinkle to an already difficult value to determine; a player’s defensive range.

Seattle’s BigDoor Media

I want the Brewer’s manager to rely in part on his own instincts, but I also want him to rely on NASA engineers, chemistry professors, and anonymous math whizzes who happen to also be baseball fans. 

The Brewers are west, in Arizona; first pitch was 9:40 EST. I fell asleep in the 1st inning, but according to mlb.com’s digital morning box score, the final score was Brewers 9, Arizona 3. There’s sabermetric inspired information listed. It raises more questions than answers.

The Brewers are 42-29.

and number 9, number 9

This is part 9 of tunes to the batting order. Yesterday was the the 8 hole pitcher

The bottom of the order is the bottom of the ocean. It’s where shrimp, plankton, and pitchers are asked to bunt with few other expectations. Hong Kong Fooey to that!

I treat my 9 hitter as my third lead off hitter. He’s gonna be my duck on the pond and transform the 1 man into the 2 man and 2 man into a 3 man and so on around the ferris wheel. No player’s place at the table is fixed.

Stengelese-wiki-commons

Casey Stengel never bothered penciling in the batting order until after the National Anthem was sung. Even holier than thou Joe DiMaggio could never be too sure. In Stengal’s world, there was only a first supper-today’s game.

I want my 9 hitter to be a chef, turning every last limb into an edible dish. He is in many ways the first baseball player to ever walk across a diamond.

In the latter half of the 19th and early 20th centuries, a baseball game was no place for a woman with refined tastes. It was filled with rough drunks and gamblers both on the field and in the stands. The only 7th inning stretch song was a dirge to carry the bloody bodies away.

But the baseball  marketeers needed money so they targeted a more wholesome crowd and even promoted a song with a woman-Katie Casey whining to her boyfriend, “take me out to the ball game.” You’ve probably heard of it.

The branding of baseball as innocence was underway and continued as Katie Casey was replaced by Nelly Kelly and then removed altogether. Baseball soon became a fabled father and son American pastime. It forgot all about its origins that once inspired Henry Chadwick and his stuffy wool frock to crusade against baseball’s “immorality” and gambling ways.

The severe scrutiny of baseball players lingers till this very day and often surpasses that of politicians and bosses everywhere, but there was a time….

John McGraw defied Chadwick and just about everybody else. He led the New York Giant to 10 National League Champions and 3 World Series titles and he made very few friends in the process. He fought, clawed, and did whatever it took to win. In short, he was an asshole at a time when the weak at heart  were brushed aside.

McGraw also enjoyed a 16-year playing career in which he reached base at a .465 clip or third all time behind Ted Williams and Babe Ruth. I want him in the 9th spot. I want him on base.

Bob Dylan can’t offer us a dirge, but he does sing the second version of Jack Norworth’s “Take me out to the ballgame.” Take it away Bob.

SABR toothed tiger

There’s been all kinds of promotional give aways at baseball games; from seat cushions to bobble heads, replica jerseys, bats, uniforms, baseball cards, barbecue smocks, and whatever marketeers can come up with.

But never 3-d glasses, not yet anyway. Or maybe the attitude adjustment potion was mixed into secret stadium sauce and spread across hot dogs; sort of a slow generational creep to reach its full potential. It’s almost there.

Holding the back side of a baseball card beside the light of today’s statistical glossary makes my mouth drop at all the innovation. The math we’ve come to know as  Sabermetrics-SABR for Society of American Baseball Research defines itself as “the search for objective knowledge about baseball.”

SABR is the history of uniforms, big league chew, world series trivia, and defunct minor league teams. It’s also reams of data on every game ever played in baseball. The simple statistics of at bats, home runs, stadium dimension, etc. are stuffed into formulas producing numbers to better evaluate player performance. The variables included are maybe where the genius resides or maybe it’s in the algorithms or maybe I have no idea, but I bow anyway because my math IQ is painfully low.

The great baseball minds stretch all the way back to father baseball himself- Mr. Henry Chadwick. He considered errors to be a weak measure of defensive ability. What about the defenders, he asked, who have greater range and as a result, make more plays in addition to more errors? That was Chadwick in the 1860’s.

Branch Rickey hired Allan Roth to sit in a Montreal press box and record statistics for the AAA International League Royals. On base percentage, pitch counts, and batter splits against right or left handed pitchers were all made available to Rickey. That was in the 1940’s.

Bill James toiled away as a graveyard shift janitor in Lawrence, Kansas. The hours allowed him to crunch numbers into formulas most kids weren’t reading on the backs of baseball cards. James offered his finding to a cult following via snail mail. That was the 1970’s.

The rebellion is no longer a rebellion. It was probably never a rebellion. It was simply seeing. Nowadays there’s a Bill James around every blog thread because kids are smarter. I bow to them. If you want to work in the front office of a baseball team., you better know some probability theory.

I take the change as real good because I’d rather have Einstein running my favorite team than me and my superstitions.

crunching numbers

another baseball crank wikipedia commons

In the summer of 1856 something suddenly caught the attention of a well-dressed gentleman. A raggedy gang of thugs were playing a bat and ball game in a Brooklyn park and it wasn’t cricket. There were three bases and two of them were occupied by men wearing gangster lean looks. Henry Chadwick knew it was less than royal, but he couldn’t resist. He straightened his lapel, tucked his pocket watch away and walked closer. The ground warmed under his feet. He was smitten.

Chadwick is considered the father of baseball with good reason. He worked hard to develop the game he said “was fully adapted to the American character.”(1) His lasting contribution was the creation of the baseball box score. How many millions of baseball cranks rely on the the simple collection of numbers organized in columns and rows to rediscover last night’s game or one 80 years ago?

Chadwick was born in Exeter England and immigrated to Brooklyn when he was 12 years young. He came with cricket on his mind and shared his passion for the sport as a New York Times reporter before falling under baseball’s spell. Chadwick knew a thing or two about statistics as well. His half brother Edward quantified the effects of industrial pollution and set out to improve conditions in England. I’m not sure how he did that, but statistics are powerful proof in swaying public opinion.

homemade scorecard with boxscore to be filled soon

Cricket keeps a lot of statistics. Chadwick applied this to baseball and invented the box score. It was more than a daily diversion. Chadwick did it so statistics from individual games and seasons could be compiled and then compared against other players. Like any statistical proof, the size of the sample was key.

Chadwick represented the first of who we now refer to as seamheads or sabermetricians after the acronym SABR-Society for American Baseball Research. A seamhead asks questions and turns institutions upside down. They don’t subscribe blindly to batting average (hits divided by at bats) as the ultimate measure of hitting ability. They wonder why a single is credited the same as a home run and why walks are not included. Bill James is often considered the godfather of statistical analysis, in baseball anyway. Maybe he simply revived what had been forced underground.

“The best player in a nine,” Chadwick said “is he who makes the most good plays in a match, not the one who commits the fewest errors.” (2)

Chadwick hit on a topic that is still discussed with great enthusiasm on websites like Fangraphs; how to quantify the range of a defender? A faster player will reach more balls and as a result make more errors. A slower defender will reach fewer balls and make fewer errors. Yet, it’s the errors or lack of em that wins golden glove awards, for the time being anyway.

Endnotes

(1) Diamonds in the Rough; The Untold History of Baseball by Joel Zoss and John Bowman, University of Nebraska Press, page 42.

(2) The Numbers Game; Baseball’s Lifelong Fascination with Statistics by Alan Schwarz, Thomas Dunne Books, page 10