Game of Chance (Comments Only)

Re: Start a New List

Schuyler Dunlap — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 01:35:26 +0000

Maddux once said that a perfect game would be 27 pitches, 27 outs. Others think that a pitcher would have to strike out 27 hitters in a row, on three pitches per player. Obviously, there is a definition: 27 outs, no baserunners of any kind. And the win. WAIT. What?! The WIN? That's one of the most flawed statistics out there. You mean my pitching, which is already reliant on whether or not I have Jack Wilson at short, or Yuniesky Betancourt, and Franky Guttieriez or Jose Guillen in the outfield, with all of their flaws, now also has to rely on these guys to not only HIT, but SCORE RUNS? Madness. I, Dallas Armando Halladay, am an unheralded/up and down/world class pitcher and my greatness should be defined by how well I pitch, no?

I jest, of course. My take away has been driven a lot by Poz: Galarraga smiling when the "perfection" has been disrupted, Halladay smiling when it hasn't. I think a lot of Braden and his autonomous country of Bradenia, staking claim to it in a much bolder way than by calling out that sissy/HOFer A-Rod.

Re: Don't Throw Away Next Year

Schuyler Dunlap — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 23:48:14 +0000

This is one reason that I'm so pleased with Theo Epstein. He'll make moves and sign veterans, but not at the expense of the future. He *seems* to properly evaluate his own prospects and not give them up for [ahem] Jacobs and Matthews... Guys like Lester and Buccholz and Pedroia and Youkilis are still with the team, while Masterson and Hansen are failing for other teams. This off-season he signed Beltre and Scutaro and Cameron, all to short-term deals that allowed for contention without sacrificing the future, while guys like Bay (sorry!) were allowed to sign for big money elsewhere. Not that there haven't been mistakes, just that they at least fit with the plan...

I'm crossing my fingers for you guys.

Re: Don't Throw Away Next Year

Alex Reisner — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 01:49:14 +0000

Epstein does seem to be doing a really great job over the past several years. Part of the reason the Mets seem so hopeless to me is that without a plan you don't know what to do differently. If you fail but you have a plan, you have a context in which to discover and evaluate your mistakes. With no plan you just keep guessing. Maybe Minaya has a plan, but it seems like he's always just guessing. Hence there's little hope for improvement any time soon.

Re: The Great Vladimir Guerrero

Schuyler Dunlap — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 04:15:34 +0000

So, I generally agree, though I wonder if the fact that he *is* a dh lowers his value enough to drop him from the top ten. If defense is worth half as much as offense (as per Dewan) than some players can add a lot to their value in that realm.

And that was a cop-out telling your phone number in the conventional way too...

Re: The Great Vladimir Guerrero

Schuyler Dunlap — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 04:31:54 +0000

Or maybe something like:

magic petrovic jordan parish english bird

I suppose Petrovic is a little out of place. I can't seem to do this with baseball players because of that darned double zero.

Re: The Great Vladimir Guerrero

Alex Reisner — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 16:25:36 +0000

But Guerrero has been a legitimate outfielder for most of his career. He's a DH now but I don't think he should be penalized too much for that if we're talking about value of an entire career. So far he's played around 300 games at DH and over 1600 in right field. Of course it does raise the question of how playing DH could prolong his career...like would Mantle have been able to play longer if he could have moved to DH?

And if I recall correctly, Jeffrey Leonard wore 00 at the end of his career.

Re: Correct vs. Fair

Spenser — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 19:45:39 +0000

One big knock against instant replay is that it would make the game go on forever.

The MAX it could add on is twenty minutes per game...heck in football it's about 5 minutes per game.

Why not give each manager two "challenges" per game. I really don't think that it would be that big a deal.

If Bud Selig wanted to get rid of the neighborhood rule, he could. So if they went to full instant replay, dont you think he could tell the umpires, managers, and coaches to still use the rule?

You could also have an "umpire refusal" clause...not only would that be useful, but innovative.

Just my two cents on instant replay

looking forward to the next show

Re: Milestones

Brian — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 23:30:19 +0000

I think this might be my favorite episode of the podcast so far. I love how you make me think-- really THINK-- about baseball and some of the stories behind the stats.

Re: Correct vs. Fair

Alex Reisner — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 15:40:16 +0000

Jim Bouton says:

"I never believed a game was lost because of a bad call by an umpire. Games were lost because the loser didn’t build a sufficient margin to overcome the inevitable missed calls, part of any game. (Note: Players make far more mistakes than umpires).

"In fact, I’ve enjoyed the occasional classic missed call that has had an impact on Playoff and World Series games. The teams (but not the fans) get over it, no real harm is done and the participants have many years of good banquet material."

From: http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/should-a-bad-call-change-baseball/

Re: The Legend of Derek Jeter

Dan — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 06:13:04 +0000

Derek Jeter is the Best SS in history learn the facts and stop what the what if's...He's actually a very good fielder on his way to his 5th gold glove this year. Honus Wagner never even came close to playing his whole career as a shortstop, and A-rod used steriods...

Re: The Legend of Derek Jeter

Alex Reisner — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 19:15:13 +0000

If you judge fielding by Gold Gloves, lack of errors, and a few slick-looking plays then you will end up believing that Jeter is a good fielder. But just about any meaningful defensive stat will show you that Jeter is among the worst in the league, year after year. Look at Range Factor, UZR, or Dewan +/- and you'll see how awful he is. You can't get an error if you don't get to the ball and NO REGULAR SHORTSTOP in the past 15 years HAS FIELDED FEWER BALLS per 9 innings than Jeter.

Re: Pitch Counts

Arsen Kashkashian — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 02:43:31 +0000

Mark Prior is tearing it up in an Independent League. I wouldn't be surprised to see him get an invite next spring. Apparently, he has changed his delivery.

I remember Marshall and House as pitchers and even though you don't have to be a great pitcher to be a great pitching coach, Marshall certainly had the edge on the field. No one will ever use a reliever again like he was used for a few years in the early 1970s.

Re: The Legend of Derek Jeter

Frank — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 04:25:17 +0000

Horace Clarke tied Charlie Gheringer's all time records for assists and double plays, and he just was rotten.
How was he able to do this? 4 pitch to contact starting pitchers that's how.
If all of your pitchers are fly ball pitchers like the Yanks were from 2004 till 2008 and most of those were rookies or vets on the downside who had trouble hitting home plate let alone spots.
And if your first baseman was a statue named Giambi who caused your second baseman to shift towards first leaving most of the middle of the infield to the shortstop to cover....I could go on.
The bottom line is, the game is played ON THE FIELD, not in a statisticians book. look how politicians play with the numbers from the CBO.

Re: The Legend of Derek Jeter

Alex Reisner — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 02:57:51 +0000

The game happens on the field, but we need numbers if we want to have a realistic understanding of it. For example, I've seen Ike Davis hit a home run in more than half of the Mets games I've watched this year. Should I assume he'll hit over 80 home runs by the time the season is over? Similarly, I've seen Jason Kubel make more sliding and diving catches this year than any other outfielder. Should I assume that Kubel is the best outfielder in the Majors?

Obviously the answer to both questions is: no. We need to use numbers if we want to determine players' values objectively. We all have vivid memories from various personal experiences, but memory is a vastly inferior tool for evaluating baseball players. There are too many events in a week, let alone a season or a career, for one to remember them accurately (even assuming you could see them all).

That being said, of course you don't want to be led astray by devious statistical arguments (by politicians or baseball fans). I talked about this a little in Episode 12 ("Speed") in regard to Juan Pierre. If you just look at his raw H and SB totals you might incorrectly conclude that he's a great player. You have to look at all the relevant stats before coming to a conclusion (or believing someone else's conclusion). In baseball this is much easier to do than it is in politics. I *love* that you've attempted to explain *why* the numbers are what they are, but your argument is still a statistical one, as it should be.

As for your argument: unfortunately, even if the Yankees had all fly ball pitchers from 2004-2008, that's the period when Jeter fielded the most balls per inning, so it can't explain his low career numbers. Personally, I believe part of the reason Jeter fields so few balls is that he sets up in the same place for every pitch to every batter. People have told me he's gotten better at moving around before each pitch in the past year or so, and maybe that's the source of his recent improvement. But he's still well below league average.

I'm not saying Jeter isn't a slick fielder. I'm not saying he isn't a great athlete. I'm not saying he doesn't occasionally make great plays. I am saying that over the course of a season, the number of balls he doesn't get to makes him a poor defensive shorstop. I've looked at a lot of numbers and I haven't yet seen any convincing evidence to the contrary.

Re: Pitch Counts

Alex Reisner — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 03:57:33 +0000

It appears Prior just signed with the Rangers three days ago and has already pitched his first MLB-affiliated game in 4 years. Good call!

And yeah, Marshall was one-of-a-kind. Here he explains how pitching permanently deformed his arm, and how he feels about it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mdbBARSkLc

If you poke around some more on YouTube you can also find some pretty funny training videos made by some of his students, as well as his excellent demonstrations of screwball and curveball grip and release. He's amazingly articulate.

Re: The Legend of Derek Jeter

kenny oneal — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 20:20:54 +0000

Granted Jeter good, but I still put Ripken ahead of them all. He could field, his fielding pct. was in the 900's and he could hit, 400 plus I believe 3000 hits plus and he showed up everyday. Now this is coming from a guy who seen Ozzie Smith play.

Re: Why Baseball Has Statistics

Mark Simon — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 17:58:30 +0000

Enjoyed this. You do a nice job with these. Liked the Jeter one too.

Re: The Unbreakables (Part One)

hexagram — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 21:19:45 +0000

It seems that you think interesting records are those that demonstrate the player’s abilities. So, if Bonds didn’t hit a lot of home runs in any other year, it isn’t interesting. What’s the relevance of the player to the record? A record is interesting if it is interesting in baseball terms, not in terms of the player. Hitting 73 is interesting (although it isn’t unbreakable).

Now I take you very seriously, so if you say flukiness is an important variable, I’m listening. The distinction you may be looking for is flukiness of the accomplishment per se, not flukiness for the player. I give full credit to Denny McLain (and not for his record of longest jail sentence by an ex-major leaguer). I even give credit to Dale Long. His record suffers from the defects of all streak records, but it wouldn’t be more interesting if he hit in seven straight games a few times, too.

I think we need a good conceptual framework here.

Re: The Unbreakables (Part One)

Alex Reisner — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 19:23:42 +0000

OK, so I think I was a little careless with my choice of words. I don't want to turn this into a semantic discussion, but let me try to clear some things up.

1. First I say that some unbreakable records (like 511 wins) are uninteresting because they're from a different era.
2. Then I say feats are uninteresting because they require more luck than skill and hence are no fun to speculate about.
3. Then I say streaks are a little more "credible" than feats because they are less dependent on luck.

So we have a few things here, which I may have conflated:

* breakability
* interest
* credibility

"Breakability" is pretty straightforward. I think we all understand that one. By "credibility" I'm talking about how much I think the player "deserves" to be a record-holder. To me this is directly related to the amount of luck inherent in his achievement. Whether a record is "interesting" is a complicated and, I think, subjective question that I didn't mean to raise, although I clearly did (I intended to have an interesting *discussion* about unbreakable records).

Things that make a record is interesting to me:

* The circumstances in which it was set, including the liveliness of the baseball that year, the height of the mound, the average number of starts for a pitcher, the equipment used, and a lot more, including the player himself. I think, for example, Bonds' 73 HR record is interesting because of the circumstances surrounding it. There's a lot to talk about.

* You can speculate about who will break them. Feats and other fluky records are usually less interesting to speculate about because anyone who gets lucky can break them. I suppose Prince Fielder is more likely to hit two grand slams in an inning than David Eckstein, but we're talking about a difference in odds of maybe one-in-a-gazillion to one-in-a-gazillion-plus-one.

I guess I don't understand how you can separate the record from the player. The 73 HR record exists because Barry Bonds set it. The career hits record exists because Pete Rose set it. I guess I'm accustomed to seeing records as stories. How is a record interesting in baseball or numerical terms alone?

Re: The Legend of Derek Jeter

ty — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 18:29:03 +0000

You say you've "looked at a lot of numbers" to determine that Jeter is a "poor" fielder, yet you also say he is a "slick" fielder and you seem to say he is a "great athlete." It seems to me you are confused and so you turn for comfort and certainty to your beloved stats.

Now, about your "numbers:" is there any way that you can be certain that another SS on the same field would have made the plays Jeter missed? Please explain to me how I am wrong to insist that for the numbers to be given so much authority they would absolutely HAVE to show the above, and take into account several other variables.

For instance, I saw a lot of hits through the hole in the ACLS this year. We know A-Rod's range at third isn't what it used to be. Given the balls were roughly equidistant from both players, who missed the play? Is that factored into your stats?

Please, no lectures on sabermetrics, I've heard it. I want you to defend your reliance on stats because it takes some nerve to call Jeter a "terrible" fielder. My contention is that you are over-relying on stats in general, and this absurd comment is just the most extreme case of stat-based foolishness that you sportswriters are committing on a daily basis.

But I stand ready to stand corrected!

Re: The Legend of Derek Jeter

Alex Reisner — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 03:26:12 +0000

Ty, you make some very good points so let me address a few of them individually.

> is there any way that you can be certain that another SS
> on the same field would have made the plays Jeter missed?

One could ask the same question about batters. Mark Reynolds struck out 211 times last year. Can we be sure another batter on the same field would have hit those same pitches? Kevin Millwood gave up 30 home runs last year. Can we be certain another pitcher facing the same batters would have allowed fewer?

Clearly there is no way to really answer these questions. The best we can do is to count everything that happens during games and look at the numbers in an intelligent way, knowing that comparisons are not 100% fair, but that the more numbers we have the more fair they are.

In the case of Jeter, who's played 19,744 innings at shortstop, we have enough data to say with reasonable certainty that, for whatever reason, his fielding results are not good compared to other shortstops. The numbers don't tell us *why* players are good or bad and that can be confusing. Jeter *does* look like a good athlete to me. Being a Major League baseball player, of course he's a good athlete. But for some reason he's fielded fewer balls than most other starting shortstops during the past 15 years.

> I saw a lot of hits through the hole in the ACLS this year.
> We know A-Rod's range at third isn't what it used to be.
> Given the balls were roughly equidistant from both players,
> who missed the play?

Firstly, what makes you say A-Rod's range isn't what it used to be? (I was under the impression he's remained remarkably consistent.)

Second, even if we imagine that A-Rod has become a worthless fielder who can't get to anything more than two steps to his left, that would leave *more* balls for Jeter to field, not fewer, and yet his range factor (number of balls fielded) has declined over the past five years.

Third, I'm not blaming Jeter for missing any particular balls during any particular series. I'm blaming him for missing some large number of balls over the course of his career. I couldn't tell you which ones exactly, and I couldn't tell you which other shortstops would have fielded them, if any.

In short, statistical studies can't answer your questions. Statistical analysis is designed to ignore specific situations and instead provide insight based on large amounts of data that cannot be perceived by looking at individual events.

> I want you to defend your reliance on stats because it
> takes some nerve to call Jeter a "terrible" fielder.

Continuing the above train of thought: statistics and naked-eye observation are two tools that are used to evaluate baseball players. They provide very different types of insight, and each needs to be used to get the full picture.

I have long believed, and teams like the Athletics and Red Sox have recently demonstrated, that statistics are the more important of these two when evaluating players at the Major League level. It's easy to put too much stock in one's own powers of observation, but in fact there is too much information in any single game, let alone the course of a 162-game season, for the human brain to accurately assess player ability. We're prone to remembering certain players when they're on streaks or for a few great plays they made, and other players when they're in slumps or making errors. We don't see, or don't remember, the vast majority of their at-bats and defensive plays. If we evaluate shortstops based on how slick or smooth they look we'd miss really excellent shortstops like Jack Wilson.

You might want to read "Moneyball" by Michael Lewis, which is a really fun book and which shows how the late-90s Athletics built successful teams with very little money by relying on statistics to the near-complete exclusion of traditional scouting. The bottom line is that stats work, if you know how to use them.

Re: Tough Guys

Dr. Richard Crowley — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 22:48:34 +0000

I hooked up with Steve Blass in spring training at Bradenton FL in 1998 and worked with him for 90 minutes and he threw his first strike in 24 years since he was released from the Pirates. Blass' story and news article about him and others is in my book MENTALBALL with
forewords by Shawn Green and Steve Blass

Re: Predictions

Mikrofone — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 23:52:41 +0000

Now the season has officially begun. Welcome back.

Re: Predictions

jeff excell — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:28:21 +0000

As a Giants fan I am not going to roast you for saying that SF will not look like the champs that they were. They MIGHT, but they definitely might not. BUT I do not think that the dodgers have any chance at all to keep up with the Rockies. The Rockies and the Giants will fight for 1st, the Dodgers and whoever loses first will fight for second. and the Padres and that other team are going to be scraping the bottom.
Anyway, I like the Daric Barton pick for batting title. It prompted me to drop Peralta and pick him up for my fantasy team since my AVE is in the tank.
Other than those things you had some pretty good points. I have enjoyed listening to all your podcasts. I think they are pretty good stuff. I did the one about Rick Ankiel. Anyway. I serve coffee to Nora at Ground Support and have been meaning to comment on the podcast for a while now.
While I am not as statistically driven as you seem to be I do enjoy random analysis and conversations about baseball. In fact I'm pretty obsessed. anyway. can't wait to hear the next one.
Jeff

Re: Predictions

Ty — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 16:40:35 +0000

Alex, really enjoyed this piece. And I think your predictions are good. At least so far some of them seem to be playing out. The Mets may need another season to get it together but it's too early to be sure and I do agree with your comments about them.

Also, it's crazy to count the Red Sox out of course at this early stage, but who could've predicted their awful start?

I really thought you were gonna mention my team, my beloved Yankees, as one with the worst off seasons! I was relieved you did not. It seems they scored some coups (again, acknowledging how early it is) in Russ Martin and Eric Chavez, and Freddie Garcia, Bartolo Colon and the rookie Pendleton would not have shown up on anybody's radar screen as bright spots in the early part of the season.

This is part of why I love baseball. After I got over the fact that my Yankees were eliminated last season, I began to really enjoy the unlikely heroics of the Giants! I'm secretly glad my Yankees don't win the whole thing every year or anywhere even close to it (despite the perception). It makes the times when they do all the sweeter.

Thanks for the great work! --Ty

Re: Fielding Statistics

George — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 12:02:38 +0000

Are there any new episodes?

Re: Fielding Statistics

Adam Glesser — Thu, 14 Jul 2016 05:46:09 +0000

Just finished listening to all twenty episodes. I understand how time consuming and difficult it is to keep something like this going, but it is a darn shame that you didn't. These are fantastic and I don't know of anything out there in the podcasting world that holds a candle to them.