In which your narrator sadly
informs you there is math.
Friday, October 31. Halloween in Philadelphia. The Phillies had just won the World Series. I took a super-impromptu day off from the post-college job I had started only a few months earlier, and my dad did as well. At the time, my dad owned a direct-mail advertising franchise, so he set his own hours. And he made it clear that his hours that day would be zero—he wanted to be at the parade with me, his oldest son. But I didn’t want to see him. I wanted to spend time with my friends, drink Yuengling from cans and whiskey from giant plastic bottles, to scream and holler and curse and do everything you don’t normally do when your father is around. So I avoided him. Cell reception was bad enough in the city that day, with so many people congregating in one spot, that he could barely get through to me as it was. But just as we were getting camped outside the gates surrounding Citizens Bank Park, my phone rang. “WHERE ARE YOU?!” he yelled. Without an excuse, I said, “Right outside the gates!” “I’LL BE RIGHT THERE!” he yelled. And ten minutes later, there he was. He had a beer with us. He talked to all my friends about the last Phillies parade in 1980. But most of all, he huddled with me, and told me how amazing this all was, and how I needed to cherish it, and how glad he was to be there with me for it. The parade rolled by an hour or so later. And my friends and I took my father (he’s about four inches shorter and thirty pounds lighter than the smallest of us), propped him on our shoulders, and carried him around, screaming and cheering and laughing and crying. There’s a picture of it. He has a huge smile on his face. He was having a ball. And so were we.
— STEVE CIMINO, Medford, New Jersey
WHEN THE TOP OF THE SIXTH INNING BEGAN, MY ST. LOUIS Cardinals, centerpiece of my flawed universe, had a 4 percent chance of beating the Chicago Cubs on this clear September afternoon. Those were the worst odds they’d faced all afternoon.
The game, as all games do, had started out with a 50 percent win probability on both sides. Ryan Ludwick’s one-out double in the first inning brought the Cardinals up to 52 percent odds, but that was the best odds we had all day; the Pujols groundout and Felipe Lopez strikeout that inning dropped us to a 45 percent chance. Alfonso Soriano’s single that went past Brian Barton in left field in the second inning dropped our odds to 19 percent—we’d been at 43 before that pitch—and the three Cubs runs in the fourth plummeted us all the way down to 6 percent. Since then, our odds were never better than 7 percent and never worse than 4. Until Glaus’s homer.
The fundamental statistic, the invention that has allowed this florid, romantic discussion of the beautiful game, is called “Win Probability,” and I figured it all out using a device called the Win Expectancy Finder. The Win Expectancy Finder was invented by a very smart man named Christopher Shea, who runs an excellently named Web site called Balk Off Balk. The idea of the tool, which tracked more than a decade of games as data to find the percentage of times a team in a certain situation went on to win the game, was to track the wisdom of managerial moves.
In an example another great site, called the Hardball Times, uses to show the Win Expectancy Finder’s utility, imagine your team has a runner on first base with no one out in the bottom of the ninth. The Win Expectancy Finder, at that point, gives your team a 71 percent chance of winning the game. Many managers, most managers, if they had a hitter not named Albert Pujols at the plate, would bunt the runner over to second base, putting him in scoring position and avoiding the murderous double play. But hold it there: The Win Expectancy Finder shows that your team’s odds of winning with a runner on second base and one out—the result of a successful sacrifice bunt—are . . . 70 percent. The out you just gave away cost you more than the benefit of the runner making it to second. Historically speaking.
It’s an extremely useful little knickknack. For a manager.
The Hardball Times, in a 2004 essay by Dave Studeman, was blown away by the discovery. “Next time you watch a ballgame,” Studeman writes, “use it to track the ups and downs of the game. It will change the way you watch baseball.”
I did use it to track the ups and downs of the game. I still do. I can’t make it stop.
Now that I am aware of the Win Expectancy Finder, I am acutely aware that: Troy Glaus had not hit a home run that brought the Cardinals within a run and the Leitches to their feet. He had merely increased the Cardinals’ win probability from 8 percent to 28 percent. That’s what we were really jumping around and screaming about. Apparently.
EVERYONE LIKES TO SAY that baseball’s statistical revolution started with a seed planted by Bill James, the bearded Kansan and increasingly cranky but always brilliant grand Socrates of baseball who whittled away the hours working as a security guard at the Stokely-Van Camp plant in Lawrence writing little observations and essays on baseball that would change the course of the game for the next decade. (I’ve never met Bill James, and I’m not sure he’d like me too much—my unabashed enjoyment of scatological humor would vastly annoy him, I suspect—but it still strikes me as strange that a company would hire the professorial Bill James as a security guard. The Lawrence Stokely-Van Camp plant must have had few invaders and lots of free time for its security guards.)
The key to James’s genius—and I do think it’s genius—was not that he invented new statistics or was some sort of abacus-wielding counterrevolutionary. Most of the statistics he came up with have been either disproved or dramatically modified since he created them. It’s that he came to the game from the outside. He didn’t play baseball, he didn’t broadcast baseball, he didn’t report on baseball, he didn’t even watch much baseball. (Like any good Midwesterner in the mid-seventies, he listened to games on the radio. Fortunately for James—who once quit writing about baseball for a few years because of a few dozen angry letters readers mailed to him—there was no Internet back then.) But he cared enough about the game to study it from a perspective that those inside the gates couldn’t have.
Jack Shafer, the media critic for Slate magazine, once criticized the late, angry Robert Novak for putting the emphasis on day-to-day mundane scoops rather than placing those events in a larger perspective. He wrote it much better than I just did: “One problem with Novak-style scoop journalism is that reporters don’t always know what’s in the water they’re carrying.” In baseball, the players, the coaches, the executives, the managers, the broadcasters, the reporters . . . they didn’t know what was in the water they were carrying. James was a revelation because he had both the analytical mind and the vast distance from the inner workings of the game: If he hadn’t had both, it wouldn’t have worked.
James did not start throwing math darts at baseball, nunchucking the game with advanced physics. Of all of James’s innovations, my personal favorite is Win Shares. Win Shares was a book James wrote in 2002 that was breathtaking in its ambition: It attempted, essentially, to attach to to every player on every team a number that captured and quantified exactly what that player had contributed to his team’s success. This is baseball’s version of a Theory Of Everything; if you could translate this to humanity itself, you’d be able to solve every mystery of the universe, as well as streamline online dating. James’s methodology was flawed, because, Christ, how could it not be? But it brought us a little closer. It was sprawling in what it aspired to. It was ridiculous and fantastic. It tried to change the world.
It did. It made us all look at the game differently, and smartly. But it did not make it more fun.
GEOVANY SOTO reaches on an infield single and Mark DeRosa flies out to center field. This is how the last two innings have looked so far, as charted by Baseball-Reference.com, the premier historically stat-based baseball Web site in the galaxy:
BOTTOM OF THE 5TH, CUBS BATTING, AHEAD 5-0, CARDINALS’ JOEL PINEIRO FACING 3-4-5
Inn: b5
Out: 0
RoB: —
R/O: O
Pit(cnt): 3,(2-0)
wWPA: -0%
wWE: 95%
Score: 5-0
@Bat: CHC
Batter: D. Lee
Pitcher: J. Pineiro
Play Description: Flyball: RF (RF Line)
Inn: b5
Out: 1
RoB:—
R/O: 7,
Pit(cnt): (3-2)
wWPA: 0%
wWE: 96%
Score: 5-0
@Bat: CHC
Batter: A. Ramirez
Pitcher: J. Pineiro
Play Description: Single to LF (Line Drive to Short LF)
Inn: b5
Out: 1 1
RoB: —
R/O: OO
Pit(cnt): 4,(1-2)
wWPA: -1%
wWE: 95%
Score: 5-0
@Bat: CHC
Batter: J. Edmonds
Pitcher: J. Pineiro
Play Description: Ground Ball Double Play: 2B-SS-1B
0 runs, 1 hit, 0 errors, 0 LOB. Cardinals 0, Cubs 5.
TOP OF THE 6TH, CARDINALS BATTING, BEHIND 0-5, CUBS’ TED LILLY FACING 9-1-2
Inn: t6
Out: 0
RoB: —
R/O: O
Pit(cnt): 5,(2-2)
wWPA: 1%
wWE: 96%
Score: 0-5
@Bat: STL
Batter: J. LaRue
Pitcher: T. Lilly
Play Description: Flyball: CF (Deep CF-RF)
Inn: t6
Out: 1
RoB: —
R/O: 2
Pit(cnt): ,(0-1)
wWPA: -1%
wWE: 95%
Score: 0-5
@Bat: STL
Batter: C. Izturis
Pitcher: T. Lilly
Play Description: Single to CF (Line Drive to Short CF)
Inn: t6 1
Out: 1
RoB: —
R/O: O
Pit(cnt): 4,(1-2)
wWPA: 1%
wWE: 96%
Score: 0-5
@Bat: STL
Batter: R. Ludwick
Pitcher: T. Lilly
Play Description: Strikeout Swinging
Inn: t6 2
Out: 1
RoB: —
R/O: 5
Pit(cnt): ,(3-1)
wWPA: -1%
wWE: 95%
Score: 0-5
@Bat: STL
Batter: A. Pujols
Pitcher: T. Lilly
Play Description: Walk; Izturis to 2B
Inn: t6 2
Out: 12
RoB: —
R/O: 3,
Pit(cnt): (1-1)
wWPA: -1%
wWE: 94%
Score: 0-5
@Bat: STL
Batter: F. Lopez
Pitcher: T. Lilly
Play Description: Izturis Steals 3B; Pujols Steals 2B
Inn: t6
Out: 2
RoB: —
R/O: 23 R
Pit(cnt): 5,(3-1)
wWPA: -3%
wWE: 92%
Score: 0-5
@Bat: STL
Batter: F. Lopez
Pitcher: T. Lilly
Play Description: Single to SS (Ground Ball to Weak SS); Izturis Scores; Pujols to 3B
Inn: t6 2
Out: 1
RoB: —
R/O: 3 RRR
Pit(cnt): 1,(0-0)
wWPA: -20%
wWE: 72%
Score: 1-5
@Bat: STL
Batter: T. Glaus
Pitcher: T. Lilly
Play Description: Home Run (Fly Ball to Deep LF Line); Pujols Scores; Lopez Scores
Inn: t6
Out: 2
RoB: —
R/O: 8,
Pit(cnt): (3-2)
wWPA: -2%
wWE: 70%
wWE: 4-5
@Bat: STL
Batter: A. Kennedy
Pitcher: T. Lilly
Play Description: Walk
Inn: t6 2
Out: 1
RoB: —
R/O: O
Pit(cnt): 3,(0-2)
wWPA: 4%
wWE: 74%
Score: 4-5
@Bat: STL
Batter: B. Barton
Pitcher: T. Lilly
Play Description: Groundout: SS-1B (Weak SS)
4 runs, 3 hits, 0 errors, 1 LOB. Cardinals 4, Cubs 5.
BOTTOM OF THE 6TH, CUBS BATTING, AHEAD 5-4, CARDINALS’ JOEL PINEIRO FACING 6-7-8
Inn: b6
Out: 0
RoB: —
R/O: 4,
Pit(cnt): (2-1)
wWPA: 3%
wWE: 77%
Score: 5-4
@Bat: CHC
Batter: G. Soto
Pitcher: J. Pineiro
Play Description: Single to 3B (Ground Ball to Weak 3B)
Inn: b6 0
Out: 1
RoB: —
R/O: O
Pit(cnt): 2,(0-1)
wWPA: -3%
wWE: 74%
Score: 5-4
@Bat: CHC
Batter: M. DeRosa
Pitcher: J. Pineiro
Play Description: Flyball: CF (Deep CF)
BASEBALL IS a game understood better in a macro sense, from thirty thousand feet up, than a micro one, with players and coaches and managers too close to the action to understand it. You need the distance, you need the space, you need to be able to stand back and soak it all in. One game is just one game: It’s a “small sample size.” You can’t tell anything from one game. It is, in the grand scheme of matters, meaningless, a random occurrence. It doesn’t matter what your eyes see; it’s what the stats show. Our best teams, our brightest minds, have embraced this philosophy. This is what’s being accepted. This is close to the rule of law. This is what sabermetrics is. It is science rather than art. It is truth.
Except, well . . . uh . . . actually . . . now that I’m looking at it . . .
A whole season, the long tale of following a baseball team through 162 games, can’t be simulated or run through in five minutes. Watching a team every day, its struggles, its glories, its problems, its assets, its joys, its pain . . . that’s what being a baseball fan is about, right? Following these players, learning their weaknesses and strengths, seeing how they react to different situations . . . that’s the whole point, right? If my team wins, I am happy. If my team loses, I am sad. This is the fundamental aspect of being a sports fan: Whatever is going on in the world, that nasty mean confusing gray world, cheering for a team provides a three-hour respite of black-and-white. Win = happy. Lose = sad.
The more we understand about baseball statistics, the more we gather the facts and the more we research and learn . . . the more we realize that, at its core, Win = Lose = Meaningless. One plate appearance is nothing. One inning is nothing. One game is nothing. These are facts. And they suck.
The problem is that you can only watch one game at a time. I happen to be watching a game right now. It doesn’t feel like a small sample size to me. It feels like a baseball game.
ON THE FIRST PITCH to Kosuke Fukudome, Geovany Soto is thrown out trying to steal by about, oh, ninety-six feet. Why was Soto running? An odd maneuver, one would think: It is actually Soto’s first stolen base attempt as a major leaguer. (He was 2-for-12 stealing bases as a minor leaguer, which is not so good.)
He was running because Cubs manager Lou Piniella had called for a hit-and-run, and Fukudome—in another example of why he’d been in Piniella’s doghouse all season—by the way, if you’ve ever wondered what it means to be in a manager’s “doghouse,” it involves him tying you up and throwing lunch meats at you—had missed the sign. I notice that Fukudome doesn’t even look at the third base coach, who is surely glaring at him. He just looks down at his feet, with the sad Charlie Brown music playing in his head. I hope he doesn’t commit Harry Caray.
The hit-and-run is one of the most exciting plays in baseball. It requires all kinds of moving parts to work in unison: A runner has to secure a good enough jump on the pitcher to force the second baseman into covering the bag, the pitcher has to throw a pitch that’s somewhere near the strike zone, and the hitter has to hit it exactly where the second baseman was just standing. When executed perfectly, it’s heavenly: It has the ideal mix of talent, luck, and wiles that make you stand up and holler every time it locks into the place. You feel like you’re getting away with something: You thought we were doing this, but we’re doing this. It always makes the manager look quite smart. Tony La Russa loves the hit-and-run. It’s a cat burglar move, and it’s thrilling.
It’s also, in a macro world, a terrible strategic maneuver: It’s essentially like a sacrifice bunt, but dramatically more risky with a lower reward ceiling. It sure looks pretty when that ball sneaks through the hole and, in an instant, you have runners on first and third, but just as often, if not more, a line drive ends up in the hands of an infielder for a double play, or the batter misses the pitch and the runner is thrown out, or he swings at a terrible pitch just to protect his runner and makes a cheap out, or he just misses the sign all together, like Fukudome. Statistics show that it’s almost never worth it.
But man, it’s so much fun when it works.
Oh, and the caught stealing increased the Cardinals’ odds of winning from 26 percent to 30 percent.
MY FAVORITE PLAYER (and Dad’s) growing up was speedy Cardinals center fielder Willie McGee. He was paradoxically lackadaisical and thrilling to watch, a spiraling cacophony of limbs flying in all kinds of directions, flipping all over the place, eventually ending up in the spot he was heading for faster than everybody else. He had occasional power, he played defense like crazy, he flung triples into the gap, he jumped over the wall to steal home runs, he once reversed the Earth’s rotation so that he might save Lois Lane from a crack in the San Andreas Fault. He was my hero. He was the hero of many young Cardinals fans. He won an MVP, he won two batting titles, he once inspired George Steinbrenner to say that trading him was one of the biggest mistakes he’d ever made. When he returned to the Cardinals at the end of his career, in 1996, he was greeted with standing ovations every time he so much as coughed. When the Cardinals opened their new stadium in 2006, he stood next to Cardinals legend Bob Gibson to catch the first pitch at the fancy, shiny digs. No one questioned that he deserved to be there. A picture of Willie and an eight-year-old Will Leitch is on the wall at our home in Mattoon. Just hearing his name makes me smile.
So. It turns out: He wasn’t very good. Well, that’s overstating it. It’s more that he was simply an average player. Despite his seven Gold Gloves, stats show that he didn’t cover nearly as much ground in center field as it looked like he did—poor routes to the ball seem to have been the culprit—and man, did that guy hate to walk: In 652 plate appearances in 1985, his MVP season, he only walked 38 times. His career OPS, the preferred and generally accepted best practices stat for determining hitting prowess, was .729 . . . which is lower than the current major league average of .753. Willie McGee looked like an amazing player to me: I would have sworn it to every court in the land. Watching him play made you feel like baseball was the most electrifying activity imaginable. Willie McGee is the person who made me fall in love with baseball in the first place. Dad dragged me away from my Bugs Bunny cartoon one Saturday morning and drove me to Busch Stadium, where the Cardinals were facing the then-potent Montreal Expos. Keith Hernandez hit a home run, Ozzie Smith made one of his gravity-defying double plays, and Willie McGee stole three bases. It was breathtaking. I was hooked. I never looked back.
And he was a below average player. I accept this as a fact. I do not think the statistics are lying. But I hate it. It makes me feel stupid. I want to ignore it. I want to throw it away.
Seattle Times columnist Larry Stone once wrote a story about Kansas City Royals pitcher Brian Bannister, about how Bannister was attempting to study advanced baseball statistics in order to make him a better pitcher. Stone was amazed: A player who not only knew about VORP and BABIP, but found a practical use for them in his performance. Stone wrote that baseball had come a long way.
Trust me, this is not the prevailing point of view in the clubhouse. More typical is the response of Willie McGee, whom I covered in the early 1990s. I once asked Willie, then with the Giants, about some statistical anomaly in his résumé—an uncommonly high average in day games, if I recall.
“I don’t know about that,” he said dismissively. “I ain’t no Bob James.”
I MADE THE MISTAKE one time of informing my father that the advanced baseball statistics book I was reading claimed that Willie McGee wasn’t a very good player. Remember how Dad reacted when I told him at the age of thirteen that I didn’t think I would make the major leagues? That’s the look he gave me. “You read too goddamned much.”
AS PINEIRO strikes out Kosuke Fukudome to end the inning, the Cardinals have a 21 percent chance of winning going into the seventh. They will face Lilly, who has a similarity index of 56 and is most comparable, in a historical sense, to Floyd Bannister, Jerry Koosman, Gary Peters, and Chris Short. Lilly has thrown eighty-nine pitches so far, at the ebb of his traditional limit, with batters posting a 5.00 ERA against him, pushing him to a value level just barely above a theoretically constant replacement player. The likely Cardinals leadoff batter will be Josh Phelps, who notched a .376 EQA with Pittsburgh last year with a WARP3 OF 1.8 and with a PECOTA Breakout rate of 19 percent heading into next season. In his career, Phelps’s OPS is .069 higher against left-handed pitchers than right-handers.
Um . . . yay? Go Cards?
KNOWLEDGE YOU NOW HAVE