2018-3 1. Media
I will be all over the media this week. I taped an interview with Russell Roberts of EconTalk (Podcast) in late November or early December; that will be available to the public today. Dr. Roberts is very, very professional, meticulous in preparation for the interview; I hope it will be interesting.
Also, my yearly Top 10 contributions to the MLB panel are now running on MLB-TV, I think; I haven’t seen them but I am getting feedback about them, so I assume they are on. Also, I taped an interview with C-Span which should begin running this week or perhaps next week. So I’ll be around.
2. Andruw
After spending a couple of days on Twitter arguing about Andruw Jones’ qualifications for the Hall of Fame, I received this e-mail from my friend Yo Poz:
Bill, I have been sort of following your Andruw Jones thread on Twitter and what I have seen, I guess I would condense it as follows:
1. The only real argument for Andruw Jones as a Hall of Famer is if you are convinced he’s the greatest defensive centerfielder of all time.
2. The argument that he is the greatest defensive centerfielder of all time is specious and unconvincing.
3. There is no other real argument for Andruw Jones because he was not a notable or outstanding offensive player, base runner, leader, postseason performer, etc.
Do I have that generally right?
The three statements are accurate, but they dodge the real issue. The real issue is that people who see themselves as pro-analytical or post-analytical revolution, people who see themselves as sophisticated consumers of information, are in fact behaving in a manner which is identical to the pre-analytic arguments commonly used before 1975. They argue that Andruw Jones has 63 WAR or whatever it is and that other players who have 58 WAR are in the Hall of Fame, therefore Andruw should be in the Hall of Fame as well. This is no different than arguing that Herb Pennock won 240 games and he is in the Hall of Fame and Waite Hoyt won 237 games and he is in the Hall of Fame and Whitey Ford won 236 games and he is in the Hall of Fame, so David Wells, with 239 wins, obviously deserves to be in the Hall of Fame as well. It is precisely the same argument; it is just using a "new" statistical category, rather than an old one. Or, to apply it to a hitter, Yogi Berra drove in 1,430 runs, Charlie Gehringer drove in 1,427 runs, Joe Cronin drove in 1,424, Jim Bottomley drove in 1,422, Robin Yount drove in 1,406 and Ed Delahanty 1,400, and all of those guys are in the Hall of Fame, so how can you say that Joe Carter shouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame when he drove in 1,445 runs, you moron, you.
Andruw Jones is not going to be selected to the Hall of Fame this year one way or the other, so that is not a real issue, and it doesn’t actually make any difference whether he stays on the ballot or not; his chance of eventually being elected is the same either way, so that’s not a real issue to me, although I can understand that people don’t like the process because it is a flawed process. I agree that Jones was a superb defensive center fielder, so that isn’t the issue, either.
Most people are not "analysts"; they are consumers of information, and before they were using old information and now they are using newer, better information, so what’s the problem with that?
The problem is this. It ultimately damages the analytic community, and it will ultimately bring disrepute upon our community, if we allow people who pretend to be members of our community to make arguments which have obvious flaws, and which may be false because of those flaws. If we allow people who think they are "with us" to make arguments which may turn out in the long run to have been complete nonsense, without contesting those arguments, without pointing out the problems, then it ultimately comes back on us.
WAR looks to an un-skeptical reader as a "comprehensive" statistic—but what people don’t get is that pitcher’s wins, in their day, were understood to be a comprehensive statistic, as well. A pitcher's win total summarized EVERYTHING the pitcher did--until we realized that it doesn't. It was very, very common, 40 years ago, for people to say that RBI were the most important statistic for a hitter. Now it is WAR, but later it will be something else—or, at a minimum, some better, more carefully constructed versions of WAR.
Let’s say for the sake of argument that I am 100% comfortable with the runs saved estimates derived on behalf of Andruw Jones; in fact it might be 85% or 90%, but it doesn’t matter. Let’s say that we’re 100 confident in those numbers. The problem is that the Runs Saved estimates derived in this manner are much larger than the Runs Saved estimates derived by older methods, which are necessarily conservative because of the limitations of the data. They are not just larger for Andruw Jones; they are larger in general. They are larger for Andrelton Simmons than for Luis Aparicio. Andrelton Simmons’ dWAR as a first-year regular in 2013 was larger than Ozzie Smith’s career high.
Andruw Jones’ career dWar is shown as 24.1, in 17039 innings, whereas Willie Mays is shown at 18.1 in 24,427 innings. On a per-inning basis, Jones is being credited with saving twice as many runs as Willie Mays, compared to a replacement level center fielder.
Well, I believe that Andruw Jones was a fine defensive center fielder, but I don’t necessarily believe that he was twice as good a center fielder as Willie Mays. I’m a little skeptical. The problem is, though, that the people who are relying on Andruw Jones’ WAR as the basis of his Hall of Fame claim are, in fact, relying upon the conclusion that he was twice as good a defensive center fielder as Willie Mays. …or leave Willie Mays out of it; Garry Maddox. Maddox’ per-inning is about the same as Mays’, which is a little over one-half of Jones’. The people who are using Jones’ WAR to argue that he should be in the Hall of Fame are relying on that statement, but they either
a) do not understand that they are implicitly relying on this claim, or
b) will not admit that they are implicitly relying on this claim, or
c) don’t think that it’s a problem.
WAR seems to the less-educated public to be a fair and consistent method between generations, when in reality it is an apples-and-oranges comparison between generations. That’s not a criticism of WAR; it’s an inherent limitation of the facts available to us at this time.
If people do not understand that this is what they are doing. . . well, that’s fine; they’re not analysts, they don’t quite get it. 99.9% of people are not baseball analysts; it’s not a criticism of them that they’re not. It is our responsibility to help people understand this problem, not their responsibility to figure it out on their own.
But if they don’t understand this and they are pretending to be sophisticated data analysts, then that’s a problem. If you’re not an environmental scientist, that’s not a problem, most people aren’t. If you’re not an environmental scientist and you’re pretending to be an environmental scientist, then that’s a problem. Then it becomes a responsibility of the environmental scientists to point out that you are not an environmental scientist, and you don’t know what the hell you are talking about. The people who are insisting that Andruw Jones should be in the Hall of Fame because he was the greatest defensive center fielder of all time do not know what the hell they are talking about, and it is an absolute responsibility of those of us who are in this field to say so.
I wish I could stop there, because that’s a better closing sentence than anything else I have, but there were issues I didn’t get to. Some people will say "Maybe Andruw Jones really WAS a better defensive center fielder than Willie Mays. Maybe Andrelton Simmons really IS a better defensive shortstop than Ozzie Smith."
Well. . .yeah, maybe he was. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. Let’s figure that out before we elect him to the Hall of Fame, rather than electing him first and then working on the gigantic hole in the argument for him later. That’s a way of saying that you don’t think it’s a problem, that we’re comparing apples to oranges. I think it’s a problem.
Another argument that people make is that if we can’t elect Andruw because of this issue, then we can’t elect anybody post-2000, because we’re always comparing apples to oranges. But of course we can elect other players post-2000. It’s a problem for Andruw because Andruw’s Advocates are making a remarkable claim for him, which rests entirely on data which is not fully understood at this time with regard to inter-generational comparisons. It’s not a problem for Miguel Cabrera, because Miguel’s Minions are not making any remarkable claim for him based on data that isn’t completely understood yet. It isn’t a problem for Miguel, or Albert Pujols, or David Ortiz, or Ichiro Suzuki, or Mike Mussina or Roger Clemens or Greg Maddux or Roy Halladay or Curt Schilling or Derek Jeter or Chipper Jones or Adrian Beltre or anybody else, because none of those men are making any remarkable claims based on data which is not fully vetted in this context. It’s a problem for Andruw because he is.
Thanks.