Searching For Reasons
Last week, Dave discussed how inept analysts have become in terms of assessing when players considered to be over the hill fall off said hill. Most wrote off David Ortiz as being done, washed up, having nothing left in the tank, and then June rolled around and he “found his stroke.” Personally, I think the problem extends way beyond just determining when aging players become washed up, and deals more with our obsession to find reasons capable of explaining potentially unexplainable phenomena.
There are certainly areas within the game of baseball that lend themselves to individual skills and not chance, but there are an equal number of areas that fluctuate randomly. Trying to pinpoint a single reason as to why one of these random fluctuations occur makes very little sense and proves to be nothing more than a futile exercise. Not everything can be explained, concisely wrapped up in a neat little bun, and then brushed aside as an issue solved.
Over the weekend, a good friend of mine and I were discussing Johan Santana and how he has not looked like himself lately. After several back and forth ideas, wondering about Santana’s health or the competition he had been facing, it dawned on me that this might be a non-issue and searching for an explanation could pave the way to inaccurate claims being dished out. In a piece I wrote for BP earlier in the year, I investigated the idea of consistency, checking to see if it mattered or if consistency itself was stable. Short answer: consistency itself was inconsistent. Johan may have looked mortal recently, but the fact that his performances did not match his early season dominance really does not tell us anything. At season’s end, we are probably going to look at his gamelogs and chalk this recent stretch up as a rough patch everyone goes through that eventually corrects itself.
Think about that Raul Ibanez fiasco a few weeks ago and how that almost exponentially found itself the topic of interest amongst sports sites, radio stations, and television productions.
If I recall correctly, Person A, who partakes in a fantasy league, asked Person B about Ibanez’s revival. Person B then looked into the numbers and wrote a lengthy diatribe about Ibanez’s career, searching for a definitive reason as to why Raul had been hitting like Albert Pujols. In his search for a reason, performance enhancers were brought up, and within days, Person B had to defend himself on national television against Ken Rosenthal. No, Robothal isn’t Dave Winfield-esque in stature, but the point remains that searching for a reason to explain what could potentially amount to nothing more than an extended hot streak not necessarily foreign to Raul, who has posted some insane streaks in years prior, led to an extremely overhyped media frenzy.
There are certainly times when looking for a reason makes sense, like with the current performance of Jimmy Rollins, but for the most part doing so is useless. Non-Pujols players always fuse together various ups and downs in a season before arriving at their bottom line. Just because a player slumps and then gets hot doesn’t mean that he lost some skill in the former and gained it back in the latter. Assign grains of salt to reasoning or explanations derived from small samples of data, especially if they involve an area of the game that fluctuates randomly.
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As H. L. Mencken pointed out, for any question there is an answer which is simple, easy to understand, and wrong.
As Occam’s Razor points out, “of several acceptable explanations for a phenomenon, the simplest is preferable.”
One Santana-esque 3 hitter with 12 k’s and all this over the hill talk will be over. All his peripherals are fine except for a slightly elevated BB/9 and HR rate. I know he and the Mets aren’t panicking. But if your able to snag him relatively cheap from a panicked owner in your fantasy league, go for it! I was able to trade for Ortiz straight up for Yunil Escobar. Rollins on the other hand….
There’s no reason to think there’s any more wrong with Rollins than there is with Ortiz or any of the other guys. He’s in a really prolonged slump, and sure, he’s not an MVP caliber hitter, but a .218 BABIP is simply ridiculous for a guy with his speed and his peripherals aren’t that different from normal. His ISO is hurting a little, but if bad luck on balls in play robs a triple instead of a single…
There’s a really good book about this very thing. It’s called “Fooled by Randomness” by Nassim Taleb. It’s geared toward the financial world and how we look for a pattern where there really isn’t one at all. If you have any interest in this article, the book might be worth a read.
Well isn’t it human nature to find a reason for an event, especially if the event is not a likely occurrence, even if there is no evidence that supports it?
Sure. A lot of things are human nature. It’s human nature for males to be promiscuous. That doesn’t make it right or good.
My deepest wish for baseball analysis is for more people to simply not make that effort. When some guy is hitting well above what a reasonable projection system would spit out after the first few weeks of May, just say, “Well, we’ll have a better idea come June or July if he’s really changed as a hitter or if he’s just having a hot streak.”
The answer to the Ibanez question is: “He’s a very good hitter, and sometimes a very good hitter will hit like a bad hitter, and sometimes a very good hitter will hit like an exceptional hitter, and in the long run it should all come out in the wash.”
The problem is that people view the start of the season as being inherently more meaningful than it is.
I am not saying that it is right or good….
Actually now that I think about it, I may have placed a reason on something where one is not needed. Oh well.
And yes, Person B should be roundly criticized for such machinations.
In 2007, from the beginning of August through the end of the season, Ibañez OPSed 1.057 in 55 games.
In 2009, he OPSed 1.062 in 55 games.
That took me about three minutes to locate.
In this baseball world, nobody is above suspicion. I firmly agree. Nobody.
But until people like Person B understand that their typings are now open to the same ridiculous stupidity everybody else is, the weird circus will continue.
Can’t play both sides, folks.
“There are certainly times when looking for a reason makes sense, like with the current performance of Jimmy Rollins, but for the most part doing so is useless.”
That’s a pretty bold statement, seeing how a lot of the analysis done on the site, although insightful, might in fact be useless.
It seems like some people just forget what playing the game was like or else weren’t good enough in their playing days to make meaningful conclusions (that wasn’t meant as an insult). In my experience, there are indeed periods when the baseball looks like a beach ball at the plate and times when it’s invisible. This was more or less independent of who I was facing. My point is that an aspect of a player’s game can change subtly for a short period without underlying skill. I thought it was more accurate to say that for whatever reason Ortiz was failing to identify pitches than to say he was over the hill.