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September 13, 2007

Lies, Damned Lies

New Life on Different Fields

by Nate Silver

This piece was originally intended as a response to Gary Huckabay’s column of last week, the idea being to contradict his assertion that baseball analysis is dead by counting down 10 points of decision that at least a significant minority of baseball franchises get wrong. But after reading through my article—I generally write my introductions last—as well as re-reading Gary’s piece, I am not so sure it is orthogonal to it at all. I agree with Gary that there is relatively little to be gained from what he describes as “the rigorous review of player performance data.” Relatively little does not mean “nothing,” however, and I have isolated some of the exceptions below. Most of the items on my list, however, have to do with questions that run outside the scope of the GM or the field manager. They have more to do with the guy sitting in the owner’s box, and those places on a baseball team’s org chart where the names stop becoming familiar.

10. Inappropriate Leadoff Hitters: We start with one of those minor exceptions that takes place at the field level. There are very few in-game strategic decisions that amount to a hill of beans, and lineup order—within reasonable boundaries of sanity—is no exception. Most teams, save perhaps for three or four outliers like the Dodgers, have no trouble understanding the value of on-base percentage.

Still, for fully one-third of the teams in baseball, the most frequently-used leadoff hitter this season has a lower OBP than that of the team in general. The ten culprits are these:

Team  Hitter   Hitter OBP   Team OBP
BOS   Lugo       .296         .362
NYY   Damon      .350         .364
CHW   Owens      .307         .317
PHI   Rollins    .346         .356
WAS   Lopez      .307         .321
CHC   Soriano    .329         .332
CIN   Freel      .308         .336
HOU   Biggio     .283         .326
ARI   Young      .293         .316
SDP   M. Giles   .306         .321

By contrast, 29 of the 30 primary leadoff hitters are on pace to finish with double-digit stolen base totals; the lone exception is Craig Biggio, which can readily be explained by the fact that the Astros came into the season apparently thinking they were getting the 1997 version of the former star. Generally speaking, the conceit of using a Brian Downing or Wade Boggs type as a leadoff hitter never really caught on.