Are Johnny Estrada’s numbers for the Braves indicitive of his true ability? What did the Devil Rays’ young players contribute to their 12-game winning streak? Is there something behind the good months that several Blue Jays pitchers have enjoyed? This and more news from Atlanta, Tampa Bay, and Toronto in your Thursday Prospectus Triple Play.
If you watch the home team broadcast, almost every start by a home pitcher isn’t just good, it’s great. No, it’s outstanding. Just plain fantastic. It was a gritty, gutty start. And that’s for a six-inning, 9-hit, 4-walk, 2-strikeout start where the pitcher sees four runs cross the plate. He worked himself out of some tough jams. He literally put out some fires (the use of literally to mean figuratively causing writers and English majors across the country to literally grind their teeth).
That’s to be expected. After all, the broadcasts are, first and foremost, marketing tools for the team. I shouldn’t get frustrated when baserunning gaffes are excused, or a hitter’s awful hacks are ignored. I do, but I shouldn’t. When we find nuggets of serious analysis, or discussions that aren’t flattering to the team, or even criticism of botched plays, it’s a bonus.
One of the most enduring concepts in baseball is the “clutch hitter.” Despite statistical evidence to the contrary, scouts, fans, and major league front offices continue to believe that some hitters are “clutch” and others are not. This is particularly evident in the playoffs, where the inability of a player with strong regular season statistics to hit in October is offered as evidence that the player is not “clutch,” while other players are lauded for a few, well-timed base hits.
While there is no statistical evidence for systematic clutch hitting, however, it is still possible that some players do under (or over) perform in the playoffs, due to a tendency for “mistake hitting.” Perhaps there are hitters who build their statistics up against bad pitching, but when faced with the quality pitching delivered in the playoffs, the holes in their game are exposed. Likewise, there may be players who do not have spectacular regular season numbers, but who have a solid batting approach that leaves them in an equally good position against low and high quality pitchers. The former type of player might be seen as “choking” in the playoffs, while the latter is seen as turning in a clutch performance.
One of the reasons we started Baseball Prospectus was to point out the biases
within the baseball industry that were affecting player evaluation. We’ve
worked hard to establish the ideas that great athletes don’t necessarily make
great baseball players, that command is as important to pitching as throwing
hard is, and that hitters tend to follow a predictable career path.
We traded infallibility for a package of draft picks, though, so along the way
damaging biases have crept into our analyses, the same way that they did in
traditional evaluation. If performance analysis is going to continue to make
inroads as both a perspective for covering baseball and a decision-making tool
for management, its practitioners will have to understand these biases and how
they corrupt the process.
If you think the discussion on steroids is bad, wait until you see what’s next. This month’s issue of Scientific American has a discussion on gene doping. That’s performance enhancement at the DNA level, which is not only effective, but like hGH and testosterone, nearly undetectable. With something as simple as muscle recovery, genetic changes can have amazing effects. The recent discovery of a genetic mutation in a German child proves the possibility exists. The scariest part of the article, to me, was how close this technology is to affecting sports. It’s five years away at the outside. Somewhere, there’s a geneticist who’s looking at BALCO and laughing.
Powered by Wilco’s A Ghost Is Born, on to the injuries…