Counterpoint: Who Cares?

In the six months I've been writing here, rarely have Jay and I disagreed on any major points. We disagreed about a hypothetical recall of Austin Jackson in the wake of a potential Melky Cabrera injury, and we differ as to how the Yankees should approach Hideki Matsui this off-season. But in instances like these, I think we both can understand, if not agree with, the other viewpoint.

Today though, I think we may have an instance of us being distinctly on opposite sides of the coin. This morning, Jay parsed the AL MVP results and had some valid criticisms of the order of finish as well as some of the more obscure individual votes. Moshe Mandel at The Yankee Universe had something similar yesterday, and I've seen traces of the same sentiment elsewhere in the blogosphere. To which I say: who cares?

Perhaps this is hypocritical of me. Just last week I put up a post here essentially criticizing the "stats based community" for not calling out Tyler Kepner, Zack Greinke, and Brian Bannister for their misuse and misunderstanding of advanced metrics in the wake of Greinke's Cy Young Award victory. Though perhaps I didn't make the point as clearly as I wanted, my issue wasn't so much with the misuse and misunderstanding as it was that everyone was so happy that Greinke both won and acknowledged FIP in the process, that they withheld the usual cantankerousness and I'm-smarter-than-you responses that normally follow such a slip up. Now, when the reaction is a bit truer to character, once again it's me who's complaining about the complaining, just as last week I complained about the lack of complaining.

That said, I still think this is really, really unnecessary. Yes, by any worthy metric Derek Jeter was more valuable than Mark Teixeira. Yes, Ben Zobrist probably finished much lower than he deserved. Yes, there were several players who received individual votes that were higher than they deserved or not deserved at all. Yes, I'm surprised/disappointed that Jason Bartlett didn't receive a single vote. Yes, a first place vote for Miguel Cabrera is so patently stupid that it's probably a waste of energy to even explain why.

But still, do we really need to break down all the grave injustices that happened behind Joe Mauer's cavernous margin of victory? Should we even care what happened beyond Mauer taking the hardware? Isn't the whole point to get the winner right, not whoever comes after him? Don't we often preach about sample size, and isn't the point of casting 28 ballots with 10 slots each for a pool of over 400 players that the "most valuable" player will rise to the top? Sure there will be some oddball votes in there, but the right guy won, and he came within one vote and five points of doing so unanimously. Does any of the rest matter?

Please don't take for me anti-statistic. If you read here with any degree of regularity during the season you know that I often sigthed OPS+, wOBA, UZR, WAR, FIP, etc. That isn't the point. The point is how much is enough? We've seen the deservedly-maligned BBWAA get all four major awards "right", and three of the votes weren't particularly close. In doing so they've eschewed traditional biases that would have favored less deserving candidates in years past. Shouldn't this be enough to keep us content for now? Remember, this round of off-season awards represents the Battle of Saratoga, not the Treaty of Paris.

At their core, the MVP, the Cy Young Award, and even the Hall of Fame for that matter are subjective, loosely-defined awards that have little value beyond whatever worth we assign to them. I have a hard time understanding the utter outrage year after year as the awards season comes and goes. While we'd all like to believe that "objective journalists" are the stewards of these institutions, the fact of the matter is we're not talking about Edward R. Murrow or Walter Kronkite here. These are sportswriters. And while many may still exhibit signs of homerism or may be hopelessly clinging to archaic and ineffective means of measuring performance, I still think they're in a much better state today than they were in the days of Grantland Rice, or Ford C. Frick, or Jimmy Cannon. We're not seeing even the likes of Barry Bonds getting jobbed out of a deserved MVP because he's an asshole to the writers. Ask Ted Williams' frozen detached skull what he thinks about that.

So, with a plethora of better methods to assess value at our disposal, why do we even care who wins these things anymore, let alone who finishes second through tenth? If we want to know who is truly valuable, then why not just pull up the WAR leaderboard, or whichever future metric proves to be the most accurate means of assessing performance? Why do we care which pitcher is given an award named after the all-time wins leader, when we know wins are a misleading indicator of true performance, and we know that Cy Young was an inferior pitcher when compared to contemporaries like Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson? Do we even need the BBWAA to give the awards to the "right" players to validate what the metrics have already told us?

As Joe at RAB pointed out in the wake of the Cy Young voting, this isn't a culture war anymore. This is the true state of baseball these days, and it's an amalgamation of what were once two distinct schools of thought. As much as some seem to define themselves by it, this is no longer us vs. them, Moneyball vs. old-school, stats vs. scouts, RBI vs. WAR. The game - or more specifically how we look at the game - has changed, is changing, will continue to change, and will do so across the board. It's no longer just Bill James, a few forward thinking executives, a handful of enlightened websites. It's widespread; it's prevalent.

Few if any of GMs are traditional "baseball men"; nearly all have a business background in addition to their baseball experience. Every front office has some sort of statistical analysis taking place. Bill James, Voros McCracken, Tom Tango and others were or are employed by, or are consultants to, Major League clubs. David Cone's routinely referencing Fangraphs on Yankee telecasts. Keith Law, Will Carroll, and other Baseball Prospectus folks were given votes in the post-season awards process. High-profile national sportswriters like Rob Neyer and Joe Posnanski are at the forefront of the "statistical revolution", and if their work wasn't enough to force their colleagues to learn about advanced metrics it was at least enough to create a palpable buzz about the truly worthy candidates.

The times they are a changing folks. And while we might not yet be living in a sabermetric utopia, we've seen great strides made this past week. As we approach Thanksgiving and presumably stop to reflect upon what we are thankful for, shouldn't we at least be satisfied, if not grateful, that the most deserving candidates won both MVPs and both Cy Young Awards rather than griping about the idiot who voted Jason Kubel seventh? I think we should; what about you?

WHIP, FIP & The WAR Against Wins

Good morning, Fackers. In the wake of the senior circuit Cy Young, like the AL version, being awarded to a pitcher not on the basis of his won-lost record but on the quality and number of his innings pitched, we're again going to disagree with the well-respected Tyler Kepner.

As Matt pointed out on Wednesday, Kepner noted that Zack Greinke acknowledged FIP in his post-award conference call but was grasping at straws in an attempt to frame the knowledge of advanced statistics as a key component in Greinke's success. Last night, Kepner tried to connect what was said by Greinke (or more accurately, Brian Bannister) with Tim Lincecum's explanation of his approach and made the same conflation:

Obviously, there is no substitute for pure talent. But in Greinke, Bannister’s teammate, we are seeing what can happen when off-the-charts talent meets sophisticated understanding of numbers.

The same is true of Lincecum, to a degree. His stuff is filthy, but he said he was mainly concerned with how many walks-plus-hits he allows per inning – which was curious, in a way, because Dan Haren, Chris Carpenter and Javier Vazquez all had a better WHIP than Lincecum in the N.L. this season.

First, Lincecum's WHIP was a minuscule 1.05. Haren, Carpenter, and Vasquez? 1.00, 1.01, 1.03. That's a difference of one batter for every 20, 25 and 50 innings, respectively, which Lincecum easily erases with his superior strikeout ratio.

But more importantly, what if Lincecum had simply said that he was trying his best not to allow batters to reach base? It would have been dismissed as a typical cliche. On the offensive side of the ball, we frequently hear batters saying that they were "just trying to get on base" which is just a different way of saying that they were trying to improve their on base percentage.

In most cases, the goals in baseball are pretty obvious. If you are a batter, don't use up outs. If you are a pitcher, try to keep men off the basepaths, preferably via strikeout. There is still some wiggle room regarding the value of sacrifice hits and bunting, but there isn't a whole lot advanced statistics can teach players. Knowing about UZR isn't going to make someone a better defender. They already know they should be trying to field as many balls, as far away from them as possible.

The main function of the more advanced metrics that are steadily gaining in popularity such as WAR, wOBA, VORP, WPA, RE24, UZR, and FRAA is that they allow observers to more accurately compare players to one another. While players citing FIP and WHIP can only increase their popularity, which is certainly a positive thing, understanding them doesn't provide much in terms of strategical, on-field edge.

The real story emerging from the 2009 Cy Young voting is that the voters have begun to value better statistics and in turn, more objective analysis. Which is to say, they're not blindly picking the pitcher who had the most wins.

Kepner demonstrates this by comparing this year's voting to win-skewed results 1990 and 1998 (both of which illustrate the writer's old reliance on wins), but Dave Cameron over at FanGraphs sums it up best:

Congratulations to the members of the BBWAA, who have been willing to adapt as the game changes. They deserve recognition for being willing to accept the shift towards better analytical methods. And getting away from wins as a measure of the value of a pitcher is a big first step.

Of course, Adam Wainwright who left his last game of the season with a 6-1 lead in line for his 20th win still received the most first place votes in the NL. He only finished 10 points behind Lincecum, so maybe if his bullpen had held up, the aftermath of these awards would be slightly less celebratory.

Both Matt and I have taken turns raining on this parade, but I think it's likely that in hindsight, 2009 will be cited as the year that Advanced Stats won the war against Conventional Wisdom. However, I'm more inclined to think that this was the Battle of Saratoga. And considering Bill James penned the hardball version of the Declaration of Independence over 30 years ago, it's probably going to a while before we see any sort of Treaty of Paris.

Everybody Do The Link Around

The Yankeeist has an interview with Alex Belth and Cliff Corcoran from Bronx Banter. It delves into the very beginnings of the Yankee blogosphere and gives some insight into the Banter Crew that you can't find anywhere else.

Big League Stew takes an in-depth look at BABIP.

A victory for potheads and statheads alike: Tim Lincecum wins the NL Cy Young.

Joe Posnanski hands out his special brand of anti-awards for managers, pitchers and the least valuable player in each league.

I'm not sure if this is good or bad, but Jason Bay is headed for pure, unadulterated free agency.

It doesn't much matter but Andy Pettitte finally filed his papers and is headed there as well.

Bud Selig says "some teams lost money" last year. He could have just said "the Tigers".

The Shyster breaks out a secondhand story about the corporate culture at GM as a way of explaining that Bud Selig might be trying to cut the fat out of the playoff schedule but he's the reason it's there to begin with.

This is why Ken Rosenthal gets paid the big bucks:

The [Yankees], according to one rival executive, plans to pursue free-agent relievers Rafael Soriano, a right-hander, and Mike Gonzalez, a lefty. The Yankees have liked both pitchers in the past.

However, another source with knowledge of the Yankees' thinking says the team prefers to address any bullpen holes from within, using the same strategy that they employed successfully last season.

He gives precedence to a quote from a "rival executive" over a "source with knowledge of the Yankees' thinking". How could you possibly justify citing an executive for another team when someone who knows what the Yanks are thinking offers a directly contradictory quote? Because Rosenthal knows that linking the Yankees - however tangentially - to free agents unequivocally equals pageviews. And that's what business aboard the internets is all about.

Just for good measure, let's take a look at how every pitcher who threw more than 10 innings out of the bullpen for the Yankees in 2009 was acquired.

• Mariano Rivera (international free agent)
• Phil Hughes (drafted - 2004)
• Alfredo Aceves (international free agent)
• David Robertson (drafted - 2006)
• Brian Bruney (signed as a free agent, assigned to the minors)
• Phil Coke (drafted - 2002)
• Damaso Marte (trade)
• Mark Melancon (drafted - 2006)
• Jonathan Albaladejo (trade)
• Edwar Ramirez (purchased from an independent league team)
• Chad Gaudin (trade)
• Jose Veras (free agent, assigned to minors)
• Sergio Mitre (free agent, assigned to minors)
• Brett Tomko (free agent, assigned to minors)

The only guys in there that were signed to multi-million dollar free agent deals were Mariano Rivera (who they were never going to let walk) and Damaso Marte who they locked up while they still had exclusive negotiating rights with last year. It's clear what the Yankees philosophy for their bullpen is and it doesn't involve acquiring expensive free agent relief pitchers like Soriano and Gonzalez.

/end rant

Now make like the NL Cy Young winner and, in the words of Ray Charles, go get stoned.

All-Star Game: Night of 1,000 Stars

Or, since the league rosters are capped at 33, maybe it's Night of 66 Stars. But that's only if you believe that the likes of Zach Duke, Andrew Bailey, or Brad Hawpe are actually All-Stars. That isn't to say that those guys aren't having good seasons, just that they aren't the names that first come to mind when thinking of the Mid-Summer Classic.

I've kind of lost interest in the All-Star Game in recent years. I've thoroughly enjoyed watching the MLBN air ASGs from my youth the past several days. Perhaps not coincidentally, my interest has waned as Bud Selig has attempted to force meaning into what was never intended to be anything more than an exhibition game. Our pal Jason at IIATMS has detailed this quite well in recent weeks, pointing out the absurdity of the whole affair. I'll say this much: it was somewhat disappointing to see the 2002 game end in tie, but it didn't ruin my summer. It's a damn exhibition. I'd rather it end tied than have a pitcher from a pennant contending team throw 100 pitches in a meaningless game.

The pitching match-up tonight is a great one, as it usually is for the All-Star Game. On-the-block Roy Halladay will oppose emo-kid-extraordinaire Tim Lincecum. And because the All-Star Game is stupid, the pitchers will bat since the game is being held in an NL park. So Halladay may get some more practice at the plate before he winds up with the Phillies at the end of the month. I've gone back about 30 years and can't find the last time a pitcher that started the All-Star Game was traded mid-season. Halladay would be the first in a long time, if not the first overall.

In another line-up note, Mrs. Tony Parker is a late scratch from the AL line-up, with an infected ring finger. Michael Young replaces him at 3B in the AL line-up, Chone Figgins replaces him on the AL roster. I'm surprised the NL is allowing such a late substitution, because, as you know, this one counts!

For the Yankees, both Derek Jeter and Mark Teixeira start, batting second and fourth respectively. Mo is out in the pen to close it out, and if recent history holds, he will. There was a time when the NL absolutley dominated All-Star play, winning all but one ASG from 1963-1982. In reent years however, it's been all AL. Since I began following the game in 1988, the AL has gone 17-3-1. They had a six game winning streak from 1988-93, and have won every ASG since 1997, save for the tie in 2002.

For his career, Jeter is .474/.474/.684 in 19 PA over 9 ASGs, including five starts. He was the 2000 ASG MVP.

Teix has made just one previous ASG appearance, starting at 1B in 2005, going 1 for 3 with a HR.

Mo has made 9 previous All-Star teams, appearing in seven games. He's gone seven innings, giving up just one unearned run and allowing only five hits and no walks. He's fanned four and finished five of those games, picking up saves in '97, '05, and '06.

Tonight's video comes from the Upper West Side's own Beacon Theater and features Phil Lesh and Friends. The video is nearly as long as last night's Home Run Derby, but it comes from a fairly historic performance, as this was filmed at the second to last concert given by the "classic" Phil Lesh and Friends line-up of Lesh, John Molo, Rob Baracco, Jimmy Herring, and Warren Haynes.