The Merits Of A Pitcher's Stats Against One Team

Mike from The Yankeeist has some strong words for the way media built up the return of Roy Halladay last night:

The problem wasn't the hype itself, but how it was justified. There should be pregame excitement anytime the Yankees face a pitcher who is having the kind of season Doc is having. But the game was sold to fans on the basis of Halladay's career numbers against the Yankees. This kind of sloppy journalism is prevalent in the baseball media, and should be criticized.

I think not citing Halladay's career numbers would have been a far more egregious error. It's a valid storyline. He'd pitched more than a full season's worth against the Yankees in his career and had great results. How do you not bring that up?

Of course, as Mike goes on to explain, even though Doc had thrown a ton of innings to the Yanks, the numbers he compiled don't really mean anything:

The baseball media frequently cites a player's career performance against a given team to provide insight into how that player should do right now against that same team. This makes no sense. Sticking with the current example, Roy Halladay has been logging time in the AL East since 1998. How, exactly, do his numbers against Scott Brosius or Jason Giambi help understand what he can be expected to do when he faces the Yankees in 2010? The answer, of course, is that they can't, but baseball struggles to grasp this.

In addition to the Yankee lineup fluctuating, the defense behind Halladay has constantly shifted, the turf underneath him in Toronto has changed, he's thrown to tons of different catchers and most importantly, he's evolved as a pitcher. Essentially, what you are looking at when you try to analyze Halladay's career stats against the Yankees (or any pitcher's line against a certain team) are a bunch of very small samples, recorded over a very long time, and smushed together to look like one big one. And, by the way, looking at his career numbers against the Yankees tells you the same thing that looking at his overall numbers tell you - Roy Halladay is like, really awesome at pitching.

But there's two parts to this - the validity of the stats and how they are being used. Mike calls it "sloppy journalism", but that strikes me as a sort of hollow, straw man argument. Its' not like it's factually incorrect. Halladay has owned the Yankees and you can bet that the players in the clubhouse are keenly aware of it. Why then shouldn't the media talk about it? It doesn't have predictive value, but no one I care to read was trying to predict what the outcome of the game would be anyway. It was one of things that was ubiquitously noted because, well, it was worth noting.

Did anyone guarantee that Halladay was going to turn in a great game? I'm not aware of such a proclamation. I think most Yankee fans sort of braced for impact (like Mike's co-author at the Yankeeist, Larry did) simply because after seeing it happen so many times, it's a natural reaction.

So why do we fans have the desire read about games before they happen? Why do we bother to write a preview for all 162 of them here? It's rare that something your read beforehand will manifest itself in the game in a meaningful way, isn't it?

In general, we are all probably a little anxious for the game to start and reading about it helps pass the time. We love the team and find that harnessing some of that anticipation and reading up on an impending game helps us look forward to it.

More specifically, when I write a preview or read one that someone else has written, it's because I want to have an understanding of any trends and storylines coming in and try to develop some sort of a framework that will make what's unfolding on the field a little more coherent and interesting to me. Some of those things might be statistical, but the personalities and rivalries and the who-owns-who are compelling in their own way, even if they don't pass the statistical smell test.

Something To Read Over The Weekend

The work week is winding down, but there's one thing you should probably do before you attempt to sneak out of the office early. Print off a copy of the new e-Ticket over at ESPN.com by Patrick Hruby. It's 12,000 words and once printed out turns into a healthy 16 pages of prime weekend reading material. Use the company's printer and save your eyes from reading it off your computer screen. Heck, once you print it out, you can even take it places with you just like one of those "newspapers" they used to sell.

The article is about a Cambodian man who goes by the Americanized name "Joe Cook" and his efforts to bring baseball back to his home country. That's where the story starts, anyway.

Yes, I definitely thought this would be an elevating assortment of words, a triumph of the human spirit with lots of pretty prose and a bright, happy ending. Sports. Uplift. An emotional shot in the arm. Tonic for a world forever going wrong. But that was before this. Before I ventured halfway around the planet to drink from a half-empty glass of half-curdled joy, before I discovered that a tale too inspiring to be true -- Cambodian refugee escapes the Killing Fields, comes to America, takes hope and baseball back to his homeland (and yeah, someone already is filming a documentary) -- is probably too deranged to make up.

After you're done reading, there's an 11 or 12 minute video embedded in the article.

Woven into a story about baseball are the sad realities of power, greed, abuse, dishonesty and lust, all underpinned by poverty. If you've spent some time in the third world, the descriptions of what goes on in Cambodia will be less shocking, but it won't make them any less sad. The silver lining is that after this article, fewer people are going to hand over their money to "Joe Cook" thinking with the assumption he's using it for the development of baseball in Cambodia.

The writing is heavy on style but there's more than enough substance to go around. I'm not sure if "enjoy" is the right word, but it's a piece that's certainly worth reading.

The Fallacy Of A Hot September

In the beginning of every season, we are forced to look at extremely small sample sizes in order to evaluate performance, which grow larger as the year progresses. It takes a while, but over the summer months, trends become realities and we begin to see who the best players and teams are. But before those positions can be solidified, the schedule winds down and heads into the postseason. Then, broadcasters, analysts and fans all try to identify who the hottest teams are heading into October and the big picture is viewed in terms of increasingly small sample sizes once again.

But does being hot heading into the playoffs really forebode success once you get there? The 2007 Rockies were the most recent poster child of this theory, skyrocketing from 6.5 games back and only 5 games over .500 as late as September 16th and finally sneaking into the postseason via a play-in game against the Padres. From there they swept their way to the World Series but were ultimately dismantled by the Red Sox.

Of course, the '07 Rockies are just one end of the spectrum. On the other hand, you have the 2000 Yankees who turned into a train wreck down the stretch, going 2-12 over their final 14 games, ending the season on a 7 game losing streak and nearly blowing the division. That Yankee team of course went on to beat the Indians, Mariners and Mets and unlike the above mentioned Rockies, actually won the World Series.

Today at The Faster Times, Lisa Swan from Subway Squawkers looked at how every playoff team since the year 2000 performed in September and how it correlated to their success in the postseason. Surprise, surprise... there is essentially no connection at all. Click through for the details.

In a season bereft of any really close pennant races, but the same amount of articles to be published, scribes will be churning out columns trying to identify who is primed for October based on the way they are playing now. Someone is probably writing one about the Yankees right now. Most columnists make a living trying to find story lines. Unfortunately for them, if you want to foretell the future in baseball, you be better off breaking out the crystal ball.