Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 53: Is the Second Wild Card Working?/Explaining Mainstream Screeds Against Advanced Stats

Episode Date: October 1, 2012

Ben and Sam discuss whether the second wild card has made the stretch run more exciting, then talk about why papers publish columns that criticize advanced stats without making an effort to understand them.

Good morning and good evening and welcome to episode 53 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives. We are recording this just after midnight New York, New York time where Ben Lindbergh is joining me. Ben, how are you today? Wonderful. Thank you for asking. How was your weekend? Pretty uneventful. Just kind of a standard weekend. Did you tweet? I don't think I tweeted once this weekend. I have a hard time tweeting when I'm not working and I wasn't really working, so I wasn't tweeting either. And did you bring a topic? Yeah.

I want to talk a little bit about articles that wonder what war is. Okie doke. And I want to talk about crickets. Okay. Why don't I start? Yes, why don't you start? Because I don't really know where yours is going to go, and I'm a little worried about it. So crickets, when the Angels showed up for the first game of their doubleheader today,

there were an estimated 500 crickets in their dugout, which is a lot of crickets. I unearthed a cricket nest recently behind a bench that I built, and that was just... I just wanted to make sure everybody knows I built a bench. Wow, you must be good around the house. It took a long time to build a bench. Why did you not buy a bench?

I was in Amsterdam, and I saw a bench that I liked a lot, and I was not going to buy a bench. Why did you not buy a bench? I was in Amsterdam and I saw a bench that I liked a lot and I was not going to buy a bench in Amsterdam so I boldly declared to my wife, I could build you that. So with some help from one of our listeners who birthed me or didn't birth me, was my father. The opposite of birthing. Whatever the other role

is. I did build a bench. Anyway, my cricket nest was like maybe 14 crickets so 500 crickets is a lot of crickets and mr miller listens to our podcast he does wow uh yeah so anyway 500 crickets that's the end of my uh so the angels today entered um as in a lot of ways, they were the key team in the playoff race. From their perspective, they could have been four games out and eliminated, I should say, today, or they could have been within one game of the A's. And the Rangers, Yankees, and Baltimore Orioles' playoff hopes all rested on what they did.

The Angels had a thrilling, amazing comeback in the first game, but they lost in the second game. So now we are really getting very close to having a settled playoff picture. We now know... Someone's opening the garage door. Yeah. So that's a first. We now know.

We now know. What was I saying? We now know almost all the playoff teams. The A's have a three-game lead on the Angels. The Angels' chances of making the playoffs at this point are going to be about 1%. We don't know the order. We don't know who's going to have the wild card and the division.

But basically, we're getting to the end of the season. And it was a fun day of baseball. Did you watch any of the baseball? Yeah, a little bit. I was actually going to ask you whether you wanted to do a sort of state of the second wild card in light of the fact that we now just about know everyone who's in it. Because Joe Posnetsky wrote something over the weekend where he kind of looked at what the playoff picture would look like if we were under the old system. And he concluded that it would be a little bit better.

look like if we were under the old system and he concluded that it would be a little bit better and so he wrapped up and he said it just feels to me that baseball like the bcs is solving last year's problem and i fear that it will keep happening a clearly inferior second wild card team will end up beating a first wild card and baseball will decide that a one game playoff needs to expand to a three game playoff that will cause other problems and fail to account for other unforeseen circumstances then they will fix those Then they will try to fix the new ones that arise. It's an endless circle. I don't think they will ever get to the heart of it, which I think is that baseball has too long a season to keep adding teams to the playoffs. And until recently, it seemed like the second wild card was a wonderful thing and then now uh it is kind of resolved almost except

for uh a couple races where you don't know who will be the wild card and who will be the division winner which of course is important but i know that that's part of the point right i don't know that that uh maybe intrigues people as much as missing the playoffs entirely. And if that were still in the air, up in the air, maybe it would be a little more suspenseful. I mean, I still think, I still like it. And I think probably it's short-sighted to judge it based on the outcome of one year's pennant races.

Well, the other thing is that even if it is, I don't know if Joe made this point, but even if it is somewhat less interesting this year than it was last year, there is still the matter of we get two amazing games on Friday. And that's not nothing either. You get to count those. We get to watch those games and we get to enjoy them. And we're all going to watch them in unison. And there are very few kind of

NCAA March Madness sort of moments in baseball. And we love those moments in every sport. And I don't mind that baseball has infused a little bit of that into its sport i think that to some degree knowing how to relate to these planet races is something that we're going to learn over time as you said it doesn't quite feel like the same tension with the orioles and the yankees for instance as it might have in like 1993 with the Braves and the Giants, where one goes home and the other one goes to the playoffs. But I think that it's possible that after a few years of this, we'll have a better sense of what it means to be a wildcard team. And if you watch your team go home after one game, you might realize that the wild card is no better than, you know,

a one-game playoff, which is what it is. So I don't know. I was actually thinking about this as well, and I didn't quite pin down how I felt, whether it was more or less interesting this year. I mean, certainly there is a little bit of drama in the NL where there would have been no drama whatsoever, right? Yes.

So that's not nothing. And I don't know. I've had a good time. I mean, it's so jumbled and crazy and hard to figure out. I mean, even when you look at the wild card standings, like they don't know what to do with the team on top. So it just appears that the team on top and the second team are tied i have looked at that and been confused myself it's always confusing and you have to do extra math and i'm never opposed to extra math um i think it's fun i think it's been um chaotic which is i believe probably the

point is to that's what last year was. That's what they're trying to replicate is chaos. And it's not chaotic if you're the Nationals or if you are the Reds, which is another point of this whole thing. And it is chaotic if you're a slightly inferior team. It just so happens this year that there's no dominant American League team. And so the difference between first place and out of the playoffs completely came down to the last weekend for almost every team. So that's kind of a quirk of this year. I think normally you'll have at least one team that has 99 wins or something like that and about how maybe it was a little too chaotic in that he doesn't know which team he'll be playing and won't know until really right before. And he seems to object to any system that would kind of keep the leading team in the dark about its opponent that long.

I don't, I mean, that doesn't really impact you or me. so I don't know that that bothers me very much. But I can understand why it would if I were a manager of a playoff team, I guess. And this is probably a good time to plug the BP Roundtable chat, which has not been announced on the site yet. But all of the authors, or many of the authors, will be doing a live chat on the site during both of the wild card games on friday so you should join us and talk to us during that um speaking speaking of chaos yes those things are always chaotic i mean if you want me to answer your question 40 minutes after you ask it and have no idea that i'm talking to you that is the place to go well that's a good advertisement i know i just i love how it'll just be like like all of a sudden paul spore will be like like terry pendleton and like what yes there are many

people submitting questions and comments and many authors responding to them all at the same time so it's fun or all at different times yeah it is yeah so are we done with that topic or did you have anything else about that it was a fun day today was a fun day i mean i don't know how you can maybe it was only fun for me because i followed both those games but to me this was a big stinking endorsement of the system okay so what i wanted to bring up uh this is the time of year, really every year, when you start to see that kind of cookie cutter column by someone who disagrees with what your win value statistic of choice says about who the MVP winner or the Cy Young winner should be. This year, it's, of course, Cabrera and Trout and Dickey over some other NL pitchers.

But it's someone every year where you see some mainstream columnists, and I'm not going to name any names because you probably know the names or can find the names easily if you'd like to. But you see these columns that they criticize WARP or whatever win value statistic you use, but they do it without really engaging with the statistic. Basically, they say, you know, they mock it. Essentially, they use the acronym and they say, well,

what does that mean? And no one knows what that means. And they make no real effort to understand or explain what it means. Of course, they could find out what it means and maybe still disagree with the way it's implemented or what it means, but they don't really take that extra step. They just kind of say, well, these traditional statistics have worked for many years, and this new one sounds weird, and I don't know what it is. And Sean Foreman, who runs Baseball Reference and is a member of the Baseball Writers Association, did a post over the weekend at Baseball Reference

pointing out that no baseball writers have called or emailed him to talk about what war is or what goes into war. And you sense that he was a little fed up about the columns basically asking the question, well, what is war by authors who who haven't apparently gone to any effort to find out what it is. And I kind of wonder how it is that these columns see the light of day, I guess. And they don't bother me so much at this point. I just kind of tune them out. And really, if you believe in what a statistic says or how you measure someone's value, then it shouldn't really affect you if someone disagrees. But I just wonder, I mean, if you or I received

a submission, I think, like this by someone at BP who wrote an article criticizing a stat and seemingly going to no effort to find out what that stat says or what it means, we would probably spike that article or we would return it to the author and ask them to find out what it is or clarify their argument in some way. And that's kind of, you know, the old school versus new school thing where the mainstream writers tend to put down bloggers or people who didn't go to journalism school or don't have that same sort of background. Often they make the point that the bloggers are not accountable in some way, or they don't

have the training to interview people or, or dig into a story. And I don't know, it seems somewhat hypocritical to criticize some bloggers for doing that without kind of engaging on that same level with these statistics. So I wonder what you think about those articles or why you think we see them at all, how they ever make it to a paper. you think we see them at all, how they ever make it to a paper. Well, okay. So there are basically two things there to talk about. And in one, I will sort of play devil's advocate in this specific instance, but I think in a larger interest, in the larger perspective, there's a little bit of truth to it there there really is I mean there it is one of the challenges I'm not going to say flaws but it's one of the challenges of a lot of these stats that

you don't really know what goes into it and even if you want to know what goes into it you don't really know what goes into it and so like I can understand how you, how UZR is calculated, but that doesn't mean I can calculate it. And probably in an example that maybe comes a little closer to home, and you can correct me if I'm wrong. I wasn't with BP at the time, so I might have some of these details wrong. But Pocota in, I believe, 2002 uh, came out in January or February as it does. And the, a lot of the, um, a lot of the projections just didn't pass the sniff test, especially with pitchers. And you could sort of just look at them and think, well, there's something wrong with these. And I, I remember, um, saying, or maybe I remember other people saying, like, these don't look right.

And there was a sort of general raising of the defense of Pocota and the idea that, well, if you, you know, just because you disagree with something doesn't mean it's wrong. There's a system in place. And then, you know, a couple days later, it came out that, oh, no, you disagree with something doesn't mean it's wrong. There's a system in place. And then a couple days later, it came out that, oh, no, there was a mistake made, and I think something having to do with team defense had been counted twice or something like that. And the numbers had to be rerun, and a lot of the problems were fixed. And the problem with having some of these metrics that are complicated enough that you either

don't quite know the methodology or don't know the methodology much at all or can't replicate the methodology is that you are essentially – you're putting your trust in people who are smarter than you, which is a totally legitimate – I mean this is how we manage the world. I came across this when I was covering autism and I would have two doctors who would say totally different things and they're both smarter than me. And so it felt silly for me to say that I was smarter than either doctor because I'm not smarter than either doctor. And you have to just decide, well, which doctor do you align yourself with? And we do this with all sorts of

things. I think we probably do it with some politics. We do it with sort of our views on science. We do it on some of our views on medicine. And we do it with some of our views on baseball statistics. We align ourselves with people that we've come to trust that have proven to us that they have some integrity that we think are smart. But the problem is that those people might make mistakes and they don't become immediately clear, or those people might have systemic biases that aren't necessarily clear. I mean, nobody's perfect. So that's a long way of saying I'm sympathetic to the idea that it can be overwhelming to look at some of these stats. And probably a person who, I would say, dumbly discards Winslow replacement models probably is not that much less informed than I am in supporting them.

We both kind of picked a side, and we decided which smart people we wanted to follow. As for the way that these columns get published, when I started in journalism, the pieces I would write would get edited over the course of hours. The content would be picked apart. It would be bounced back to me. Questions would be raised. Logic would be discussed. And over the course of the years, that process basically ended. Editors became copy editors because copy editors became laid off.

Editors also became in charge of posting things on the web. Everything started to be on the web first. And so you would publish before even anybody had read it. Probably the last thousand pieces that I wrote for the Orange County Register saw no editing whatsoever. I would just publish them myself. And so that was just a, the way that the industry went. It was very disappointing for writers because you wanted to get some of this feedback. And I've long thought that when I read some of these columns, that it would be a remarkably different conversation that we would all be having about sports if the nation's sports editors edited for content rather than simply grammar. But they don't anymore, as far as I can tell, for the most part.

There are probably exceptions and maybe it's different at different places. But that's just really not the process the way that it used to be. And so it is frustrating because you can watch these columnists get away with with arguments that a rational another rational adult who is trying to keep them from making a mistake or from simply being wrong would definitely shorthanded and not being able to devote the same time to each piece or having to do double duty on the website and the print edition and just not having enough time to go around basically to have that gatekeeper or someone who can say, hey, maybe you should take a longer look at this or something. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's, I think it's basically that and that it's, it's just the culture has changed. Columnists are no longer, and maybe it's possible it was always like this for sort of the more famous columnists that you might know at your local newspaper, the top columnist. The top columnist at a newspaper is kind of a pretty big deal in the newsroom. And there are only, I don't know, it seems to me that there are only a couple of people who kind of have the rank to give substantive criticism to

these columnists a lot of times. And I think if you, there's usually at least one or two people who do, but if they file something on a weekend, for instance, it might not be read by one of those people. All right, then. Those articles explained. Kind of. By one very limited perspective of a person who never wrote those articles. Yes. All right. Should we wrap it up? Let's do that. All right. We'll talk to you all tomorrow.