Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 989: A Reading from the Bill James Bible

Episode Date: December 12, 2016

Ben and Sam read a passage from The New Bill James New Historical Abstract and discuss whether contemporary observations of baseball players still have something to add to today’s closer-to-comprehensive statistical record.

Good morning and welcome to episode 989 of Effectively Wild, a daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus, brought to you by The Play Index, BaseballReference.com, and our supporters on Patreon. I'm Sam Miller of ESPN, along with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hello, Ben. Hello. Joe DiMaggio used to take naps in the dugout, somebody told us. Yeah.

That's my banter. Anything you got? No, that's all I've got. All right. This is going to be an odd episode. We'll see if we publish it. I'm almost actually, I don't even need you. I read an essay in the Bill James historical abstract that was so good and such a thing that I wish I had written that I want to read a large chunk of it and then ask you about it at the end of the large chunk. Okay. So you can get some tea if you want. I'll just mute myself and sit back and

listen with everyone else. That's exactly right. So are you ready? Yeah. All right. This was an essay that he wrote, one of the essays he wrote introducing his player rankings, his all-time player rankings. And he's writing essays about how he decides how to rank players and the nature of the statistics available to him and the statistics themselves and so on and so forth. And this is essay six, a subjective record, and it begins like this. You possess about each successful player of our time, an enormous fund of information, information that in 20 years time, it would be almost impossible to reconstruct. I've heard several people say that they have gotten so involved in the baseball of another era that they know more about the players of that era than the players of our own.

I've found that this is almost never so, and indeed I wonder if it is even possible. Pick a player, say Mickey Rivers. You know so many things about Mickey. You probably remember how fast he was when he came up. That was all you heard about him for the first two years. You know how he walks, with that pained, almost crippled gait, suddenly exploding into a blaze of speed when it comes time to run. You know they called him the Chancellor, and you probably know why. You know about his throwing arm, and can visualize him picking the ball off the wall in right center, and whirling, flapping like a goose, and propelling

the ball feebly in the direction of a cutoff man, with a throw most likely coming to earth 15 feet short of target and a little to one side. You know the way he chops down on the ball. You can probably call up the image of him fouling one off his foot, as he often does. You certainly remember him flipping the bat like a baton as he completed his swing. You remember Pete Rose staring down his throat, as he completed his swing. You remember Pete Rose staring down his throat 25 feet in front of third base in the 1976 World Series. You know about the malapropisms for which he became famous late in his career, and could probably quote three or four of them from memory. You know about his fondness for the horses, and probably remember the stories about his placing bets between innings from the bullpen phone. You probably remember his minor conflicts with Billy Martin when Martin came to New York, trying to get him to work on his throwing.

You may know how much Whitey Herzog thought of him as a player when he was young. You could probably call up a hundred things that you have seen him do on the field. One thing I remember is that he used to go back to the dugout a lot and get a rag to wipe his bat with. So many things. So many mannerisms, witticisms, confrontations, friendships, habits, accomplishments, failures, and customs. And yet he means nothing special to you, just another player. That you know what his on-field abilities are and are not. That he can hit 300 and has great speed but little power, doesn't walk as much as he might. That goes without saying. Those things, the statistics, are but the merest fraction of what you know about him.

And you know as much about 200 other players. About Gary Matthews, Carlton Fisk, Steve Garvey, Daryl Porter, Joe Morgan, Bobby Grich, Don Baylor, Gary Templeton, Steve Carlton. About a few, such as Reddy Jackson and Pete Rose, you know far more. To reconstruct that enormous library of information about the players of another era would be all but impossible. To reconstruct just the sense of one man would require that you read a biography of him. As, indeed, you have probably read a biography of Phil Necro, a few words at a time, a biography splattered across 20 years of interviews and short blurbs in the sporting news. That is why I believe that, in evaluating players, much respect should be given to the opinions of the players' contemporaries,

both afield and in the press box, or for that matter, in the seats. It's not that they're always right. They're not. The sports writers of the 1920s were as prone to misjudgments, mistaken impressions about the relative values of different accomplishments, and outright partisanship as we are today. But they knew so much more about those players than we do today, or than we ever can. If the sports writer of his own time did not regard Bill Dickey as a great player, and they did not, we must assume that they had some reason for that. If the players who played against Buck Ewing and the sports writers who reported about him regarded him as the greatest player of his time,

and they did, we are not bound to agree with them, but we must respect the fact that they possessed far more knowledge than we can ever hope to obtain about him, about his contemporaries, and about the game they played. The problem is that the way in which players are regarded changes so radically after they retire. The way the players of the 50s or even the 60s are remembered even now is not exactly the way they were regarded while they were active, and it has but begun to shift. Some players in retirement continue to ascend to even higher peaks of accomplishment, while others regarded much more favorably in their time begin to lose favor and to see their talents reduced after they are no longer around to display them. That is why I have tried,

in writing this book, to pay careful attention to how players were regarded, not after the fact, but in their own time. I have tried to restore somewhat the image and reputation of the player as it existed when his son was overhead. One thing that is very helpful in this respect is award votes. Too many of us, in writing about award votes, are inclined to write about what is wrong with them, and indeed there is always something wrong with them, but with that in mind, the value of awards has been too often understated. The value of awards is that they form an objective record of subjective judgments. I'm not talking about the Hall of Fame selections, which are mostly made 20 or 30 years after a player's best years, and by a badly designed voting system at that. I'm talking

about the annual selections, which flash across the horizon, provide wire service copy for a few days, but tend to be forgotten as soon as the player retires. A careful look at how a player performed in the voting for these awards, I think, can tell us a lot about how he was regarded in his own time, and thus can do a lot to help restore an accurate picture of the player's reputation at the time when people were in the best position to evaluate him. In compiling section 3, the player records, I have tried to draw up a history of the player's performance in award voting, to say what major awards he won, and to record in particular his position in the voting for the most valuable player award. I've tried to make the player's performance in award voting a part of his permanent public record. The MVP votes

are summarized in the notion of an award share, which I'll explain in a moment. Most of you have probably have in your library a record of who won all the MVP votes. My notion was to make a record not only of what awards the player won, but of when he finished second, when he finished third, and when he drew no support at all. I'm trying to use the awards to form a clearer picture of how the player was regarded by the writers of his time. Whether he won the honor is not the question. The question is whether he won the respect of his contemporaries. A couple of players who provide a good example of what I mean are two guys with the initials JB. You may never have heard of either of them. One was a catcher for the Detroit Tigers in the early 1920s. His name was Johnny Bassler. Bassler played in the major leagues for only nine years,

batting 2,319 times. He never batted 400 times in a season. His lifetime average was.304, but he played in a time in which good hitters hit.350. For example, in 1924, when Bassler hit a career-high.346, Rogers Hornsby hit.424, Babe Ruth.378, Zach Wheat.375, Charlie Jamison.359, Ross Youngs.356, Kaik Keiler, 354. Bib Falk, 352. Eddie Collins, 349. Ed Rausch, 348. Harry Hellman, 346. Bassler's 346 average didn't knock anybody's socks off, but it was by far the best of his career. He had no power at all, one home run in his career, and seems to have been one of the slowest players of his time. Now, look at the AL MVP votes for 1922 through 1924. 1922, Bassler finishes 6th.

1923, he finishes 7th. 1924, he finishes 5th. He played regularly in only two other seasons, 1921, for which there was no MVP award, and 1925, for which I was not able to find award voting. I don't know anything else about Johnny Bassler. No mannerisms, no quotes, no memories. Only this and the statistics, and the statistics don't impress me. But I'll tell you, that man could play some baseball. The MVP selections for the AL at that time used basically the same form they do now,

although there was just one voter for each team and there were some other rules. But for three straight years, a panel of knowledgeable sports writers watching him play, reading his box scores, talking to his teammates, thought that Johnny Bassler was one of the best players in the American League. In 1924, he must have finished above a dozen eligible Hall of Famers in the voting. You've got to be impressed by that. A similar case is Jimmy Brown, an infielder with the Cardinals from 1937 through 1943. He hit.279 lifetime with only nine home runs. He never had a regular position, even for one year. He moved around every year between second base, third base, and shortstop. He wasn't a base sealer. He certainly wasn't an RBI man, and he never scored 90 runs in

a season. In 1939, hitting.298 with three homers and 51 RBIs, Brown finished sixth in the MVP voting for the National League, just ahead of Joe Medwick, who hit.332 with 14 homers and 117 RBIs. In 1941, with about the same numbers, he finished fourth, ahead of all of his teammates, including Johnny Mize, Enos Slaughter, Marty Marion, and Terry Moore. In 1942, hitting .256 with one home run, he still finished 13th in the league's MVP balloting, ahead of the likes of Medwick, Bill Nicholson, and Stan Hack, who had far better statistics. Whatever the reason for it, the people who saw Jimmy Brown play thought he was something special. Maybe they thought he hit well in the clutch. Maybe they thought he was

a leader on the field or in the clubhouse. Maybe they thought he was a great fielder or a great base runner or both. You can look at his numbers and make some guesses, but it's not easy to know at this distance what it was about him that they liked. Maybe they were right, maybe they were hallucinating, but there was sure something there that impressed people. Sometimes, there wasn't something there. There are other players who finished surprisingly poorly in MVP voting, despite good statistics. This too, I think, should be part of the record. I'm taking a step here toward making it a part. Maybe sometime I'll publish the complete history of MVP voting. It's just evidence, that's all. It bears a certain weight. I wish there had been gold glove awards about 25 years sooner than there were. I'd love

to know how the voting would have gone among Joe Gordon, Bobby Doerr, and Jimmy Bloodworth, among Archie Vaughn, Billy Jurgis, and Dick Bartell. I find that defense is one area in which subjective opinions, in the absence of the most careful and meticulous statistical analysis, simply have to be given a degree of weight. Pete Palmer, in assessing the greatest players in history, had Sam Crawford ranked surprisingly low, 80th among non-pitchers. He would express the reason for this differently, but what it comes down to is that while Crawford is one of the greatest hitters ever, his range factors were not very good. From 1910 through 1916, he never made more than 1.54 plays per game. Well, I put a certain

weight on that. I certainly would like to know why Crawford's range factors were so low, but I can't justify on the basis of such evidence charging him a huge defensive penalty. All of the reports of the time, all of the people who saw him play, said that he was a good outfielder, Sabermetrics is not numbers. Sabermetrics is the search for better evidence. If subjective judgments can be drawn into the web of evidence, then we should welcome the aid. And I'm going to stop there. I guess I keep going, but my point has been made, or I guess his point has been made. So, hey, Ben. Hi, nice reading. Thanks. Got any banter?

About that? No. So I love that, but I also am interested in thinking about that essay and that argument overlaid over the changing generation as far as what data gets recorded, what data we have, and how we look at it. look at it. And so in particular, I'm curious whether you think that in 50 years, baseball writers, baseball podcasters, our, you know, our grandchildren will look at anything we write and care. Huh? Probably not. Right. Probably not. I mean, how often do we look at things from 50 years ago? Every now and then you might, but for the most part, no. So I guess then let me first ask, are you convinced by Bill James's argument there? Or do you actually disagree with him philosophically on what he's saying?

Am I convinced that there is something that contemporary observers can pick up that is lost later in the stats or that is important yeah i guess that there's there's two questions one is maybe slightly more controversial which is can they pick up something that is lost in the moment in the stats but uh secondly yes whether uh whether to a person who has not seen the player play whether there is a benefit to seeing the player play, whether there is a benefit to seeing the player play, I guess. I think, I'm not sure that there is a significant one in, at least in terms of on the field performance. I mean, there might be storylines surrounding that performance that you don't know about. Maybe the guy was a terrible teammate. Maybe he was a great teammate. Maybe he was a mentor and he taught other players to be good, All of that stuff, which can be very important. But I'm not sure I'm convinced that there is a ton that you lose from not watching the guy play, especially now.

I mean, maybe more so then because the stats just weren't that great right and even the the stats that we've gone back and reconstructed like you know the defensive stats that we have now for those eras are better than the ones they had at the time but still probably you know not as good as the ones we have for 2016 and not as good as the ones we'll have for 2036 so i think there was probably something then, I mean, you know, like if a guy was a great framer in 1940, then there's no stat for that. Or, you know, there, there's really no stat for that. We've, we've managed to go back and sort of estimate it to 1988, but before then, who knows? So yeah, I think there was value then in going back and seeing, well, what did pitchers say about him and what did his manager say about him and what was his reputation? You could reconstruct from that. And I bet that usually there would be some correlation to the reputation and the reality. But I'm not sure that's true anymore. I think we've come along at a time when our own ability to evaluate the players is as inessential and dispensable as it's ever been. Yeah, that's kind of what I was wondering as I read this, is if this is an archaic argument that only applies to whatever that guy's name is, Johnny B, Johnny whatever his name was.

Johnny B, Johnny, whatever his name was. Or, and if it is explicitly about the shortage of data that we have on those players. On the other hand, 50 years from now, I assume that there will be still more and still more precise data and ways of measuring the data that don't exist now. And they will still wonder, oh, wow, I wonder, you know, I wonder what Andrew McCutcheon was like by these measures. They won't have them. They'll have stat cast and they'll go, oh, stat cast. They'll have something else, right? Yeah. It'll be like your, you know, your heartbeat or your wearable, whatever, or what you were thinking while you were playing. Who knows? Yeah. It is, it is amazing how often I bump up against the shortage of, well, I guess how easily you can create generations just in terms of what stats are available for them. So like to even go back 11 years and not be able

to really get reliable velocity, or maybe you have to go back about 15 or so years to not be able to get reliable velocity readings for a pitcher. Like that's crazy to me, like to 15 years ago and to not have pitch counts or, you know, pitch by pitch play logs before 1988 and to not have splits before some period even before that. And so we've gotten to the point, we have gotten to here where there has never been a shortage of baseball players in the even recent history who existed before our maximum statistical abilities. Like we, even two years ago, a player who retired even two years ago, we have no stat cast on that player. And in a certain sense, you are relying on either old stats or old observers for those players.

And so that is, in a sense, that is encouraging if you're writing about baseball and you hope that what you're saying is more durable than this year. But on the other hand, I also wonder whether we've just reached the point where there will never be another day where the observer has more to add than the terabyte of data that is generated for that game. Right. And of course, there is the bias that comes in when you have people, voters, writers from those eras that Bill James is talking about, who obviously valued skills that maybe weren't as valuable as they thought. I mean, it's possible that they were picking up on some value that we are just not seeing now, but it's also quite possible that we are the more enlightened ones and that they were wrong to put so much value on it. And so that skewed their perceptions of the players in the moment. And that's kind of, I mean, that's why there is a Hall of Fame period, right? A voting period where you're supposed to wait is so you will not be blinded by whatever your feelings in the moment for that player. You get some historical perspective and time often helps you see the player more clearly than you can. So yeah, I think we are probably both useless in the long run.

I've spent the past few hundred episodes periodically arguing in favor of the subjectivity of both MVP and Hall of Fame voting and making the case that I think there is something valuable to that that a leaderboard sort could not provide. And I think it is basically this point that Bill James is making about players from the 1920s, that the subjectivity is valuable as a historical record, and that it accomplishes something that players and a lot of fans value more than a simple stat. And I wonder whether I have to quit making that argument if that argument was based on my understanding of the last hundred years of baseball but has nothing to add to the next hundred years of baseball. I also wonder if you quit writing about baseball today, I'm curious when you think the last citation of your work would come. That's a depressing thought. Yeah, I don't know.

You never know when something you wrote is going to pop up in a weird place. I showed up in a cracked video about James Bond the other day that my future sister-in-law showed me, and it just had a snippet of me in there, which I was not expecting. So I don't know. I mean, someone would be mining some archives someday in the future and would tweet about the crazy stupid unenlightened thing that penlinberg wrote in 2012 i don't know if that counts yeah i don't know if that counts but uh probably like maybe 10 years if if i'm lucky i i don't know i mean there are certain things we wrote that are evergreen and that you could read in 20 years and would be just as entertaining as they were at the time.

But they'd just be buried under the avalanche of other content. So it's hard to find them. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe we just have to embrace that we are writing for a very present focused audience and not think about it. Yeah, which is the case for almost everyone. Yeah. I don't know.

Does that rule out Roger Angels? Does that rule out his being? No, no, not plural. Does it rule out? Oh, I see. Will there ever be another Roger Angel? Does it rule out the possibility of a Roger Angel having value? I mean, I just read Roger Angels writing about, you know,

world series is from the 1960s. And yeah, that makes sense. I have no, I have no other record of the World Series in the 1960s. And of course, he brings more to it. You could look up a box store if you wanted. You could look up play by play. Yeah, I could. So that's a record? Yeah. Choosing not to. Well, he and he brings so much more to it than simply recording the events of it. But I wonder if that will get lost if there's no kind of place for subjectivity in the historical record, if all of that gets lost, if the language itself seems to have less value. I don't know. I'm not sure.

I mean, yeah, there's still, Roger Angel wasn't really doing analysis. I mean, he was at times, but also at times he was just sort of painting the picture and the portrait and telling you what these people were like and what they cared about and that sort of thing. I think he was doing analysis. I think it was mostly analysis. I think it was mostly analysis.

I guess so. But it wasn't the kind of analysis that Baseball Perspectives does or Fangraphs does or that we often do. I don't think, was it? I mean, maybe sometimes it is. But obviously he didn't use nearly as many numbers. There weren't as many numbers, which is kind of what we're talking about. But if you can write like Roger Angel and you write Roger Angel-like stuff in 2016, I think that's probably just as timeless as it would have been then. I don't have the numbers and you don't show the kind of show your work then people will point out well i could just look up what what his war was or whatever and there's kind of an alternative to that now but i think people still appreciate good writing as much as they ever did

okay i just don't know if either of us is Roger Angel. Well, certainly not. Yeah, it does seem to me that the writing, the baseball writing that I most return to that is more than a year old is almost all scouting writing. It's all about the prospects. Our book, right? People could read our book. And we were, I don't know if we were consciously trying to write our book so that it could be read in more than five years, but that was on my mind, at least when I was reading it. Hey, this is someday going to be for sale for one cent on Amazon. This is going to be a tattered copy in some Salvation Army that someone stumbles across and what will it sound like to them then? someone stumbles across and what will it sound like to them then?

And I think our book will be as readable in the future as it is now. I mean, there's a lot of statistical musings in there that the things that we considered cutting edge in 2015 will be quaint 20 years later, but I think it will still be readable, still be as compelling as it was at the time. All right. Bottom line, Ben, Johnny Bassler. I think it would still be readable, still be as compelling as it was at the time. All right. Bottom line, Ben. Johnny Bassler. Good or bad?

Probably bad. All right. What was his war? He actually had a good war. His war was 19.6 career in basically, I guess, full seasons worth he's a catcher catchers didn't weren't as durable in those days yeah he was a three-win catcher basically okay pretty good it's pretty good but it's also not not top 10 mvp voting no never yeah i wonder what it was i wonder what it was about him i don't know I might have to Go back and read the archives I might have to

Okay Alright, thanks for Thank you for indulging me Sure So we will wrap it up there You can support the podcast on Patreon By going to patreon.com Slash effectively wild

Five listeners who have already done so Zach Wittenberg Helen Benton Nathaniel Roberts David Medcalf And Andrew Gross Thanks to all of you You can buy the book we were just talking about, The Only Rule Is It Has To Work,

our wild experiment building a new kind of baseball team. It's been on a bunch of best of 2016 lists lately. Makes a good gift if you're in the market for one. You can go to theonlyruleisithastowork.com for more information. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. i have a new episode of the ringer mlb show up michael bowman and i talked to sandy almar jr cleveland coach and longtime catcher he was really great we talked about his two heartbreaking world series losses in cleveland and about clubhouse chemistry and

of special interest to podcast listeners terry frcona's disgusting, gross gum chewing. You can find that on the Ringer MLB feed on iTunes. Ratings and reviews appreciated there also. You can contact me and Sam at podcast at baseballperspectives.com or by messaging us through Patreon. We will be back soon. on you. History has its eyes on you.