Freakonomics Radio - 8. Who Stole All the Runs in Major League Baseball?

Episode Date: October 7, 2010

It was a pretty good baseball season -- especially if you're a fan of the Yankees, Rays, Twins, Rangers, Reds, Braves, Phillies, or Giants, all of whom made the playoffs. But the post-season just opened with a telling event, a no-hitter pitched by the Phillies' Roy Halladay, which shows what's been missing all season: runs.

So, Levitt, you're a guy who loves to catch cheaters. And it's October, which means the baseball playoffs are starting. Tell me what you know about the time-honored tradition of stealing signs from the other team. So I was talking with the Chicago White Sox about a number of different ways in which we could use data to better their baseball operations. And the thing that was most interesting to me was stealing signs. And I told them that I was certain that I could do a great job stealing signs and they could use that to their benefit. Now, why was that so interesting to you? Just because I like to catch cheaters, but it's fun to cheat too. It's fun to know that you can

cheat. It'd be fun for me to be sitting at home watching a baseball game and to be able to watch what the catcher was doing and say to my kids, hey, look, that next pitch is going to be a curveball. Or even better, to get on the phone to the dugout and say, hey, just wanted to let you guys know they're using signal version C today. And so if you get a guy on base, that'll tell you what to be doing. So you wanted to steal signs for the White Sox.

You didn't want to catch other teams stealing their signs? I wanted to engage in the intellectual activity of understanding how to steal signs. Now, whether anyone actually stole any signs or not didn't really matter. I just thought it would be fun to figure out how to steal signs.

Like code breaking. World War II kind of stuff. Today on Freakonomics Radio, cracking the code on the National Pastime's new obsession with leather. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. This year, the number of runs scored in Major League Baseball was at an 18-year low, 1,105 fewer runs than last year. That's 1,105 guys who, instead of crossing the plate and scoring one more run to tell their grandkids about, instead had to jog back to the dugout, chin down. On the other hand, that means there were 1,105 times

when the pitcher didn't kick in the Gatorade pool. The 1-1. Santiago hits a fly ball to right. times when the pitcher didn't kick in the Gatorade pool. In the early part of the season, there was a flurry of no-hitters and even two perfect games, what should have been a third but got erased by a bad call. Some people were already calling it the year of the pitcher. Two out, nobody on, ninth inning. And Braden turns, he throws, and it's swung on a ground ball to short. Taken there, Pennington's got it. He throws! Two pitch.

Hit toward third. Castro has it. Spins, fires. A perfect game! Roy Halladay has thrown the second perfect game in Philadelphia. The old-timers said not to get too excited that scoring would heat up in the summertime, as it always does. But when the season ended, the run totals were still way down. So here's a simple question for you. Where did all those runs go?

There's a surprising truth buried deep in the numbers, where only guys like Mitchell Lichtman can find them. Okay, so we have a zone rating that came into fruition about 20 years ago. And zone rating is basically the number of balls that a fielder fields successfully. The thing about baseball, about all sports really, but baseball particularly, is that it comes with its own crop of fans-turned-scientists, people who analyze the game as if they were decoding the human genome. Mitchell Lichtman is a proud member of the Stat Geek Squad. Like a lot of them, he spent some time working for a Major League Baseball club, in his case, the St. Louis Cardinals.

Basically, what I do is I look at how hard a ball is hit, exactly what area on the field a ball is hit, go through five or six years' worth of data, and I figure out how often for every type of batted ball, the average fielder at each position fields that ball successfully. And then we compare that to how often a particular player at that position fields each of those balls successfully. And then we come up with a number which represents how good of a fielder that particular player is at that particular position. Think about what Lichtman's saying. Five or six years worth of data for every outcome on every type of batted ball. That's what people are willing to go through to gain the slightest advantage in a high-stakes

enterprise like baseball. They measure every input, every output, every action on the diamond that can possibly be expressed in numbers. Numbers that tell you who wins and why. That tell you which players are worth how much and which ones are a bad bet. They look at baseball very much the way an economist like Steve Levitt looks at the rest of the world. So let's think about this baseball mystery on our hands, the case of the missing runs. Where's the first place you'd look for them?

I know the first place I'd look is cheating, or more specifically, the lack of cheating. That is, the end of the steroids era. In just a minute, we'll hear what Steve Levitt has to say about steroids. Plus, straight from the San Diego Padres' dugout, manager Bud Black, a former pitcher, explains why pitchers aren't everything. Hey, fans, we're back with Freakonomics Radio from WNYC and American Public Media. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. So this theory is simple. Steroids help turn great baseball players into even greater ones, hitting previously unthinkable numbers of home runs. Then came the scandals, the grand jury indictments, busted reputations, and new rules that banned performance-enhancing drugs and increased testing.

So it would make sense that players are backing away from steroids, becoming smaller, more human. And that is leading to less superhuman statistics, right? Steve Levitt isn't so sure. So twice in the past decade, I have really tried to find evidence that say steroids matter in baseball. And both times I invested a lot of effort and ended up finding no evidence that steroids mattered. It sounds hard to believe, but Levitt just isn't convinced that steroids helped all that much, which doesn't mean the players didn't have an incentive to use them. The stakes are high. In a world in which being a big home run hitter is worth millions and millions of dollars

and performance enhancingenhancing drugs are cheap, and you think you're unlikely to be detected, well, even if you're not sure whether they work or not, you probably use them anyway. It makes sense. It makes sense to try to do it. Here's a strange fact. The year steroids testing began, run scoring actually went up. There are a couple more confounding clues.

In the minor leagues this year, run scoring is higher, even though they also have steroids testing. Also, in the majors, the run decline has come almost exclusively in the American League, even though testing there is the same as in the National League. So if all those runs didn't evaporate along with the steroids, what else might be happening? You're out of there! This brings us to the year of the pitcher theory. Let's go back to Mitchell Lichtman. He does believe that steroids helped hitters a lot.

But, he points out, pitchers also used steroids. In fact, more than half the suspended players were pitchers. So maybe steroids were more valuable to hitters than they were to pitchers. And now that everyone's on a level playing field, theoretically at least, could that be leading to pitcher domination? But wait a minute. If pitchers are so dominant, they should be striking out a lot more batters, right? The data tell a different story. The data tell us that pitchers aren't striking out more batters than they used to. In fact, they're not doing anything better than they used to.

That leads us to our prime suspect, fielding. Here's Lichtman again. There's probably more of an emphasis in the post-steroid era of players that have speed and defense as primary attributes rather than hitting, slugging, hitting home runs, that sort of thing. Statisticians like Lichtman have invented a bunch of new metrics that help isolate what the pitcher does and what the fielders do. Stats like defensive efficiency, fielding independent pitching, or FIP if you're a seam head, and ultimate zone rating, or UZR. And if you look at those numbers, the answer is pretty clear. It's the fielders who've stolen all those runs. One of the reasons that teams are, some teams are

focusing on defense and defensive evaluation using these advanced metrics is because overall it's an undervalued commodity in baseball. An undervalued commodity. Anyone who's ever read Moneyball knows that a batter's on-base percentage used to be the undervalued commodity, used to be. Then the market caught up. Today, with fewer runs being scored and winning margins smaller, keeping runs off the scoreboard has become a bigger priority. That's great news if you're a good fielder who doesn't happen to hit so well. And that would describe Doug Glanville,

who played nine seasons in the big leagues with three different teams. He ended his career with 293 consecutive games without an error. Well, I do think it's sort of a natural phenomenon in the game of baseball. It's a very cyclical sport. You go through times of different points of emphasis, the way offense is played, where defense is played. And so you'll see a cycle where some years you got a lot, you know, stolen bases as a priority, speed and defense. Obviously, the steroid era brought to light a lot of the emphasis on power numbers. And I think part of the cycle and adjustment coming off of this power game is now people are trying to pitch.

They call it pitching to contact, trying to make sure that you use your defenders behind you and also catch the ball. So especially now with the power numbers down, it's even more important to win ball games to play defense. Let's stop for a minute and say this. Yes, run scoring is down, but it's hard to say exactly why. Some combination maybe of fewer steroids, good pitching, better fielding. Some people think the ball itself has changed. That's an argument baseball fans have every decade or so. Also, better fielding. Some people think the ball itself has changed. That's an argument baseball fans have every decade or so. Also, stadiums change. There's the brand new Target Field, where the Minnesota Twins play, and where home runs have been much less plentiful

than in the Twins' old home, the Metrodome. But whatever the reason, runs are scarcer than they used to be. Five years from now? Who knows? The game has cycles. Circumstances change. Incentives change. And in response, people change their behavior. I can't predict how. All I can tell you is that baseball players will continue to play baseball and generate mountains of data for people like Mitchell Lichtman and Steve Levitt to sift through. You never know what they'll do with all those data, of course.

You remember Levitt's scheme to break the code for his hometown Chicago White Sox? So a few years later, I happened to be playing golf with a former Major League Baseball player, probably a future Hall of Famer. And I told him about the various analyses I've done of baseball and I found that pitchers don't randomize properly and whatnot. I must say this guy could not have been much less interested in any of the things that I'd done. And then I just kind of threw in an offhand manner that I thought that I might be able to steal signs.

And he said, steal signs? No, that's something more interesting. So I told him the story about the White Sox. And he said, oh, well, I know why the White Sox weren't interested in stealing signs. It's because Ozzie Guillen, the manager, he's the best signster in the entire world. He doesn't need your help.

Nobody steals signs better than Ozzie Guillen does. But I will say that this gentleman was very interested in enlisting my services to try to steal signs for another club. And so hopefully coming soon to a ballpark near you will be the Steve Levitt sign-stealing show. Freakonomics Radio is a co-production of WNYC, American Public Media, and Dubner Productions. Our lineup for this episode, leading off, Christina Russo, producer in left field out in California, batting second, Ethan Lindsay, our marketplace-based producer, Michael Raphael is the man behind the plate who mixes our show, and batting cleanup, executive producer Colin Campbell. We want to give a big shout out to Hayes Davenport, who pinch hit as our stats guy on this episode. Subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, and you'll

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