Saber Gibber

Did I just mention the 79-83 1971 Chicago White Sox?  Well, silly me to think that rookie Sox manager Chuck Tanner did a great job with a team that went 56-106 the year before.  Why?  Because baseballreference.com uses the Pythagorean metric to project that the Sox should have gone 83-79.

I can see Tanner looking at his team assembled in the dugout Opening Day.  Look, there’s Lee “Bee Bee” Richard, proof that you can’t steal first base no matter how fast you are.  And there’s Rich Morales, in his fifth season of an eight-year career that saw him bat all of .195.  Also on hand was Lee Maye, who stuck around for thirty-two games before ending his career at age 37 at Triple-A Hawaii the next year.

Tell me what kind of formula can accurately predict what the 1971 White Sox should have done given what Tanner had to work with in real time?  And by that I mean the likes of Steve Kealey and Chuck Brinkman.  What’s the exact formula again for pulling a rabbit out of a hat?

Yes, you could say I’m not a big fan of sabermetrics/analytics, however you want to call it; gibberish is gibberish regardless the spelling.  I found more of the same yesterday in The Athletic.  Apparently, there’s a new stat that shows Javier Baez of the Cubs isn’t as good as he’s cracked up to be.  That’s right, Deserved Runs Created Plus suggests a wait-and-see attitude when it comes to Baez.  Too bad we can’t trade Richard and Morales for him.

The author really loves this stat, though he admits that Baseball Prospectus, where it comes from, is not all that popular “simply because the site is so difficult to operate.”  Oh, I think there are other problems, my friend. Consider that DRC+ doesn’t like how Baez hits doubles.

That’s right, Baez (and Christian Yelich) hit their doubles in a way (don’t ask) different from the ideal DRC+ hitter; Baez also strikes out too much while not walking enough.  Wow, now you need a formula to show what a quick look at player stats once did.

 

Now, here’s the really good part.  The author of the piece argues for Baez, “who makes consistently hard contact and runs the bases with panache rarely seen, [and] would benefit by a decent margin if those aspects of the game were more strongly considered [by DRC+] .”   For his part, Mr. Critic says he’s open to feedback on the stat.

 

Huh, what?  The whole idea behind analytics is that they offer hard, objective measures of player value.  To talk about adjusting the stat is to admit that analytics is arbitrary to its very core.  But, hey, I’m just old school, the kind of guy impressed by what Chuck Tanner pulled off back when I was eighteen.