Talkin’ ‘Bout a (Statistical) Revolution
It’s that special time of year. The birds are chirping, the grass is borderline visible, and spring training is upon us. Of course, you know what that means- other than the return of exposed skin on the opposite gender, which is lovely- another round of whining about statheads ruining the sport of baseball. The debate seems to be the loudest in baseball (I don’t recall anyone burning down a village when QB ratings were introduced to football), and I feel like that’s for good reason…even though it’s wrong.
Something we can all agree on is that Logic should be the star of the next season of Tool Academy. Seriously, I don’t care how many calls we have to make, VH1 was invented for that exact purpose. Another thing we can agree on is that statistics in baseball are more significant than in other sports. For those of you that have been out of school too long/drank away knowledge/hate numbers/occasionally get dates/all of the above, I’ll explain. Baseball is unique in that it has an incredibly large number of games, and a large number of events within each game. So you get a repeated test against a certain set of variables, and then 161 more repeated tests under different conditions. As these repetitions add up, it becomes more likely that the various statistics are representative of the true values that player should achieve. Football doesn’t allow for this, because even something like passing attempts (which is a huge number) only comes in 16 test situations. Outliers are more likely to exist, because the actual mean is harder to define. Basketball and hockey have simliar problems. Throw in the relatively isolated nature of events in a baseball game (that is, if a guy hits a home run, his own pitcher had nothing to do with it), unlike other major sports which are either inherently team-based (football), have a lot of ebb and flow making singling out instances difficult (hockey, basketball), or both. This is an incredibly long way of saying that baseball players will, logically, eventually regress/progress to whatever the statistic should be, whereas in other sports, it is possible to be lucky/flukey/play the Bills and Lions for the majority of the season (kind of. You know what I mean.). (more…)
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