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The Book on the Book
A Landmark Inquiry Into Which Strategies in the Modern Game Actually Work
By Bill Felber St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2005 Bill Felber
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-00494-9
CHAPTER 1
THE COMPONENTS OF PLAYER VALUE
Even before the result was announced, conventional wisdom conferred the 1998 National League Most Valuable Player Award on Sammy Sosa rather than Mark McGwire.
The argument for Sosa and against McGwire could be heard that fall on the evening sports shows and read in the national newspapers. USA Today's National League columnist justified his selection of Sosa on the basis that McGwire's accomplishments — which, it should be noted, include setting the all-time record for home runs — came on behalf of a non-contender. In his mind this posed the question, "Valuable to what?" The previous night, an ESPN analyst backed Sosa's candidacy for the same reason precisely one breath before naming Ken Griffey, Jr. the American League's MVP. Griffey's Mariners finished nine games below .500 and in third place in the four-team AL West that season.
Another ESPN commentator said he would vote for McGwire as Player of the Year, but not MVP. This is the smarmy new parsing. In baseball there is no such thing as player of the year. But what of it? ESPN pays its on-air personalities to be advocative and entertaining; commentators are not required to be reality-based.
The cavalier dismissal of McGwire based on his team's nonstanding — which, by the way, received nearly unanimous ratification when the official vote was announced — logically reduces as follows: he's not the MVP because Ron Gant, Donovan Osborne, Jeff Brantley, and Kent Bottenfield stunk.
Yet in that befuddling reasoning, the vote also frames a fascinating and broader question: What precisely is value? As the baseball experts saw it in 1998, Sosa had value because his team won; McGwire lacked value because his team didn't.
The way we define "value" is the linchpin of much of "The Book" about baseball strategy for the simple reason that strategies are inevitably focused toward maximizing "value." Yet in the modern game, value analysis is often subjective and thus prone to error. Sports commentators commit this error as do team executives. As we consider the relevance of the modern baseball "Book," one of our foundations has to be an understanding as to what constitutes "value." In forming that understanding, we have to be careful that our trendy definitions don't confuse the ends with the means.
THE FORMULA FOR SUCCESS
One of the singular beauties of baseball is that the components of success can be quantified. Relating the value of a basketball player to scoring average is too one-dimensional; football rotisserie leaguers don't even try to assess the value of a pulling guard. It's hard to reduce to a numerical formula the components that make a great professor, a great lawyer or, for that matter, a great book. The measure of a corporation's success can be stated on a bottom line, but can one devise a formula accurately presenting the relative contributions of all the corporation's accountants, salespeople, engineers, production line workers, and officers to that bottom line?
This can be done in baseball because we have a very measurable result — namely a victory — which is created by means of a second entirely measurable occurrence, that being runs.
Thanks to the intervention of computers, we know — and I do not use the word "know" loosely — that in the modern game the average base hit produces forty-six one-hundredths of a run; the average double produces eight-tenths of a run, etc. Conversely, we know that the average out reduces production by one-quarter of a run.
All that being the case, and setting aside only the intangibles and uncountables, determining the MVP at season's end is a deceptively simple task. Count the singles, doubles, triples, home runs, walks, steals, and outs made by each player, apply the proper run-producing value of each event, add proper fielding and baserunning quotients, and you can define any player's value in the appropriate context of games won. (The same process works essentially in reverse, by the way, for pitchers — with equal validity.)
The Most Valuable Player Award is a frequent backdrop for value-related arguments. Sometimes it takes the McGwire-Sosa context. At other times, the debate focuses on whether a pitcher should be eligible to win the award. None has since Dennis Eckersley won with Oakland in 1992. In the case of pitchers, the disqualifier tends to be twofold: First, they have their own award, the Cy Young; and second, they don't play every day. Of the first, little need be said in refutation beyond that it is plainly silly. So what if pitchers have their own award? In the NHL, defensemen have their own award ... did that stop hockey writers from voting for Bobby Orr for MVP all those seasons?
The second argument, that pitchers' value is diminished because they are not everyday players, is superficially more appealing. Yet given a tinge of thought, that argument, too, quickly collapses. The essence of baseball is the pitcher-batter matchup, and it is not a vast oversimplification to say that the fellow who wins the greatest number of those matchups over the course of a six-month season is the most valuable player. There are, of course, degrees of "winning" and "losing" such matchups: While both a walk and a home run qualify as "wins" for the batter, one carries a substantial number of bonus points. But we can adjust for those variations.
It is certainly true that an everyday position player has the opportunity to impact four or five times as many games as, for example, a starting pitcher. At the same time, a starting pitcher's impact on the game in which he appears is several times more significant than the impact of any individual position player. This is so for an obvious reason. In the typical game, a position player gets four or perhaps five opportunities to "win" or "lose" a pitcher-hitter matchup — and by doing so, influences the game's outcome. In a stretch of five games, that might amount to participation in between twenty and twenty-five such confrontations.
A starting pitcher would only pitch one of those five games, but he would be involved in every one of the pitcher-hitter confrontations for the duration of his tenure in that game. Pedro Martinez may have only made 29 starts in 2000, but he pitched 217 innings, averaging seven and one-half innings per start. Since we know that Martinez allowed 160 base runners by either a hit or a walk, we can state the proposition in another and more precise way: Martinez influenced 811 pitcher-hitter confrontations in 2000, and he won 80 percent of them. The average American League pitcher won 65 percent; Martinez's edge over the field was 15 percent.
Jason Giambi, the writers' choice for the 2000 MVP Award, certainly had a fine season. But Giambi was a part of only 647 pitcher-hitter confrontations — influencing the outcome of games 164 fewer times than Martinez. He did win 47 percent of those matchups, 12 percent more than the 35 percent league-wide average for batters. But still, his advantage was less substantial than Martinez's advantage
(A side note: Seen in this context, the 1992 MVP Award to Eckersley — or to any relief pitcher — is plainly silly. In 1992, Eckersley won 77 percent of his pitcher-hitter confrontations ... but he only engaged in 313 of them. More on the frivolousness of considering relievers as MVP candidates in a subsequent chapter.)
Our cursory examination of Martinez versus Giambi has not thus far taken into consideration the supplementary factors we cited above. Giambi, for example, hit 43 home runs; Martinez allowed just 17. Giambi drew 137 bases on balls; Martinez issued just 37. Giambi piled up 73 extra base hits; Martinez allowed 36.
We can't accurately weigh those numbers in our minds, but statistical analysis can. In fact that's precisely what Pete Palmer's Batter Fielder Base Stealer Wins and Pitcher Wins does: Weigh all those factors and reduce them to a comprehensible sentence. When you do that, this is the result. In 2000, Pedro Martinez improved the Red Sox by a factor of 8.4 victories, the highest total in the American League. Rodriguez actually stood second, improving the Mariners by 6.8 victories. Giambi was the league's third most valuable player, improving Oakland by 5.2 victories.
SPINNING THE TRUTH
The point of this exercise isn't solely to criticize the thought processes most voters apply in considering their MVP selections — although that alone would be a constructive exercise — but to underscore the true concept of value. Recognition of the rough equilibrium between the importance of pitching and hitting — as expressed in the MVP voting — would be a step in that direction. A second step, illustrated by the debate between the credentials of Sosa and McGwire in the 1998 NL race (or the mirror debate involving A-Rod and Miguel Tejada in 2002), would involve recognition of the importance (or lack of same) of winning in the context of individual awards.
Because baseball is a team game, not an individual one, it is impossible to fairly overlay team performance onto matters of individual accomplishment. No single player is good enough to merit that sort of accolade. The Sosa versus McGwire scrum illustrates the failure of such logic. Sosa's 1998 achievements added up to a Batter Fielder Base Stealer Wins of 5.0. To put it another way, a team comprised of 24 completely average players plus Sammy Sosa should (pending the intervention of luck) have finished the season five games above .500 (86-76). But McGwire's achievements equate to a BFW of 7.1; a team of 24 average players plus McGwire should have finished 88-74 and beat out Sosa's crew by two games. To argue anything else is to visit Bottenfield's sins on McGwire.
These debates concerning value are a fascinating and ongoing part of baseball, and they are also — hopefully happily — much of what this book is about. Perhaps it is his personality as much as his performance, but in a recurring way, Sammy Sosa often finds himself personifying one aspect or another of that debate.
In June of 2000, when the Chicago Cubs briefly put Sosa on the trading block, the issue was all about his value to the team.
That seemed a silly argument to Sosa, and to a lot of Cub fans. Consecutive seasons of 60-plus home runs, nearly 300 RBIs along with an MVP Award and a spot in the playoffs (in 1998), and the guy needs to defend his production? "I don't know what more I can do," complained Sosa when Chicago management sniped at him.
His manager, Don Baylor, along with some of the Cub brass, had a few suggestions. The critique as management saw it: He struck out too much, didn't use his speed, had become increasingly one-dimensional, and was a liability in right field. "He drives in 160, but lets in 45 on defense," went the now-famous anonymous remark from the unnamed team official.
The Sosa Affair represented an especially prominent instance — only one of many in baseball (as in life) — of both sides engaging in selective truth-telling. When they put you under oath in court you are sworn to tell "the truth, the whole truth ..." but nobody takes an oath during meetings with the press, certainly not ballplayers or club executives. Therefore what often emerges is a process of limited truth-telling. In the matter of Sosa's value to the Cubs in the summer of 2000, not a single word presented by either side could have been argued to have been spoken in error. But neither was either side's version accurate in the sense of being a full, honest, or complete assessment: "the whole truth," as it were.
The facts are that by June 2000, Sammy Sosa had become everything both his supporters and his detractors said he was. Sammy Sosa could make a clear and compelling case for his accomplishments. One does not devalue a home run; there is no such thing as a cheap or empty one. Runs batted in are a bit more problematic — the situation dependency of their nature can compromise their value as an index of production. But even so, 158 of them (in 1998) followed by 141 of them (in 1999) is pretty tough to argue around.
Nor could there be any question of Sosa's credentials as a gamer. Between 1997 and 1999, he missed only four of Chicago's 487 games. He also started every Cub game in 1995, and would have done the same in 1996 had not a fracture sustained when he was struck by a pitch cost him that season's final six weeks.
As might be expected, Sosa's Batter Fielder Base Stealer Wins — the best single-number gauge of all-around contribution — was superb in both 1998 and 1999. Following his 5.0 rating of 1998, his BFW slid in 1999, but only to 4.4, still a substantially positive figure.
Yet to Sosa fans, there ought to be something unsettling in that 4.4 BFW rating. It came, after all, during a season in which he delivered 63 home runs, a figure at the time surpassed by only McGwire in all of baseball history. More than that, Sosa counted for a league-leading 397 total bases, adding 24 doubles, 2 triples, and 91 singles to his 63 blasts. That sounds like it ought to produce a mega-mega season, not merely a very good one.
For purposes of comparison, here are some of the other players who rated within a few fractions of a 4.4 BFW in 1999: Craig Biggio (4.3), Brian Giles (4.1), Mark McGwire (4.2), and Robin Ventura (4.5). The best mark in the National League, by the way, belonged to Houston's Jeff Bagwell (5.3).
Well, the company Sosa kept at that rating level in 1999 certainly is nothing to be ashamed of. At the same time, when a similarly productive player is Brian Giles (24 fewer homers, 26 fewer RBIs, 77 fewer bases), it is fair to suspect that there are, indeed, gaps in Sosa's all-around play, and that some of those gaps are reflected in his BFW. Which means the Cubs, too, may have been telling at least some of the truth.
SOSA AND GILES MANO A MANO
If we can identify those gaps in such an obviously talented player, they may shed light on the less readily obvious yet important aspects of talent as it contributes to what baseball is all about: winning games.
What in the heck did Brian Giles do in 1999 to help the Pittsburgh Pirates win games that Sammy Sosa didn't do for the Chicago Cubs?
First, he got on base more ... and it was a lot more. Savvy fans today recognize that if on-base average isn't the most important single statistic, it's in the top two. Giles collected 164 base hits in 521 official at bats for a batting average of .315. Sosa had 180 hits — 16 more than Giles — but he burned up 104 additional at bats in getting them; that's 88 more outs laid at Sosa's feet than at Giles's. At three outs to an inning, it's fair to say that Sammy Sosa killed a lot more innings than Brian Giles did.
Giles then compounded his on-base advantage by drawing 17 more walks than Sosa, and by doing it in that same 104 fewer plate appearances. The impact of a walk on potential run production, which goes unrecognized by many sluggers, is effectively doubled by this reality: Batters who draw a lot of walks do so by not swinging at pitches that batters who draw few walks are being retired on. Should it be viewed as coincidence that in 2004 Barry Bonds batted .370 while at the same time drawing more than 100 unintentional walks? Not in the slightest; they are in fact very closely related. What do you suppose is the normal batting average on pitches thrown out of the strike zone that are put into play? We've no way to truly tell, but a pretty good guess would be about 150 — after all, that's why they make pitchers throw the ball over the plate. The consequence of patience thus is that not only is a player more likely to reach base, he is at the same time less likely to be put out. Without even swinging, the on-base average and batting average both look better, the one because of the walk, the other because of the out he didn't make.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Book on the Book by Bill Felber. Copyright © 2005 Bill Felber. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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