Sheldon Hirsch - The Beauty of Short Hops: How Chance and Circumstance Confound the Moneyball Approach to Baseball

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Hirsch, Sheldon, 1955

The beauty of short hops : how chance and circumstance confound the moneyball approach to baseball / Sheldon Hirsch and Alan Hirsch.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7864-6288-9

1. BaseballStatistical methods. 2. BaseballMathematical models. I. Hirsch, Alan, 1959 II. Title.
GV877.H57 2011
796.35702'1dc22 2010054077

British Library cataloguing data are available

2011 Alan Hirsch and Sheldon Hirsch. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Front cover design by David Landis (Shake It Loose Graphics)

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com

Heres a quirky one-question quiz. What do the following statements by prominent figures in the sports world have in common?

(1) I mean, who the hell is Bill Russell?NBA coach and broadcaster Hubie Brown on the legendary Boston Celtics center Bill Russell

(2) Players dont win championships. Coaches dont win championships. Organizations win championships.Chicago Bulls general manager Jerry Krause

(3) Anything but a World Series championship is unacceptable.Yankees owner George Steinbrenner

The arrogant ranting of egomaniacs? True enough, but these utterances have something more specific in common. Brown, Krause and Steinbrenner all believe, on some deep level, that athletes are a secondary component of sports. To credit players with a teams success is like crediting pawns for the success of a chess master or cows for the success of a steakhouse.

The idea of a basketball coach condescending to Bill Russell seems remarkable only until you understand Hubie Browns world view. A sportswriter once speculated that Hubie would prefer the mediocre Rory Sparrow (a workmanlike point guard) to Magic Johnson, because he could control Sparrow, tell him just what plays to run, whereas Johnson liked to improvise. When Hubie serves as color commentator for NBA games, he frequently uses the word unfortunately, almost invariably in the same context. A play, presumably called by the coach or at least drilled by him in practice, had been run to perfection and led to an easy shot. Unfortunately, the player missed the shot. In Hubies world, the players spoil basketball. If only they could be replaced by robots, the best coach would win and the world would be just.

Jerry Krauses suggestion that organizations, rather than players or coaches, win championships, is transparent. Translation: Primary credit for the Bulls titles belongs not to Michael Jordan or Phil Jackson but to Jerry Krause. Krause, like Hubie Brown, sees the players as merely a component of his master plan. The only difference is that Krause locates the success of a team at general manager rather than coach. And George Steinbrenner, of course, thought sports revolve around the owner. He pitched fits whenever his Yankees didnt dominate because he had spent whatever money his advisers said was needed and, since he had more money than everyone else, that should have been the end of it.

This attitude can reach a comical extreme. Consider an item that ran in a Boston newspaper after a Bruins victory over the Montreal Canadiens in an NHL playoff game a few decades ago. Rene Rancourt, the Bruins anthem singer, received a note from Rouget Doucet, his Canadiens counterpart, crediting him with the Bruins victory because his stirring rendition of the American and Canadian anthems inspired the crowd and set the tone for the game.

The tendency of people peripheral to the athletic contest to see themselves as the crucial variable entails seeing the game as essentially decided before it begins. Everyone from the owner on down to the anthem singer sees his pre-game work as decisive. All of them, consciously or not, diminish the role of the people who actually play the game and short-change the spontaneity and unpredictability that make sports so compelling.

Baseball is being hijacked by people with such a mindset. They call themselves sabermetricians. The name, which combines an acronym for the Society for American Baseball Research with the Latin word for measurement, was coined by Bill James, the father of a revolution that changed how the game is seen [This is no exaggeration. As Jonah Keri wrote in the introduction to a book of essays by sabermetricians published in 2006, Today theres a whole new way of thinking about baseball that extends from the bleachers to every major league front office]. Sabermetrics, loosely defined as the search for objective knowledge about baseball through statistical analysis, has inspired a passionate response in opposite directions: followers believe it rescued the national pastime from a tradition of ignorance, while detractors claim it damages the sport by drowning it in statistics that deflect attention from what really matters. They are both right.

Traditional Old School baseball featured what might charitably be called an anti-intellectual streak. In Ball Four, Jim Boutons 1970 best-selling book, manager Joe Schultz advises his players, Boys, its a round ball and a round bat and youve got to hit it square. That passed for baseball wisdom, not some bearded guy with a spreadsheet and formula to measure the effect of a particular ballpark on runs created. Thats not to say managers had zero use for numbers. They tracked rudimentary statistics like batting average, home runs, and runs batted in, as well as a pitchers wins, losses, and earned run average. At least some of them did. At one point in Ball Four, when Bouton whips out data to convince Schultz he deserves a start, the manager says, Aw shit. I dont want to see any statistics. I know whats going on out there just by watching the games.

Sabermetricians err in the opposite direction: they dont need to watch the games. They find the meaning of baseball in something other than the good old-fashioned athletic struggle; for them, its in the numbers. The players are primarily vehicles for organizing datanames to attach to sets of statistics. Listening to sabermetricians, one gets the feeling that some of them enjoy board games like Strat-O-Matic Baseball more than real live major league games.

One finds this attitude exemplified in Moneyball, the best-selling book which announced and accelerated the success of the sabermetrics revolution. The protagonist, Oakland As manager Billy Beane, grew up a Strat-O-Matic fanatic and cant stand the actual games. Some of Moneyballs most revealing moments monitor Beane during an As game. He wont watch. He goes home or hangs around the weight room inside the clubhouse, sporadically checking the radio to hear what is happening just outside. When the As went for a historic 20th consecutive victory, and a prospective record crowd jammed the Oakland freeways, Beane intended to drive home against the traffic rather than witness his teams pursuit of glory. Folks urged him to stick around for public relations reasons, and he reluctantly agreed. He still wouldnt watch the game, until the As jumped out to an 11-run lead. At that point, he allowed Michael Lewis (Moneyballs author) to corral him into watching on television from the managers office. When Lewis describes Beanes response as the game unfolds, we see why Beane finds the game torturous. He cant bear seeing the damn players muck up what should be a perfectly predictable contest.