60 Not So Deep Minutes
Posted: March 31st, 2008 | Filed under: Baseball | 27 Comments »
A few weeks ago, I saw a 60 Minutes profile of Gustavo Dudamel, a young and glam young conductor. I thought it was a great piece, and here’s why: I know absolutely nothing about classical music or conductors. I could not at any depth explain to you what a conductor does, or why everyone cheers him rather than the musicians; I don’t know even know if people in an orchestra actually look at him when he’s up there with the baton.*
*Just like I don’t know if pilots actually watch the guy who is trying to guide them into the gate … Dennis Miller has talked about this. Don’t you think the pilots just look these guys with their orange sticks and go, “Oh look, here’s Bob, gonna make sure I don’t crash into the airport again. You know, um, they give me a uniform with stripes and and a hat and everything and they call me captain … I might be able to roll up a plane to a gate without hitting anybody.”
Point is, I think 60 Minutes is a great show — as long as you don’t know much about the topic. I would guess that people who understand classical music probably had no use at all for the Gustave Dudamel piece, they probably felt like it was shallow and silly and borderline inaccurate.
I say this because, of course, I DO know Bill James. You know Bill James. And that gives us a unique look at the 60 Minutes piece on him Sunday. I will say first that I liked the piece because I thought Bill came across well, and I’m guessing it was probably well received by people who know nothing at all about baseball. But, it was certainly those other things too, shallow and silly and borderline inaccurate.
The problem with this piece — and I’m guessing it’s the problem with any of these 60 Minutes profiles of people you don’t know — is that it tends to take something that has SOME truth in it and make it the WHOLE truth. It is true that Bill was an early and loud advocate of looking way beyond batting average. But it might not be entirely true that he “embraced a new statistic, on-base percentage.” Nothing “new” about on-base percentage.
It’s true that the Red Sox had not won a World Series in 86 years. It might not be entirely true that he they were “congenital losers for 86 years.”
It’s true that Bill has suggested and continues to suggest that clutch hitters — as presented by the newspapers and baseball men — were largely (and perhaps entirely) a figment of their imagination. But it might not be true that he ever said (and he certainly does not say it now) that “there’s no such thing as a clutch hitter.”*
*I’ve always thought that the patron saint of “clutch hitting is a myth” is not Bill James at all, but rather the author John Updiike. In his famous, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” story about Ted Williams final game, he wrote:
“For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill. Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance—since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical—always threatens its interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upon but by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art. Insofar as the clutch hitter is not a sportswriter’s myth, he is a vulgarity, like a writer who writes only for money.”
I don’t think Bill or anyone else ever improved on that. Of course, there’s clutch hitting. You will see some virtually every game. And I believe there are men who, through their athleticism and power of concentration, will hit well in clutch situations throughout their lives. I would also bet that 99.7% of them are great hitters the rest of the time. I think George Brett was the best clutch hitter the last 50 years. He was awfully good other times too.
And if there are anomalies, if there really is someone who performs way better in clutch situations than he does at other times, I would stand with Updike. That guy ain’t trying hard enough in the third inning.
Then, of course, there were numerous silly moments, my favorite being when Morley Safer — whose first piece for 60 Minutes was, I believe, on Napoleon — made his statement about how Bill said there’s no such thing as a clutch hitter, and Red Sox Manager Terry Francona replied, “I’ve heard him say that (ed. note: very doubtful) but then I’d want him to be introduced to David Ortiz.”
Really? Does Francona really think Bill James is somehow unaware of David Ortiz?I’m always baffled when people say goofy stuff like this — when they go up to coaches and say, “Have you guys thought about playing zone?”* To me, this is a lot like hearing that a doctor has come up with a new method to perform a heart transplant, and saying, “Yeah, but have you tried that like thing where you have people open their mouths and stick tongue depressors on their tongues and stuff?”
*Roy Williams always had a classic Roy Williams-like answer whenever anyone came up to him with the “Have you thought of this” type suggestion. He would say, “No offense, but believe me, we’ve thought of it. Anything you have thought of, we’ve thought of. It’s our frickin’ job.”
There was a lot of stuff like that. Like I say, though, all in all, I would imagine that the piece was fun to watch for people who don’t know or care about baseball. I’ll ask my Mom what she thinks … she would fit both categories. I’ll get back to you. In the meantime, in case you missed it, I’m going to post it here (mostly to show off that I know how to post video).*
*Before I do that I have say that Opening Day is about to begin here in Detroit, and Miss America just sang the National Anthem. She did a fine job, and she’s obviously a very pretty young woman, but she had to wear the goofy crown. I wonder how she really feels, deep down, about having to wear that crown.
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60 Minutes says Bill James has changed baseball. Way to jump on a story 30 years after it breaks.
Bill really deserves a better profile than what was presented last night.
Excellent. I was hoping and kind of expecting that this would be your take on the piece.
I think there’s often an inverse relationship between your own knowledge of a topic and your satisfaction with the way it’s covered.
The uninitiated viewer, I think, would have come away from that piece knowing that there’s a trend in baseball toward more rigorous statistical analysis, that some teams have benefited from that rigor, and that a guy named Bill James has been at the forefront of it for many years. That’s good enough.
That 60 Minutes produced this piece at all speaks volumes. Think of all the people they could have profiled on the eve of Opening Day and with the NCAAs as a lead-in, and they picked Bill James. Wow.
I would like to have seen more about James’s early years. The stuff about him sitting in that Stokeley plant with a stack of newspapers was the most interesting part of the piece.
I’m also watching the Tigers-Royals game here in the office on FSN Detroit. I thought Miss America was cute, I liked her Michigan accent, and I think Detroit’s season is going to begin and end with a crown.
In a shocking turn, I’ll have to side with you on this one Joe. (I’m trying to think of something upon which I haven’t agreed with you and am coming up blank). That piece could have been so much better, for the (relatively) informed baseball fan, and maybe it was meant to be that way. Thing is, why dumb it down? The casual fan, or the non-fan isn’t going to be swayed by anything Bill James has to say, and likely tuned out the last 20 minutes of the 60, if they’d been watching at all. Why not provide some meat so that baseball fans, non believers in OBP, OPS, ERA+ and their ilk (the stats not the non believers – Joe Morgan are you out there?), might actually hear something and have a light bulb turn on? Anyway, it was fun to watch baseball lite. And I’d like to think Terry Francona was joking – perhaps you could shed some light on that?
This reminds me of when I was about six and we used to get Highlights and Weekly Reader magazines at school. Whenever they had an article about Antarctica or Ronald Reagan, I thought it was pretty interesting. But then they’d have a baseball article. “Reggie Jackson is a very famous hitter. He tries to hit the ball hard. Nolan Ryan throws the ball very fast. Steve Garvey is going to be a politician some day.”
Why is Andy Rooney still on TV?
How is Andy Rooney still alive?
My wife asked me once…What’s a “curmudgeon?” I told her to watch Andy Rooney.
Hey have you guys ever thought about doing an AL division preview using, get this, different kinds of poems?
What about using some sort of six-sided star thingy as a way of interjecting additional italicized factoids and anecdodes into one’s blog entries, then later copywriting the idea in an attempt to finally extract some profit out of an otherwise obscenely charitable educational online enterprise?
Is it just me or is that one of the lousiest video players on the internet. I had to reload about eight times before I could watch the video all the way through.
I actually liked it. It’s easy for us as people immersed in baseball to see the flaws. but for the average guy, it get the basic notions across. I’ll have to run it by the wife — always my litmus test — to see what she thinks. “See, honey! This is what all those gigantic books are about.”
Yeah, I’ve tried 3 times and have only been able to watch the ads at the start and the intro where Morley Safer is sitting in front of the big magazine or whatever that’s supposed to be.
Joe, I guarantee you Miss America has no problem wearing the crown. I’m sure its her most prized possession and that she carries it with her on the plane in a special box. She likely shines it every night and looks at it with a gleam in her eye. The average person would think twice about wearing a crown, but Miss America (and the ladies that “compete” for it) are not normal Americans. Just ask the girl from SC that talked about “the Iraq” and Americans not having maps. I’m sure she’d happily wear any crown she won to any event she could.
Gordon.
Goes.
Yard.
might want to change the last word of the entry, Joe.
Mathematics makes my eyes bleed.
What made me a true Bill James fan was his prose. Even for me, he makes the numbers mean something.
I first discovered the Abstracts back in the 80s and miss them. The first Historical Abstract was perfect bathroom reading for years.
I expect Poz to push a verb against a vowel with certain aplomb. But Bill James explained his stat-crunchin with such vivid clarity, wit, and passion, I knew back in the 80s somebody somewhere would listen to him.
I’m about Bill’s age and suffered through many years of Charlie Finley’s Kansas City A’s, too. So I relate to whence he came. Monte Moore reciting Finley’s company line to the point that you thought, maybe, perhaps, Jerry Lumpe was a decent second-baseman. I can just imagine a young Bill James (without my mathophobia) sitting and wondering, “How could that be?!”)
I’ve always thought Bill James was one of those guys you’d want to sit in the ballpark and watch a game with. Yeah, he’d know a lotta stuff like how likely the guy on second might try to steal third with one out and a banjo-hitter at the plate. But he wouldn’t do it in a way that made you think he was a know-it-all; merely that, well, he knows it all. Or is workin’ on it.
He loves this silly game and it shows. He approaches the game from a fan’s perspective. No wonder it took so long for “baseball” people to catch up with him.
I remember a story about how the Mets brought Willie Mays to spring training one year to coach their rookies. Mays was, reportedly, the worst coach in the world. His advice was pretty much limited to telling the kids to run after the ball and catch it and hit the cover off the ball. He didn’t know why or how he’d done it and couldn’t share with lesser players how or why he did it.
About that time, Jack McKeon became one of the first major league managers to never have big league experience as a player. As Casey Stengle told Congress, “I was not a successful player as it is a game of skill.”
How is it Charlie Lau became such a great batting coach when he couldn’t hit squat as a catcher for the Kansas City A’s? Sometimes not knowing how it’s done works.
The best part of the 60 Minutes piece was when the guy said, “Bill James doesn’t have all the right answers, but he asks all the right questions.”
Who gets to ask Hillman after the game why he didn’t use Nunez in the 8th, and instead brought back Tomko for a second inning?
The best part of the Francona “I’d like to introduce him to Ortiz” line is that it came upon the heels – I mean, just a few seconds after, Safer talked about how instrumental James was in getting the Red Sox to sign Ortiz. Great stuff.
…AND… how about Andy Rooney asserting that Enlish is “by far” the best language. Admittedly, finding flaw in his logic is shooting fish in a barrel.
+3 points for the very nice Updike passage
It was a pretty terrible piece (Lord, the OBP howler) but it did give me an idea for a paper, so I can’t be too upset.
I wonder if the “introduce him to David Ortiz” line was more a friendly plink than anything else. Francona seems to have embraced a lot of “Jamesian” reasoning in his on-field decisions.
And if the game were on the line, I’d want David Ortiz up there too — mainly because he’s an amazing hitter, clutch or no clutch.
OK You snuck a new picture in at the top and I never found out where the lake picture is form.
Is that a ballon, or a cow ,…dog?
I learned one thing from the 60 Minutes piece: Bill James is a big tub of goo. He looks exactly like the kid who got picked last in the school yard ball games. Who woulda guessed?
monkeyhawk had a great point about the abstracts. not only did bill point out the numbers but he explains what they mean and usually with some humor.
two more glaring gaps imo in the piece…
1) gave no context as to what “competitive” meant for beane’s A’s. all he had to say was “at this time the avg payroll was this and teams won this many games while beane’s payroll was this but he won this many games.” done.
2) it still discredited SABR’s by jabbing at the “geeks” and “wonks” whatever a wonk is. and he ended the piece by trying to convince James that “magic” is still more important.
i did agree that Bill came across as very likeable but probably lost some credibility with so many full body shots. i’d have to think Joe Midwest sitting on his couch took one look and said “wtf does this guy know about baseball? look at him!”
to me it was a big swing and a miss. pun intended.
*Roy Williams always had a classic Roy Williams-like answer whenever anyone came up to him with the “Have you thought of this†type suggestion. He would say, “No offense, but believe me, we’ve thought of it. Anything you have thought of, we’ve thought of. It’s our frickin’ job.â€
Isn’t it kind of condescending to assume that you’ve already thought of everything? Isn’t the point of this Bill James pieces that people hadn’t thought about it? For years people were enamored with the basic stats like batting average, without considering that there may be something more, and without listening to the people who suggested a change…
“Just like I don’t know if pilots actually watch the guy who is trying to guide them into the gate”
Hehe, that part is funny. But there really IS a purpose for these guys. Pilots can’t see the nose of their plane. Nor the wheels. Nor really much of anything.
While a pilot could conceivably get the plane close enough to the gate by “feel” for the whole scenario to work, it’s a bit easier if they have a guy giving them instructions 60 feet in front of the plane that they can actually SEE.
And don’t forget the safety element. The pilots can’t see if there are any obstructions on the ground underneath their plane either.
As for the 60 minutes bit on Bill James, I ignored it. It’s extremely rare for 60 minutes to actually provide some useful information, and the idea of its producers being able to shed some information on Bill James and / or Sabermetrics that :
A) I didn’t already know
B) was actually accurately presented
C) was actually interesting
seemed extremely unlikely. It’s good to see that 60 minutes was up to its usual ‘fine’ standards again.
I know something about classical music and conducting. And yes, the Dudamel piece was everything you guessed it might be, and even worse. As was the Bill James piece. The nature of the medium, I guess, except that Bill James has been doing his thing for a very long time now, whereas at least Dudamel is a relatively recent arrival on the conductor scene. So with the James piece 60 Mins. is being not only obvious, but way-behind-the-curve obvious.
Really accurate description of these 60 minutes profiles of people. There always is some truth that they make to be the whole truth. My area of expertise is politics, and as is true with any political news item these days, facts are distorted by editorial bias. They did the same injustice to Bill James that they did to former Chess Champion Gary Kasparov in describing his political activities in Russia. They seemed to put a face to an area of thought that actually encompassed wide-varying opinions, not at all completely represented by the man they credit. All in all, I think your observation puts it best in describing 60 minutes these days.
You know, reading this blog reminds me how little I know about Bill James and his work. I still think he is the Henry Chadwick of our era and deserves a spot in the Hall, but it seems like I need to read more of the Abstract.