Bugging Harold Reynolds
Posted: June 19th, 2009 | Filed under: Baseball | 132 Comments »
I like Harold Reynolds. I mean, I don’t really know the guy, but he seems to be a likable guy on television. And friends who do know him tell me he’s a very likable guy. And one of my favorite baseball images is that of Harold Reynolds in the moments after Bo Jackson threw Reynolds out at home plate from the base of the left-field wall … the scene (as relayed to me by then-Royals-beat-writer Dick Kaegel, who was there) was of Reynolds sitting by a television, watching the play, rewinding the tape, watching the play again, rewinding the tape again, watching the play again, over and over in a futile effort to figure out what the heck happened. There’s something about that scene that speaks to me, something about mere mortals trying to come to grips with the mysteries of the universe. Yes, I like Harold Reynolds.
Unfortunately, this morning I made the mistake of reading this. That is a blog post, written by Harold Reynolds, that (from what I can gather) tries to explain the … well, I’m not going to lie to you, I really have no idea what it tries to explain. I’m sitting here like a cartoon character with all sorts of question marks and exclamation points dangling over my head in a thought bubble. Yes, I blame myself: I mean, Harold Reynolds is not a writer. And I know that my own feelings about baseball and statistics and measuring value do not always meet up with Harold Reynolds. I never blamed Roseanne Barr for her horrifying rendition of the national anthem … I blamed the goofball who hired ROSEANNE BARR to sing the national anthem. I can’t blame Artie Lange for sabotaging that Joe Buck Show, I mean, he’s Artie Lange. That’s what he DOES. Were they hoping he would do knock knock jokes?
If you hire Andrew Dice Clay to do your kids birthday parties, you shouldn’t be surprised when the nursery rhymes go awry*.
*Hey, how about an Andrew Dice Clay reference? Holy cow, I’m old. But, apparently the guy’s still going – he’s going to be in Halifax, N.S. tonight for any of you Canadian readers who, you know, like your comics in sleeveless leather and shouting dirty Mother Goose.
So, yes, I was probably aware that I would not be on board with whatever conclusions Harold Reynolds made in his blog post. But I read it for three reasons: (1) It is short; (2) It is putatively about OPS — and yes, I did have a bet with someone that I could use the word “putatively” in a sentence; (3) I like Harold Reynolds. I figured, at worst, I would kind of shake my head and move on to something else this fine Friday morning.
Little did I know that in a mere 522 words, Harold Reynolds would leave me a broken man. It isn’t that I disagree with what I think is his conclusion (OPS is a flawed statistic — I loosely agree with this). It isn’t that I am opposed to ballplayers standing up for what they believe about the game (hey, there are a lot of ways someone can be a good baseball player). It isn’t even that the logic of a short post sends me tossing and turning and I have a weak stomach … I take Dramamine every time I go on a plane, so to read this I needed one of those motion sickness watches.
No. What bothers me is that I LIKE Harold Reynolds. I really do. I don’t have to agree with someone to like them. But … this thing baffles me to a level where, yeah, it’s like this time long ago when I went out on a second date, and we went to see “Hook.” I’ve already written about Hook when I wrote about my soon-to-be patented MEF, “Movie Expectation Formula*”, where you give every movie a +/- rating based on how good/bad you expected it to be in relation to how good/bad it actually is.
*Here’s what I wrote: I don’t want to get too deep into this, but the movie expectation formula is why, in many ways, Hook is the worst movie experience I have ever had. Hook is not the worst movie I have ever seen of course — I mean I did see Batman and Robin, just as a starting point. And North. And The Story of Us. And The Money Pit. But I really thought Hook would be good. It had Robin Williams before I realized that the Freaky Awakenings Transformation had occurred**, and it had Julia Roberts who I used to love, and it had Dustin Hoffman as Hook which seemed pretty inspired casting to me. It was directed by Steven Spielberg. It seemed like one of those corny Christmas-time movies and I’m a major sucker for those — I can’t help myself, I loved The Family Man, for instance, it’s one of the my favorite ever movie experience (Expectation level, 1 star — Actual level, 4 stars — the rare +3 movie).
So, I pretty much expected a 4 star movie experience from Hook.
And I got a 0.0 star movie experience. Hook sucked.
That’s a minus-4, the worst possible movie experience.
**My Freaky Awakenings Transformation theory, which I have mentioned here before, is that during the filming of Awakenings, Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro had their personalities switched. So from that point on Robin Williams no longer wanted to be funny and wanted to play serious and quirky roles while DeNiro decided he desperately wanted to play in oddball comedies. The switch has worked about as well as the Fred Savage-Judge Reinhold switcheroo in Vice Versa.
But, when I first wrote about Hook, I didn’t write this part. I really liked this woman, but we went to see Hook, and she liked it, and I knew then that we have no future together. Yeah, this little Harold Reynolds blog post is a little bit like that. I just wanted some light Friday reading for a laugh. And I ended up spending way too much time trying to decipher it and come to grips with it … yeah, I like Harold Reynolds a little less now.
I don’t want to go all Fire Joe Morgan (or Hugging Harold Reynolds) here but, well, yeah, here’s my best effort to translate this post in 15 steps.
1. It’s interesting how statistics have become more important than ever.
2. I used to play for Dick Williams who used to make the statement “the situation will dictate what happens.” This means a lot to me.
3. Skip used to tell me, “Pay attention to the situation.” I tried to do that as a player.
4. Not all statistics work. Some do. Most don’t.
5. One of the super trendy stats now is OPS. We are 179 words into a 522 words post, and what I’ve said so far seems pretty safe and inoffensive, and it does not seem like I have enough room left to do much damage. But this is about to take a horrible turn.
6. Here’s why OPS is bad. If you are a power hitter, pitchers will either walk you or pitch you really carefully. This is because of the situation … the situation being that you are a power hitter. They don’t want to pitch to you. Because you are a power hitter. You might hit a home run. So they don’t want to pitch to you. And this reflects in OPS. And this is why it’s bad.
7. See, it’s more than likely, in that situation, that a power hitter will get on base than a non-power hitter. And this makes his on-base percentage go up. Everybody thinks this is a good thing.
8. It’s not a good thing. Well, maybe it can be a good thing, if the power hitter is on a good team. But it’s not a good thing if you have a bad team. Take Adrian Gonzalez. Please! His OPS is going to be high because he hits a lot of home runs and walks a lot. This is because pitchers don’t pitch to him. Yes, when he hits the home runs, they pitch to him, but the other times they don’t. I appear to be confusing OPS with on-base percentage but I’m rolling now, so please don’t stop me.
9. Jason Giambi and Adam Dunn have always had high OPS’s because nobody wants to pitch to them, except when they hit the home runs. This is because they have power. If only they had less power, pitchers would want to pitch to them and this would make them better players. But they do have power, and so they walk, and this hurts the ballclub. The reason this hurts the ballclub is that they don’t have speed. It takes two hits to score them from first base, unless the hit is a home run, but home runs are part of the problem here because if you hit home runs then pitchers won’t pitch to you and the whole mess starts again. Speedy guys can score from first on one hit. If it’s a double. Into the gap. And Bo Jackson is not playing in the outfield.
10. Dick Williams is pulling his hair out.
11. You know what my argument needs? A little Dave Kingman. Because all of this is nothing new. History repeats itself. It all goes back to Dave Kingman. When Kingman was hot you didn’t pitch to him. If he wasn’t hot you did pitch to him. This is why he walked so much in his career. You could argue, perhaps, that Kingman didn’t walk much, and he had a .302 career on-base percentage, which is awful, but that’s the problem with statistics, they confuse things.
12. A slugger’s on base percentage will always be higher because he clogs the bases.
13. I’m going to repeat that because in this sea of bafflement, this statement is probably the most baffling of all: A slugger’s OBP is always going to be higher than most other guys because they clog the bases. PItchers want those slowpokes on the bases, clogging things up. The more slow guys on the bases, the better.
14. Someone once told me Ichiro should walk more. Why? The guy gets 200 hits a year. He scores over 100 runs. Why would pitchers want to walk him more? Then he would score even more runs and he would steal more bases. This might seem like a good thing from Ichiro’s perspective, which seemed to be the original point when someone once told me that Ichiro should walk more, but no, now I’m suddenly talking about the pitcher’s perspective — why should they walk him more? In other words: Why should he walk more when pitchers would rather not walk him and, um, sluggers who walk are not really, you know, well, OPS is not good when you have a slow runner clogging up the drain like dog hair when you wash him in the sink though Ichiro is a fast runner and could score more runs if he walked more which is a bad thing because Dave Kingman is or he would be, if he was on a good team with Adrian Gonzalez, a slugger who, and, um, Adam Dunn needs to be mentioned and statistics are not good except sometimes like when a guy gets 200 hits, but then, if he walked more, he would score more and pitchers don’t want that and … that’s why OPS is not a good statistic.
15. It’s like Dick Williams always said: “The situation dictates what happens.”
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DON’T circle me
My third-favorite part of Harold Reynolds’s post: where he suggests that every slugger has a high OBP.
My second-favorite part: the title.
My favorite part: the four words in the middle that on their own, and thanks to a typo, summarize the post, like one of those puzzles where the first letter of each sentence or paragraph spells it the message: “This is my mind”.
The question I always want to ask the Base-Clogging-Believing ex-players is: Did you feel like a failure when you walked? Because that’s the insinuation.
Thanks for the clarification, Joe. Now it makes perfect sense.
That was literally the worse thing I’ve ever read.
Ted Williams was criticized for walking too much.
My head just exploded….
NOT going to see Andrew Dice Clay tonight. Wouldn’t cross the street to see him. Even though I don’t mind dirty Mother Goose jokes.
Still haven’t forgiven Harold Reynolds for stealing Frank White’s 9th gold glove.
I have a 13 year old son, and I try to take some precautions about the things he can access on the Internet. There’s just a lot out there that I’d prefer he not see at his age. Thankfully, most web browsers and search engines let you check history, they let you filter for content, and so on. It’s a nice feature for a parent.
Sadly, no browser has yet figured out a way for me to filter out stupidity, so it’s possible that my son will wander across Reynolds’ post the next time he googles “OPS”. And that’s terrifying.
Hug your kids while you can folks.
Number 6 is hilarious.
Oy. It hurt to read that.
Not trying to be funny: this is why most former players should get a ghostwriter if they’re going to have a blog or a column or whatever. What a mess.
As ex-player analysts go I actually think Reynolds is one of the best. I hate to see him get his tits ripped like this, even if he did bring it on himself.
I know just what HR means about certain players clogging the base paths. You guys would understand it if JoePoz didn’t have so many good points clogging up his blog post. They confuse the issue.
But if you have a guy like Adrian Gonzalez, for example, his OPS is going to high – he’s got a lot of home runs and walks a lot…because you’re not going to pitch to him!
I liked “Family Man” but I really had a problem with suspending all reality and just going with the story. It was just too unbelievable.
He has a wife that, after having two kids in four years, looks like Tea Leoni, sings the Rolling Stones in the shower, and urgently wants to have sex with him as soon as the kids fall asleep. That’s just ridiculous!
I’ll give Harold one point. If two players have exactly equal OPS but one can score from first on a double and the other can’t, OPS doesn’t reflect the difference in value between the two players.
I think that’s what Harold was trying to say through all that other BS. I wouldn’t say this makes OPS worthless but it isn’t the perfect stat.
Harold is a deep guy. Clearly he was referring to the act of “walking” (OBP is just a random stat he threw in to make his argument more credible). You don’t walk around the bases (they get clogged), you RUN! Steve Balboni walked around the bases, Willie Wilson ran. Ichiro should probably walk more. He might get tired.
Using one of the best hitters in baseball to point out how a statistic DOESN’T work is never a good idea.
If you’re going to go with Gonzalez, why not just say Pujols?
I really liked watching Harold Reynold on Baseball tonight and thought he did some really great work in the booth, on all levels. But one of my largest complaints about televised sports commentary is that the former athletes who end up working on these shows are, more often than not, incapable of putting together a coherent argument. Baseball is not alone on this. Football is just as bad, as is basketball.
At least he wasn’t talking about OPP!!
OOOOHHHH!!!!
Joe, is there a link to a video fo Bo throwing him out at home?
Something I noticed: Harold appears to be making the 100-year-old mistake of giving all credit for walks to the PITCHER. Remember, this is how walks ended up not being included in ABs – people thought of them as errors the pitcher made, rather than the hitter not swinging at bad pitches.
Pay special attention to point #14 here. “How could Ichiro walk more? Pitchers won’t walk him because they don’t want him on base!” HR does not even consider the fact that the hitter can walk more by being more selective with pitches. I think this is a major point Joe should have pointed out. Mainly because it makes HR look even dumber.
Yeah, you know me!!
Harold was just expressing the views he has garnered from luminaries like Mitch Williams on the mlb network studio set.
I think Harold’s problem (and the problem of many who hold this same anti-OBP philosophy) is that he considers the walk as something the pitcher does and that it has nothing to do with the hitter’s ability to talk a walk.
I mean, there is something to his idea that power hitters only walk because pitchers are more careful. If a guy stops hitting homeruns, pitchers are going to be more aggressive with them. Take Travis Hafner for example: His shoulder started hurting, his power started decreasing, he stopped walking. Now I believe having a good eye is a skill. But Hafner’s eye didn’t get worse when his shoulder was hurt, pitchers just threw more strikes to him because he couldn’t them like he did when he was a top-three offensive player in the AL from 04-06.
So, a walk may have more to do with the pitcher’s perspective than the hitter. Harold’s problem is that he overstates this to the point where he doesn’t recognize the skill involved in drawing a walk. Also, he is obviously underrating the value of the walk.
Somewhere Jeff Francoeur made a congratulations phone call to Reynolds.
Bo Jackson’s throw:
http://soxanddawgs.com/2008/10/17/harold-reynolds-finally-admits-he-was-out/
Reynolds started with this point at about 11 p.m. the other night (I’m not positive, as time suspends itself when watching that network and its cavalcade of analysts – I still love it, though). He hit on the same points and Al Leiter was just about as dumbfounded as Joe. But then they had to go to an in-game A’s-Dodgers highlight and Harold must have said, “I gotta blog this baby!”
Harold Reynolds is quite unhappy with OPS because, well, his career OPS of .668 is rather mediocre. His career OPS+ of 83 isn’t much to write home about either. Reynolds was a speed/glove guy who wasn’t quite superb at either. He had one insane year of 60 steals (20 CS) but his second best total was 35, and for his career he had 250 steals and 138 caughts, meaning he probably would have helped his team more if he’d just clogged the bases like Adam Dunn. Reynolds was a good fielder who won three gold glove awards. And this article is basically a diatribe about how Reynolds should be seen as better than he was using modern stats.
But where the article has value, and I think it does, is that baseball really does not have a good statistical comparison between traditional slugger types like Adam Dunn, and speed/defense guys, like Ozzie Smith. And Smith is a good comparison to Reynolds. Reynolds was slightly better at OPS, Smith OPS+, Smith was clearly a much better base stealer and fielder, but the two are similar in the same sense that, say, Pujols and Derrek Lee are similar contemporaries. Pujols is much better, especially since Lee’s injury, but they were both good fielding first basemen who did everything well.
What I think Reynolds is really trying to say, and doing a terrible job of it, is “Hey, if OPS is so important, why did I have such a long career? Where is the statistic that enables us to accurately compare guys like me, guys who save runs, guys who save our pitching staff by turning hits into outs, to guys like Dunn, who don’t save any runs but hurt the other pitching staff more?”
Not that I’m a fan of Reynolds, but I think he has a point. Not as good a point as somebody like Mark Belanger might make, but a point.
Boy, old baseball players get pissed off when the nerds try to get revenge.
Is there some way we can arrange for Harold Reynolds (among others) to take a course in game theory, and then re-take it, and re-take it, until he can pass it? That’s what he’s trying to do here, analyze the implications of strategic interaction. You could build a game tree, pretty easily, and specify exactly what the best strategies are. Maybe Pete Palmer already did.
But before we have Harold take the game theory course, perhaps the higher priority is a course in rhetoric first. The single worst thing about the Internet is that it is populated by participants who are, as a general rule, completely ignorant of rhetoric. This is a major failing of our civilization.
Bear with me on this. This one reminded me of a scene from Full Metal Jacket . . . . .
Colonel: Marine, what is that button on your body armour?
Joker: A peace symbol sir.
Colonel: Where’d you get it?
Joker: I don’t remember sir.
Colonel: What is that you’ve got written on your helmet?
Joker: “Born to Kill” sir.
Colonel: You write “Born to Kill” on you helmet, and you wear a peace button. What’s that supposed to be, some kind of sick joke?
Joker: No, sir.
Colonel: Well what is it supposed to mean?
Joker: I don’t know, sir.
Colonel: You don’t know very much do you?
Joker: No sir.
Colonel: You better get your head and your ass wired together or I will take a giant sh*t on you.
Joker: Yes sir.
Colonel: Now answer my question, or you’ll be standing tall before The Man.
Joker: I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man sir.
Colonel: The what?
Joker: The duality of man, the Jungian thing, sir.
Colonel: Who’s side are you on, son?
Joker: Our side, sir.
Colonel: Don’t you love your country?
Joker: Yes, sir.
Colonel: Well how about getting with the program? Why don’t you jump on the team and c’mon in for the big win?
Joker: Yes, sir.
Colonel: Son, all I’ve ever asked of my Marines is for them to obey my orders as they would the word of God. We are here to help the Vietnamese because inside every g**k, there is an American trying to get out. It’s a hardball world, son. We’ve got to try to keep our heads until this peace craze blows over.
Joker: Aye aye, sir.
To me Harold Reynolds is like Private Joker. Except that he cannot write, or blog, or type in English. I like Harold Reynolds, still. I do not think less of him. In a twisted way, I think he is exploring the duality of man. Unlike Private Joker, he is completely oblivious to this. He is exploring the world between humans and statistics. He just happens to be doing this out loud, where the rest of us can read it.
He was very good calling games on TBS and now on MLB TV. This new medium of the interweb may not be his thang.
“”"”What I think Reynolds is really trying to say, and doing a terrible job of it, is “Hey, if OPS is so important, why did I have such a long career? Where is the statistic that enables us to accurately compare guys like me, guys who save runs, guys who save our pitching staff by turning hits into outs, to guys like Dunn, who don’t save any runs but hurt the other pitching staff more?””"”"”
I think you’re right, that is the point he is making. But the problem for HR is that the answer to those questions is: Because in the 1980s, traditional baseball men didn’t understand the essence of how to win the game. (Yes, I know that sounds silly, but I think it’s true.) In today’s age, especially on a team that is intelligently run, HR does NOT have a long career. You can’t have a long career with his numbers unless you are a top-notch defensive player and I don’t think he was.
What a tease. HR writes “Not all statistics work. Some do, most don’t.” Well quit holding out on us and tell us which statistics are those that work!
And Harold Reynolds kind of leads me to my response to the Joe James column on SI.COM about pitch count. To me, as a fan of baseball since the early 60’s, pitch count was *never* an issue or a concern until the rise of the great pitching Braves, with Glavine, Smoltz, Avery, and Maddux (who was an import, but still). Bobby Cox’s Braves were one of the greatest dynasties in the history of baseball. And they were the team in which I first heard of pitch count limits.
No offense to Nolan Ryan, who was a freak of nature (in a good way), but I think the Braves clearly showed that hard pitch counts can lead to more wins just as easily as fewer wins. I mean, Glavine and Maddux both reached 300 victories, and off the top of my head I’d say they had 200 or so each while team mates.
And the Braves of the time also seemed to me to make personnel decisions to help prevent runs, at least at the really important positions up the middle. Fewer hits leads to fewer pitches leads to more effective starts by the front line starters.
I think Cox is one of the few managers who managed strategically. Tactical managers can be very successful; making the best decision to win today is almost always a tactical decision. But strategic managers are trying to win over the entire season. Cox’s strategy was to keep his best pitchers healthy so that he didn’t have to use the dregs of the bullpen very much. He did that by pulling his starters with a hard pitch limit. And the Braves were a dynasty until they stopped having the budget of Turner’s cable television network enabling them to pay to compete with the best teams. Again, just my opinion.
The only other manager I’ve seen that I think manages strategically is Joe Torre, although it’s possible Francona is as well, and it certainly seems like Ted Williams also fits. These three seem to preach high pitch counts, all the time, to always get into the other team’s bullpen. Get to the weaker pitchers, batter them, get them overused, get them injured, then still worse pitchers are called up from the minors. Baseball is a game of attrition, and patience at the plate is how you win that game, not in the short term, but as the season progresses all the batter staffs get weaker and weaker, and that’s when your team can really win.
For much of this season, the Dodgers have been carrying an insane 13 pitchers. Why? Injuries to the opening day starter (Kuroda), and only two pitchers who could be counted on for 6+ innings most starts (Billingsley and Wolf). Kershaw is either great or lousy, and sometimes when he’s great he still is at 100 pitches in the 5th inning with a bunch of Ks and Ws. So Torre, to protect the good arms in his bullpen, has had a LOT of arms in the bullpen, so folks aren’t getting overused. That’s strategic management for the whole season on the pitching side as well as on the hitting side. I am certain that Torre’s goal is to make sure that whoever his best relievers are behind Broxton, come October, those relievers will still have something in their tank.
I’ll give Ryan this much: some pitchers deserve to go more than 100 pitches into a game. Koufax was notorious for throwing as many as 100 pitches in warmups, getting his arm just so. Koufax also didn’t last very long. How many Ryans have there been? Not many. I think pitch counts are generalizations, but I think for most pitchers, they benefit the pitcher.
Joe, you’re the best in the business. Thanks for the post, I’m laughing out loud as I write this.
Finally, Joe, at work the past week or two, when trying to read your blog, I’ve been getting errors about server problems. I thought that it was just some #$%#$%# new firewall or something, but today at home when trying to post a comment I got the same kinds of messages, repeatedly. It took a dozen or so “retries” to finally post. So you *may* be having some server reset issues. I thought you’d want to know.
Adam @ #27: Thanks for the link. It saves me the trouble of searching for it tonight after I get home from work.
Anyway… I haven’t actually read the Reynolds piece yet. I don’t know if I want to subject my eyes to that level of idiocy. But, based on Joe’s comments and the comments here… Well… Of *course* OPS isn’t a perfect statistic. It’s not meant to be! What it is meant to be is a quick measuring stick that has more value than batting average. Gah! Now I have no choice but to go read the piece. I hope you’re all happy!
I think we can summarize the ‘anti-OBP’ faction’s view as “players who walk don’t ever score.”
I did enjoy the part about Dave Kingman. If Kingman was hot, you didn’t pitch to him. If he wasn’t hot, you pitched to him. So the deal with Kingman was to pitch to him until he hit a homerun, then walk him until he cooled off. Sweet.
PS- the problem isn’t that Hal Reynolds isn’t a writer, it’s that he didn’t both to think things through before posting that blob of atrocious ‘logic’ on the internet. My goodness, he spent 522 words telling us that the worst baseball player in the world is a power hitter with a good eye.
Harold Reynolds prefers that Ichiro make more outs.
Is anyone else still having trouble getting ot the site? I’m still having to go through the Google cache to see anything.
Is it just me?
Ryne Sandberg used to have a Yahoo column–sadly, it was horribly written. In one edition, he essentially said that we fans couldn’t judge anyone if we had not shared a locker room with them and also said something like Player A from one era was better than Player B from another…yet he had not shared a locker room with either man!
Each week, in a short amount of space, he seemed to show that his body knew about the game and his brain did not.
If clogging the bases is bad, NL teams should intentionally walk the pitcher.
A former player with a .668 career OPS is trashing OPS? Should we be surprised?
I’ve got to reprint this comment from Harold’s Blog. It’s a classic:
http://haroldreynolds.mlblogs.com/archives/2009/06/enjoy_it_for_what_its_worth.html
I can totally relate Harold. I am a farmer and I can’t believe how science has taken over the agriculture business. Like I had an old neighbor who was much like Dick Williams. He said, “If something is going wrong with your crops, then the situation will dictate what to do. Like, if rain is your problem, then sacrifice two goats or one pig. If pests are your problem, then yell at the moon for a forenight and bury three red stones in your field. Problem solved. But I shouldn’t have to tell you beforehand, you should know this.” Now days they have fancy inventions like irrigation, meteorology, crop rotations, and fertilizers. I am like, “Phooey and bunk!” I am just like you Harold, I don’t need their new fangled theories and hocus-pocus in order to understand farming better. I mean a meteorologist has never farmed, what can he tell me or my old neighbor about farming? We reached the pinnacle of understanding with yelling at the moon! The point is that I have nothing left to learn just like you, Harold.
By mattwithanh@yahoo.com on June 19, 2009 11:13 AM
Harold Reynolds is single-handedly attempting to give blogs a bad name.
I’m reading the post, and I get to the Movie Expectation Formula, and I grasped it immediately, and the movie that came right to my mind that I enjoyed way, way, WAY more than I had expected to was that one with Nicholas Cage and Tea Leoni, whatever it was called, I sat down with a crap attitude about yet another movie my wife had picked out . . . and I loved it. I even looked it up the next day and was surprised to learn it was seven years old or something like that and I had never even heard of it. And then you wrote The Family Man, and I thought, wait a minute! That’s it. I couldn’t believe that was the example you used of a plus-MEF movie.
I’m trying to make myself not post this because everyone else has stayed very nicely on-topic re: Harold Reynolds, but I can’t help it. We just seemed kind of in-sync there for a moment.
(By the way, I’d consider working into your formula some points for a movie that surprises you by its content or tone. In Bruges did that for me. Whatever I was expecting, it turned out to be a lot quirkier and more interesting in the viewing.)
Reynolds has received a lot of employment opportunities and passes for his stupidity based solely on his “nice” personality. The guy was indefensibly moronic before getting canned at ESPN – sadly, they have since found plenty of other genial, dim-witted ex-players to fill the void since HR’s departure (Destrade, E.Perez, E.Young, Tino Martinez at one point).
I liked The Money Pit.
Hey, this is a sports site! So I need to leave “edgy” comments like “tits ripped” so that any woman reading this site KNOWS that she’s not welcome here. NO GIRLZ ALLOWED
It’s funny that everyone is going on and on about how they like Harold as a person and TV personality but not as a blogger.
It’s worth remembering that this is a guy who was fired from ESPN for sexual harassment. Sexual Harassment! Of five different women! That is not the type of guy who I think we should all be so in love with.
But his post is hilarious. Incoherency at his funniest.
You guys are too harsh. His post is fine. People are overly sensitive when stats are criticized. If you don’t agree with his point then start a constructive conversation about it and not just rag on the guy.
Fire Harold Reynolds
Hook overall was flawed, but you have to admit, Hoffman did his best to salvage it. One of all-time great performances in bad movies. I still drop ‘bad form!’ into conversation from time to time.
I posted about this on Gleeman’s blog. What do all these stats haters think about airlines and other industries that use stats to keep them safe? should they just eyeball a plane, ’cause, you know, they know what a safe plane looks like? should they come up with their processes and procedures for handling a plane without using math and predictive ability?
Why are stats evil in baseball, but good in other places?
EW-his point seemed to be that OPS was bad, because good hitters would have a high OPS. That, um, raises some questions about his understanding of what stats are for….
here’s some sanity in that Harold Reynolds post, but his editor really failed him in not catching that his points are obscured.
Take two players, a “slugger” and a “non-slugger.” For the slugger, the classic example is Adam Dunn. For the non-slugger, we’ll take a swing-away type, let’s say Shane Victorino.
Dunn has a .404 on base percentage and .544 slugging percentage.
Victorino has a .351 on base percentage and .451 slugging percentage.
Using OPS as your only measurement of a player’s ability, one would argue you would always want Dunn at the plate, in every situation, no matter what.
Let’s put a runner on second base with one out. We’ll assume the score is close.
When Dunn steps into the box, the pitcher will likely try not to give Dunn anything to hit because 1) a homerun can blow the game open and 2) walking Dunn creates an easy double play situation due to his speed. Dunn probably won’t be able to break up the double play. Walking Dunn both neutralizes his slugging percentage and creates a risk/reward type situation. The next batter could hit a 3-run homer, but now an inning ending double play increases in probability too.
When Victorino steps into the box, a lot of different outcomes could happen. Victorino is a smart player and understands what the situation dictates according to Reynolds. Victorino wants to put the ball in play, either singling to score the run, or moving the runner to third with two out. He could end up walking, or hitting a double, or lining out, or a lot of things. If he walks, it will be harder to turn two than had Dunn walked. But by not going up to the plate looking to take the walk, he creates a lot more different possibilities.
I disagree with Reynolds in that I actually would rather have Dunn hit more often, because a sure-thing walk sounds great. But I understand how Reynolds misinterprets the myriad of possibilities Victorino brings as being a “better strategy” even though, going by my limited knowledge of linear weights, I’d say the guaranteed walk will usually result in more runs.
If the batter after Dunn/Victorino is, say, Jose Lopez (13 GDPs already this year), well, I really think Howard may have one point in his favor, that that would be a situation where OPS doesn’t tell you who you would rather have hitting. More often than not, you would want Dunn. Sometimes, you would want Victorino. Let’s not all forget how idiosyncratic this great game of baseball is and measure a player by only one statistic.
That’s what, I hope, Reynolds is trying to say here, despite doing a terrible, terrible job of it. Situations exist where you’d rather put the ball in play and take your chances rather than send your best OPS guy to the plate only to get walked. Reynolds likely thinks more of these situations exist than there actually are — and I have no idea what he is grasping for with Ichiro — but buried somewhere in that paragraph is this point. Since he was so much more Victorino than Dunn, I understand him championing the little guy, even though the situations you would want Dunn at the plate far outnumber Victorino. And these situations of automatic walks inflate Dunn’s numbers, if only a tad, and lead to a small gap between the players seeming slightly bigger as measured by OPS.
I like Harold a lot too, and want to give him a break here, and am inferring a lot. I think his editors and the people he works with do a poor job helping him grasp and highlight the parts of the game he loves the most and tries to write about, which are some things even us stat guys sort of miss from time to time. However, words and examples fail him. That was a mess of a post. It might even make him not that great at what he does for a living, if he can’t articulate his points, but the insults don’t seem to be the way to improve this (and I think he shines in a lot of respects as a color commentator even despite poor examples like this, because I love his voice, his energy for the game, and his unique outlook as a player who did everything he could to keep his job as a MLB player). He’s also no where near as preachy and as dominating a personality as a Joe Morgan/Tim McCarver/Hat Guy/Rick Reilly/other supposed know-it-alls, which is a huge point in his favor too.
In conclusion, Reynolds wrote a terrible post, but the piling on is unnecessary and low and I think the Posnanski fan base is better than it.
You know what I like about Reynolds? That he likes baseball. This is in stark contrast to, say, John Kruk and Rob Dibble, who are regularly repulsed by it. Billy Packer hates basketball. I’m glad he’s gone.
At least Reynolds likes baseball. I like him for that much.
He’s also prefect calling the little league world series. (Those kids are SO fundamentally sound, it’s unreal.)
Sluggers also clog the bedroom. You all remember those “chicks dig the long ball” ads…well, Dick Williams used to say players should adapt to the situation with women.
Sometimes, you have to (allegedly) sexually harass women. That’s something OPS doesn’t take into account.
That’s messed up, man. The guy does a blog post about a baseball stat, you don’t like it and you post something like that? Shameful for a person to attack someone else over this.
BB
OH MY GOD!!! STATISTICS!!!
You sports-fan chuckle-heads are no different than the basement-dwelling virgins who argue over make-believe fights on Deadliest Warrior.
“Nuh-uhh”
“Uh-huh”
“Nuh-uhh”
“Uh-huh”
Buncha losers…
Y’all are missing the most important piece of the article. If ballplayers are supposed to know what to do, what on earth did Dick Williams draw a paycheck for?? (Looks at W-L% with Mariners… .453) Wow, not much, apparently.
Harold is arguing that OPS is a statistic people value, but it can sometimes be misleading. He says the best offensive player on a bad team often has a high OPS. However, he says that player’s OPS is inflated due to the team dynamic, i.e. opposing teams will not pitch to the player in certain situations unless they have to, resulting in a lot of walks a player on a better team wouldn’t get. I think it is a valid point. Explained poorly, but a valid point.
And Bo Jackson is not playing in the outfield.
LOL
This is the first thing that popped into my head regarding Harold’s train of thought (if you could call it that)…
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Sorry, I have to stand up for Hook. Not the best movie ever made, but a solid 3 out of 4 stars. Well made, entertaining, funny.
I really can’t believe so many people are trying to defend Harold’s “point.” First off, anyone well versed in statistical analysis knows OPS is far, far from an end-all, be-all measurement tool. Baserunning and defense are both being increasingly quantified even with the difficulty of the task. That’s just a strawman argument.
A player who is walked frequently because his team is bad doesn’t have an inflated OPS. Sorry, it’s just not true. It’s been shown many times that if Bonds was walked every at bat the offense would have been better off. The batter may get pitched around more often, but that STILL helps the team.
Clogging the bases is wrong-headed thinking. Yes, there are more skills to look at than on base percentage. But knocking the most important thing in baseball is stupid.
You sure told us, Dr. Mike. I’ll never be able to enjoy a ball game again, thanks to your eloquence and piercing insight. But before I slink away in shame to pursue the higher life of the mind that you embody:
In the long run, the higher OPS player can be expected to produce more runs than the lower, if the rest of the lineup is the same. To take the above hypothetical with Dunn and Victorino (man on 2d, one out, close game), you can argue that Victorino will get easier pitches to hit than Dunn, and would thus be likelier than Dunn to put the ball in play/score the runner. BUT that’s comparing him to Dunn. The real comparison is with the guy following him. If Victorino is a better hitter than that guy, then he will probably be forced to swing at a poor pitch or take his base. We already know he walks less often. Since average on balls in play tends to even out over time, a guy who puts more balls in play can expect more base hits. The problem is, Victorino doesn’t do that enough to make up the vast difference between his and Dunn’s power, and he certainly doesn’t do it enough to make up the difference in walks.
Example – grant 600 PA and a .300 BABIP. If player V strikes out and walks 50 times each, and player D does each 100 times, then V will hit .273 [150/550] while D will hit .240 [120/500]. BUT, V’s OBA will be .333 [200/600], and D’s will be .367 [220/600]. Also, D hits twice as many homers, thus making it superfluous who hits behind him (he’s scored himself), while V can only hope for help.
This really damages Reynolds’ point (such as I can fathom it). Sure, V can score on one more hit, while D requires two; but in many cases, D will require zero, while V waits in vain for the one hit that never comes. And D is on first base as often as V, because of those fifty extra walks making up for the difference in hits and homers. The only benefit to V over D is on the rare times that a team gets one long hit – and ONLY one long hit – for the rest of the inning when either starts on first base. If there’s a walk behind them, they both become equally likely to score on an XBH; if there’s a homer it doesn’t matter how slowly either jogs. If there are two hits then there are only a few rare times V will score while D would be stranded.
Now, one can see almost anything in small sample sizes, so it is STILL possible that V (or heck, HR) would succeed where D would fail, driving in the run with a single instead of going to first and getting stranded together; or else, scoring later in the inning while D is stuck on third. And not all other things are equal – walking D might bring up a pinch hitter superior to the guy waiting on deck; or D could be slumping horribly or dinged up from crashing into a wall or V could just own a particular pitcher. Then there’s all sorts of tactics the defense could employ by switching pitchers and etc. The thing is – in only a few of these scenarios could one *expect* V to have more success than D, and a smart manager would (one hopes) do that which is expected to bring the most successful outcomes most often.
Sorry for taking so long – still shorter than HR’s post, though.
“So from that point on Robin Williams no longer wanted to be funny and wanted to play serious and quirky roles while DeNiro decided he desperately wanted to play in oddball comedies. The switch has worked about as well as the Fred Savage-Judge Reinhold switcheroo in Vice Versa.”
That’s F’n funny. Great post; I like Harold Reynolds too, but they need to take his blog privileges away.
Mike Caprio
Keeper League GM
Reynolds has a point, but he cant write to save his life.
I like Harold Reynolds, but I feel like he just hugged me inappropriately.
I’d like to elaborate on something further I said:
“Walking Dunn both neutralizes his slugging percentage and creates a risk/reward type situation. The next batter could hit a 3-run homer, but now an inning ending double play increases in probability too.”
Let’s say the game is tied in the eighth now also. One run will probably win it, or at least really, really increase the chances.
What this means is although Dunn/Lopez is worth more runs than Victorino/Lopez, Victorino/Lopez, by virtue of them both taking a swing, seems more likely to give the team the lead.
Case 1:
Dunn walks, Lopez has a 30% shot at a hit. The next guy has a 25% shot because 5% of the time Lopez hits into a double play.
Case 2:
Victorino has a 30% shot at getting a hit, Lopez has a 30% shot at getting a hit.
If your goal is to score one run, you’d rather back to back 30% odds than a 30% chance followed by somewhat less likely odds, wouldn’t you? Yes, two runs and three runs is better than one run, and with walking Dunn, that becomes a greater possibility. That’s why you don’t walk in the early innings — on average, it will kill you. Walking Dunn demonstrates more worth because you increase the odds of more runs coming in.
But if only one run is important, Victorino/Lopez seems better, because even though two run and three run innings are that much less likely, the one run inning is more likely and at that point in the game, playing for one-run outweighs a big inning.
Is this thinking correct or no? I understand there are a lot more variables, but this was the crux of my example I was getting at (and I hope HR was getting at). Scoring more runs is less important than consistently scoring the one run in situations. Know your situations. Because Dick Williams doesn’t.
Bill Bee-
I don’t see this blog as “attacking” Mr. Reynolds, I see this as a calling out. Mr. Reynolds has many skills, and a charming personality. Two skills Mr. Reynolds clearly lacks are a cohesive writing style and a solid understanding of baseball statistics. Mr. Reynolds passes himself for an expert, and if Mr. Reynolds expects to be respected as an authority on baseball matters he needs to be called out when he writes a nonsensical,discombobulated mess.
“I really liked watching Harold Reynold on Baseball tonight and thought he did some really great work in the booth, on all levels. But one of my largest complaints about televised sports commentary is that the former athletes who end up working on these shows are, more often than not, incapable of putting together a coherent argument. Baseball is not alone on this. Football is just as bad, as is basketball.” (Post #19)
I really have started to despise former athletes as commentators over the past few years.* Joe Morgan is a good example (once tried to explain that Mark DeRosa missed a throw at 1B because he had his right foot on the base instead of his left….but putting the left foot down and being a righthanded thrower would reduce his range of motion, not increase it). These former athletes seem to all believe that what was used in their time should still be true today, such as no pitch counts, lesser emphasis on stats, a guy who works his ass off on defense and dives left and right is more valuable than a guy that is positioned correctly on every play.
Many of these former players are hired because they can offer “insider” analysis, but to be honest, if you watch enough baseball games, this “insider” stuff often becomes repetitive.
*Actually, I’ve started to dislike many commentators, regardless of if they are former professional athletes or not. Joe Buck comes to mind, for reasons that would be too long to describe. (I did not realize that Gleeman just complained about Buck on his blog as well until after I typed this.)
“I posted about this on Gleeman’s blog. What do all these stats haters think about airlines and other industries that use stats to keep them safe? should they just eyeball a plane, ’cause, you know, they know what a safe plane looks like? should they come up with their processes and procedures for handling a plane without using math and predictive ability?
Why are stats evil in baseball, but good in other places?” (Post #55)
Very good point. I’m sure many people would be surprised to hear that airplanes are actually MUCH safer than cars.
Edit: This sentence should say: guy who works his ass off on defense and dives left and right is more valuable than a guy that is positioned correctly on every play, even though they make the same number of plays.
Joe, I couldn’t really read all the comments – it would take too long, and it’s too painful to read people trying to make sense of Harold’s blog post…which is part of your point, it’s a post that makes no sense.
So I’ll just talk about your real point, which is that Harold’s blog post sort of ruined your relationship with him.
And what I think is the real problem is simple: your expectations of Harold have been a little bit too high. I’ll go back to the parallel you drew with the woman you saw Hook with: before you saw the movie, you “really liked her”, and I sort of take that as code for “maybe you guys had some kind of a future together”. When she liked Hook, you realized it was no go.
So, ok, that can happen, in fact I’ve had it happen to me. I don’t think it’s a particularly unique experience. But here’s the thing (to draw out this parallel a bit futher): There’s all kinds of friends. There’s the kind that you connect with on a deeper level, and there’s the kind that you maybe like to have a beer with and find entertaining on a more…superficial level. I think, for you, Harold may be one of those. And you know what? We need those friends too. Buck up, my man.
@Tod”First off, anyone well versed in statistical analysis knows OPS is far, far from an end-all, be-all measurement tool.”I think that is the point of Harold’s post. He feels OPS can be misleading at times, especially if the individual player’s situation is not considered.”A player who is walked frequently because his team is bad doesn’t have an inflated OPS.”Right. I shouldn’t have used “inflated” in my prior post. By definition OPS cannot be inflated. So let me rephrase my exegesis:- The OPS of the best offensive players on some bad teams are increased by the particular situations they face, e.g. they are pitched around more often than if they were on a good team.- If those players moved to a good team and faced different situations, their OPS would be lower.I think that is Harold’s point. OPS is influenced by team and situational factors so it shouldn’t be looked at as the defining measure of a player’s ability.
Do these comments not accept HTML codes? My formatting is screwy.
I have a story. I was in a Calculus II class in the spring semester of my Freshman year in College taught by a man named Roman Iviknajov. On the first day of class we walk into a lecture hall with about 300 desks and a syllabus lying on every one, presumably left there by his TA. After the bell to begin class rang, Roman proceeded to attempt to explain to us in a very thick, almost to an unintelligible degree, Russian accent and severely broken English that a syllabus was on our desk and to review it over the next two days. After that, I was completely lost. He attempted to give a 40 minute lecture on vectors, but I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. I understood a word or two here and there, but he wasn’t capable of communicating to the class well enough to convey the information he was trying to fill our heads with. After 40 minutes of sitting there trying to listen (OK, that’s a lie, I gave up after about 10 minutes), he stops and says, “Is there any questions?”, again in a nearly unintelligible Russian accent. A gentleman about 10 rows back raised his hand. Roman pointed to him and said, “Yes?”. He responded:
“Uhh, yeah. WHAT?!?!?!?!?”
I feel like that gentleman after reading Harold Reynolds’ post.
Bangerang Joe!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um8mMa5w41A
I’ve read and read and read and read, but I’ve never posted here. This time I can’t help myself: waaaay, you know, too funny! There are at any given time only a handful of great prose stylists writing in our land and, if one narrows said writing to one genre, i.e., sports, there are a mere thimbleful. Joe Posnanski is in that thimble, America! We’re lucky to read the columns, the blog, and the SI.com/print magazine pieces. In that latter category, Joe has stepped into the rarified air my friend Paul Zimmerman has occupied for 30 years. (Get well Z!) And that is a very high compliment indeed.
82 comments in and no one has even made a mention in passing of the name Dick Kaegel…
DICK KAEGEL
Is that not one of the most unfortunate names ever? It’s definitely in my top five.
If not unfortunate it’s at least uncomfortable.
Hook scarred me for life. I expected it totally blow, but it was truly horrible. If I am ever on death row, I want a continuous loop of Hook playing. It will make my last day on earth feel like a century.
Harold Reynolds is a worse writer than Jeff Francoeur.
At least, after reading Jeff’s blog, I know to fly Delta.
After reading Reynolds, I know less than when I started…..
I get sick when I fly ’cause I’m afraid of crashing into a large mountain. I don’t think Dramamine will help. (i hear oregano helps)
Jason Giambi and Adam Dunn have always had high OPS’s
Really OPS’s, not OPSes?
Prepare to flame away, just know that I really do like advanced statistics and use them.
Adam Dunn 2008:
79 Runs – 40 homers = 39 runs
122 walks + 122 hits – 23 doubles – 40 homers = 181 times reaching first by walk or hit
I bet he scored on half his doubles, we’ll call it 11 runs after hitting a double.
That leaves 28 runs scored on 181 times making it to just first base. That is 15.5%. Does that stack up to league average? If it doesn’t, maybe Harold Reynolds has a valid point and there is a bit of truth to the “clogging bases” theory. Even including his doubles, he only scores on 19.1% of times on base that he doesn’t hit a homer. Knowing how that stacks up to league average would be nice.
Ichiro in 2008 was 98/257 = 38.1% (runs on non-homers divided by times on base minus homers)
That’s almost exactly double Dunn’s percent. I would wager most people in MLB fall somewhere in the middle of those 2.
If this stat gains acceptance, I want it called the Harold Reynolds Base Clogging Percentage (HRBCP or BCP)!
Flame on!!!!!!!!!!
First off, this post is hilarious. I was literally laughing out loud.
AxDxMx: valid point, but you have to remember, a big part of HRBCP deals with the guys hitting behind the slugger in the lineup. From what I remember, the Reds didn’t have anyone to hit behind Dunn. Clearly, the player(s) hitting behind a certain guy have more of an impact on his HRBCP than the guy’s speed does.
Heh, the MEF reminds me of something I’ve had in the back of my mind for years. I generally rate movies on a one to five scale (one to four, Joe? Really? Scales without whole midpoints stink, bud.), and I’ve noticed that there are certain actors who, for me, tend to add a bit to everything in which they’re in. I enjoy a movie more simply because of their presence.
Michael Caine is my personal top guy there, as he adds a full star to everything. The Weather Man? A one-star movie if Caine weren’t in it, but I enjoyed his work in a relatively small role enough that he turned it into a two.
Can someone please email this to Michael Schur? Then, perhaps, FJM would be tempted back into existence. How can they resist that?
All I can think about is that “Billy Madison” scene. You know the one. “I am dumber for having listened to this. No points will be awarded and may God have mercy on your soul.” Or to that effect. Not a great movie, but I like it more now that it has equipped me to describe EXACTLY how I feel at this moment.
If a player hits 300 you know he`s hitting safely 30% of the time. If his OBP is high (400) you know he`s getting on 40% of the time. But OPS is little more than a stat geek fantasy player stat. Few if any GM`s or players pay any mind to it now nor will they ever. If you think I`m in error find one non fantasy player who finds value in it. It`s almost as bad as that garbage ESPN will run in thier bottom crawl of how some team has lost 6 straight Sunday games. Or how the NFL rates the number 1 defence or offence based on points. Just because Reynolds wrote in poorly does not make him wrong.
I very vaguely understand what Reynolds is trying to point out, actually, but….
If it takes twice as long to explain what someone said than what they said in the first place… god help him.
Travis Bickle, if batting average and on-base percentage are meaningful (then I assume you’d think slugging percentage is meaningful) and OBP and SLG are the statistics that comprise OPS, then why is OPS not meaningful?
I agree that OPS is useless from the stand point that anyone can simply use OBP and SLG to evaluate a player’s ability to get on base and hit for power. In fact, OPS blurs that picture. Clearly though, the components of OPS are excellent metrics in evaluating two of the most fundamentally important points of scoring runs – and thus winning games – which are not making outs and the accumulation of total bases.
Also, how is OPS a stat geek fantasy player stat? Most fantasy leagues don’t use OPS.
The single worst name in the history of the world is Rusty Kuntz.
Well, either that or Biggus Dickus from “Life of Brian.”
HR’s blog, and on-air commentary, suggest a fact that transcends sports: Most people do not want to hear new & accurate information about the world; they want their own views echoed back to them in an interesting way. (This is why HR continues to be employed as an analyst.) I think that’s significant because this is just as true in sports as in politics & government, the place where, y’know, important decisions are made.
In a sadly hopeful way, I am optimistic that the growth of the stat community foretells a time when public debate & decisions are more rational. A question: How many statheads respect Bush43 or Sarah Palin? If many, then…………………..nevermind.
Travis, what are you talking about? On-base percentage is a component of OPS, and on-base percentage measures the most important aspect of offensive baseball…how often you get out. Slugging percentage is a bit less important, but it is still worthwhile to know the power output of a particular player. Slightly fancier versions of these stats are wOBA (weighted on-base percentage, think fancy OBP) and ISO (isolated power, or slugging percentage-batting average.)
OPS isn’t perfect because in many cases it overrates a guy’s power. Take for example two hypothetical .800 OPS players…if one has a OBP/SLG of .300/.500 and the other’s is .400/.400, the second is actually helping his team more simply by not making as many outs. However, this does not mean that the stat should be junked and it certainly doesn’t mean that no one uses it. Just because it’s flawed doesn’t mean Harold is right, after all his reasoning is way off base. Even casual, non-statsy baseball fans are at least aware of OPS’s two components.
LAattorneySteve,
Save it, thanks.
Joe,
I too have experienced a number of problems trying to access the site in the last week or two.
I suggest, in accord with your wont, to put up a poll asking how many of your readers have experienced a similar difficulty.
When will we finally elect the first POTUS that is also a member of SABR?
I may not live to see it, without HGH.
Joe – you must’ve hit a chord with this one, because the responses range from the ridiculous to the sublime!!
Hoffman honed his salvage technique for Hook from the movie
ISHTAR. In the only memorable scene – Hoffman is attempting suicide via jumping off a building ledge in winter … he sets up Warren Beatty (who is on the ledge, next to him, trying to talk hoffman to come off the ledge)for a great line -
Hoffman – “I lied to you, i wasn’t living with a girlfriend .. i was living with my mother, i had no money and no job (looking to take the final leap)”
Beatty – (Convincingly) “Im proud of you. You accepted nothing when you could’ve taken less”
I have to find a positive in this, as I just had a good interaction with Harold over this Civil Rights Weekend- at least we all know he wrote that himself.
Many athletes have someone who write their blogs for them. If Harold had a ghost writer, the editor would have never let that go up. But you can’t necessarily edit Harold himself.
Travis B., I don’t understand your comment re: the NFL ranking the best offenses and defenses based on points scored/allowed. The whole purpose of the offense is score points, so why shouldn’t the best offense be the one that scores the most points? Or the best defense be the one that allows the fewest?
Jim K (#103):
Because the quality of a defense can directly lead to more poins for the offense, and vice versa. A great defense will consistently set up an offense with above-average field position, so they’ll be expected to score more points.
Case in point: the 2006 Bears tied for second in the league in points scored, yet they were mediocre at best.
(And, to add, the official NFL offensive and defensive ratings go by yards, not points; this is even worse.)
When I was a kid growing up in the 1980’s I remember looking at baseball cards and my dad showing me people who hit for high batting averages. My uncle gave me a box of unopened 1981 Donruss cards, and of course I opened them. I remember seeing some players from the Cardinals. For example, I had Garry Templeton’s card (just looked it up, he hit .314 in 1979 and .319 in 1980). My dad explained to me that he was an excellent player. The problem was he didn’t walk much, so while he had a similar batting average to Keith Hernandez in 1981 (.321), somehow I knew watching the games that Hernandez was a better player. Hernandez never had the classic first baseman’s power, but he usually walked 80-100 times a year.
I remember my father just kind of saw them as similar players, and somehow I knew Hernandez was more valuable. I can see now that much of Templeton’s offensive value was in batting average, so if he wasn’t hitting, he wasn’t valuable, whereas even in a year where Hernandez hit .255 (1978), he still was an above average contributor, in large part due to his 82 walks (OPS+ of 108). Meanwhile, when Templeton’s batting average dropped to .247 (1982), his OPS dropped to 79.
Statistics allowed me to explain these things a little better, and it makes me sad that people don’t come around to them. They are a tool, and just like any other tool, they can be misused.
As a teacher, I think the problem is that people hate science in this country. The scientific method that people should be learning in science courses should teach them to use evidence rather than anecdotal data to support evidence. However, as someone said before, if a player has awesome reflexes (like Carlos Beltran) and makes a ton of plays without effort, they don’t LOOK impressive, whereas Eric Byrnes diving and making a great catch does. Byrnes may make spectacular catches on things that Beltran would have read better and been in better position. A scout can tell you that, because they know what to look for, but the average baseball fan knows that Byrnes made three diving catches and Beltran doesn’t and therefore he’s more impressive of a player. Statistics help to give us a way to look at things objectively and that’s why I like having them available.
[...] [...]
I think HR should invent a time machine, go back to 1927, and call Babe Ruth an asshole for walking 137 times when he should’ve been driving in more runs.
Even though Earle Combs was a big asshole too. .414 OBP in 1927 and only 15 SB’s? How useless. Those Yankees must have scored like 100 runs on the season with that basecloggery.
I can’t believe I’m going to comment on post #105 but I think it kind of gets at a deeper problem that exists whenever someone “knows” something. The comparison of Byrnes and Beltran cannot be resolved by statistics or scouting or anything else. I firmly believe that Beltran is 1000x the ball player that Byrnes is but that guy who is excited about those three diving catches is looking for something that Beltran just won’t provide. If you look at them from a general managers position(assuming that his first priority is to make a winning team and not have someone test the strength of the outfield walls) Beltran is clearly superior for a number of reasons but to a casual observer no amount of “evidence,” anecdotal or objective, will counteract the enjoyment of watching Byrnes flop around like a fish. Both observers think they “know” something which is apparent to them and ignored or concealed from the other. The same is true about science and religion, neither side seems to be able to see that the other one has a different objective for looking at the same thing. While the scientist may find a million ways to prove that genesis is hogwash I think most believers get defensive not because they think that the universe was made in a week but that with it comes something that gives them comfort when dealing with questions unanswerable to science(meaning, purpose, basic philosophy). Scrutinizing it with semantic arguments obscures the point and makes everyone look foolish. Stats are their own religion too, one that shouldn’t be pushed on people that love the beauty of the game as it is without having to quantify things. Likewise people who love the beauty of the game (I’m talking to you HR) should avoid publicly trying to wrestle with logic.
Shouldn’t there be an expectations meter for everything? I’ve recently started watching The Wire, which was hyped to me by a whole lot of people. And it’s good – maybe borderline very good. But compared to all the raves I’ve heard about it, it’s falling short. Let’ say:
Expectation: 9
Result: 7.5
Experience: -1.5
This whole “Expectations Rating” thing could really be fertile ground for a new post…it doesn’t just apply to movies.
[...] great, immortal Joe Posnanski (love his work) got on him for the piece, and it prompted Sky Kalkman of Beyond the Box Score to tell everyone to give it a [...]
Not sure how the pitch count became a part of this but since I never liked HR – or at least never liked him as an analyst, since I never knew him any other way – I’ll just respond to the bit about hard counts making the braves long term success in the rotation. To that I say…
Perhaps, but then again perhaps not.
I always suspected it was their extra day of throwing between starts that was a Mazzone hallmark that helped keep them healthy. Which of course would mean that throwing more as opposed to less helped keep them healthy.
A third choice of course was that it was the result of astute FO types who selected all that natural talent and just let them pitch.
The point I liked about Ryan’s approach is that he was saying not to put everyone in a box (so true) and that babying people means they likely won’t be able to do more when you need them. That is so clearly true in all walks of life – spoil a child and they will have much harder times maturing, for example.
If you get someone who needs the babying – that special pitcher with the long history of injuries – then I imagine Ryan could switch gears, but he would prefer to not baby whenever possible.
That just seems like the absolute right approach to me for any endeavor. Of course if he really is thinking that he did it and so everyone should be able to do it as well, then he won’t be successful.
“The reason this hurts the ballclub is that they don’t have speed. It takes two hits to score them from first base, unless the hit is a home run, but home runs are part of the problem here because if you hit home runs then pitchers won’t pitch to you and the whole mess starts again. Speedy guys can score from first on one hit. If it’s a double. ”
I love this argument. I always wonder how flummoxed the arguer would get if you interjected during their rant and asked “how many hits does it take to score your “guy” from the dugout after he made an out”?
Sabrematricians screwed up when they started pushing OBP as a stat. Had they used the inverse stat and called it a player’s out percentage, it would be less misunderstood (for one thing it wouldn’t be directly competing with BA that way)
I should just start saying Tim Raines’ made an out 61.5% of the time vs. Andre Dawson’s 67.7%.
And Kingman 69.8% or something.
I just think it takes a special sort of ignoramous to imply that the ability to draw a walk under any situation is a bad thing, or that Adrian Gonzalez should just hack and change his plate approach cause his team stinks.
And oh HR, if you only knew the value of a walk, you’d know that Adam Dunn is WAY more valuable a hitter than Kingman was. HR would know this if he used something, like, OBP/OPS and not BA/RBI.
The worst thing about his post was that he was right that OPS isn’t a be-all, end-all. But his reasoning was so bad and assumed so many special scenarios that HR doesn’t even get partial credit.
Right when we need Michael Schur the most in the world of blogdom and he’s dark.
Okay, all you superior mathematical minds and statistical geniuses — please explain to me your justification for adding two fractions with completely different denominators.
(Don’t let the percentage signs allow you to forget or gloss over the logical fallacy — OBP is a fraction with number of Plate Appearances as a denominator, while SLG is a fraction with number of At Bats as a denominator.)
The sum of the percentage of men who eat apples and the percentage of women who don’t eat apples does not equal 100%, unlike the sum of the percentage of people who eat apples and the percentage of people who don’t eat apples. (I’m sure there are much better illustrations of the fallacy . . .)
How come nobody’s shouting from the rooftops for a redefinition of SLG, basing it on the player’s number of Plate Appearances? Or are they?
(The same should be done with Batting Average (AVG), which would redefine it either totally out of existence, or at least out of any kind of relevance at all, which of course, is it’s just fate.)
I am not a stats luddite; I swear this isn’t flamebait. But as OPS:
1) Is merely the addition of two ratios.
2) Attempts to characterize a player’s value in terms of bases gained versus outs made
Why is it more valid than Tom Boswell’s Total Average, which very literally is all bases made divided by all outs made?
I’ve run the numbers from last year, team OPS correlated approximately 89.51% to team runs scored per game (or runs scored, I’d have to pull up the Excel file from home).
Like I said before, it’s far from perfect, but given what a rough, raw stat it is, it’s effective, and simple for anyone to grasp.
Once again, no one is bashing HR for bashing OPS, it’s flawed, but the way HR attacked it is what’s ridiculous (especially since the main criticism of OPS is the undervaluing of OBP, which is the aspect HR attacked).
Who know Harold Reynolds and Dusty Baker were the same person!?
I’d rather have Bill Hicks at children’s parties. All the righteous anger, half the misogyny!
Now if someone wanted to tell me that, in part, the reason that Adam Dunn walks more than Ichiro is Dunn’s “ability” to swing and miss at pitches (yeah, I know it sounds counterintuitive, but bear with me), and they could back it up with some data, I would love to see that argument made.
Here is my reasoning. Dunn swings and misses at a lot higher % pitches than Ichiro. Early in counts a swing and a miss simply extends an at bat (rather than ends it), whereas swinging and hitting the ball (fair) ends the at bat. By utilizing his “ability” to swing and miss, Dunn has more walk opportunities than Ichiro, who by making better contact ends his at bat sooner and doesn’t get the opportunity to walk.
I don’t know if I made any more sense than HR, but I would like someone to prove or disprove this theory.
1) OPS, as others have mentioned, is not a preferred stat of stat folk. Do some research. Go to fangraphs, read moneyball, etc. wOBA, EQA–these stats were developed to replace dumb OPS.
2) I just read Reynolds post. He says zero about base clogging. zero. so why argue with it if he didn’t say it?
3) I am a huge fangraph nerd. I absolutely love their articles and their stats. i can spend days on that site without ever getting any info from the real world, or without ever watching a game for that matter.
However, there are certain supposedly stathead sites that drive me nuts. Fire Joe Morgan being one. Thank god they went off the internet. yeah, sure, they make some good points, and they can be extremely funny. But by taking these reporters way way way too seriously, they completely miss the point. Reynolds had a deadline. He took a few moments to jot down his thoughts on the situation-stat debate. Yes, it is disorganized. No, it is not an attack on the game, or on stat freaks.
4) Yes, Reynolds’ job is to casually discuss the game in the way that most people do, as if he were at a bar or a dinner table. His job is not serious analysis. He plays just as serious a role in baseball as any more analytical writer (as if any of them are analytical). That the supposedly analytical writers don’t recognize this is cause for concern.
MAF, direct quote from Reynolds:
“And at the end of the year their OBP is always going to be higher than most of the other guys on the team because they clog the bases.”
“Okay, all you superior mathematical minds and statistical geniuses — please explain to me your justification for adding two fractions with completely different denominators.”
Most people who try to measure performance with statistical analysis understand that OPS is a flawed metric, because it assumes that OBP and SLG are of equal value in run-scoring. Thus, it’s used as something of a superficial number and generally ignored when more in-depth analysis is done.
I agree that OPS and OPS+ get more attention than they deserve, but I also think it’s wrong to assume that ’stat freaks’ are the ones giving it that attention. Stat freaks are using VORP, WARP, EQA, and similar calculations that try to provide a balanced (and thus more accurate) assessment of a player’s performance.
Hey, leave Harold Reynolds alone. I like him.
Joe is right in saying that whoever wrote what was published under Reynolds’ name is a dope. Joe’s critics are right in saying that Harold Reynolds is an ex-ballplayer, not a statistician. I kind of agree with the critics. Save the carve-ups and the Fisking for all the rotten professional sports writers out there, those who do their job poorly, like a couple of those hanging around KC. Give guys like Reynolds, who are comparatively non-obnoxious (at least compared to McCarver or Kruk), a break.
[...] City Star columnist Joe Posnanski has a wonderfully off-the-wall reaction to Reynolds’ post in his own blog. Thanks to Deadspin for pointing these [...]
Juancho… man, you must love Harold Reynolds… Joe didn’t really attack him, he is actually helping the readers out by understanding what Harold has written. If ex-ball players write about stats and publish it, then they are as open to criticism as a statistician who writes about, say… brain surgery. So, put down the hater-trailmix and have a laugh. JEEZ… mean while Joe can just polish his awards and crank out another clever blog or column in his sleep.
@random
You’re thinking way to hard about this. OPS is just a toy that gives you a very rough estimation of what kind of a hitter a given player is. As with all stats, if you understand its’ limitations than you won’t get in trouble. Guys with low OPS’s are bad at both…Mid-one or the other or mediocre at both…High-good at both.
However, it’s far from a good measure, b/c OBP is by far the more valuable component. Any individual with a sophisticated understanding of sabermetrics wouldn’t use OPS to prove anything about a guy. wOBA or BABIP or batted ball percentages are better metrics.
@MAF
Sites like FJM.com existed because people within the baseball-writing community are often too lazy or too incompetent or whatever to actually look things up and learn about their game. They assume they’ve got it figured out or the people who do have things figured out, and therefore they bang out lazy, prepackaged stories…”David Eckstein is small, but golly he tries hard. That makes him good!” “ARod/Beltran/whoever isn’t clutch and isn’t a guy you want b/c they have no passion!” “Stats don’t tell you every thing about a player…look at W/L and RBI to learn about one!”
And so on…Whether HR or a crony wrote the blog post is irrelevent because it’s the same, unintelligent dribble that we’ve been hearing about for years. To make matters worse, HR/whoever crushes stats people without bothering to REALLY understand OPS and it’s limitations or even bothering to note that no one at fangraphs or BP or whatever will rely on OPS in the first place. Bottom line…HR/someone did a crappy job and needs to be called on it, or else said crappy product will find it’s way out there again.
Note—this is why Joe Poz is so friggin’ awesome…he’s got an open mind and sees baseball as it is, not as some kind of contest of whose grit is the gritiest.
Yeah, but come on. Reynolds is an ex-jock hired to give an ex-jock’s perspective on the game, which as we know is frequently very different from what us folks open to sabermetrics think.
There are guys going around presenting themselves as professional sports journalists right there in Kansas City, who do a terrible job. I think Joe ought to pick apart some of their garbage, rather than Fisk an (admittedly very dumb) article by a former player who is not a professional writer.
You’re right to say that Joe didn’t attack Reynolds personally; he’s too nice a guy to do that.
Then he should write from an ex-jock’s perspective. HR shouldn’t talk about stats or analysis if he is just going to dredge up tired and incorrect memes- you write crap, you should be called on it.
HR seems like a nice guy and I don’t find him unbearable like Steve Phillips. But he should either provide some interesting insider/ex-player insight or actually do some goddamn research. It does bug me somewhat that much of baseball is so anti-intellectual that a guy pulling a very substantial paycheck doesn’t feel it necessary to actually put in some work on the product he produces.
[...] Reynolds Presents: Enjoy it for what it’s worth”. And something even funnier? Joe Posnanski’s response. I didn’t out-do Posnanski, but this was my response to Harold’s piece (which can be [...]
I’ll still give Harold Reynolds credit for calling the end of the 2001 World Series before it happened(ball to the short outfield).
[...] post is dissected much better by Joe Posnanski, so we recommend that you read that piece, too, as well of all his other posts, which blow anything [...]