Okay, let me try to try to explain why I take this stuff so seriously:
First, in almost every walk of life we are presented now with a way of thinking that is based on being able to quantify everything we do and evaluate it – and evaluate us, as employees, students, citizens and voters (think of the sophisticated use of statistics by election campaigns of both parties, but especially by the last two Obama campaigns, identifying things like one’s favorite TV programs or favorite online games, then linking that to correlations with likely views on issues, then to creating policy proposals or at least campaign slogans to interest such voters and then contacting such voters at home one-by-one), and of course as consumers.
The whole overall impact of these statistical methods is to isolate us as individuals, evaluate us and then act accordingly toward us – evaluating our employment status or pay, advertising and selling us stuff (Facebook personal data and postings, and Google Search algorithms are key to sales today), and so on. It is not that the data being generated is not true or correct, but it tells only one sort of story and not others that are equally true. It tells about how we act as isolated individuals, but not how we act as parts of communities, workplaces, teams, classes, ethnicities, organizations, churches, synagogues, mosques or temples, labor unions or social movements, cultures, ethnicities, nationalities. For a system whose advocates see as their utopia the creation of a world with no nations, borders, belongings, cultural differences, etc. but only isolated individuals in a global marketplace (British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once said “There is no society, there are only individuals” – of course she still sent brave British men to fight and die in the Falklands War, and I am pretty sure that they thought they were fighting for something called “Britain”), all competing with one another as though they were forms of entrepreneurs, these statistical approaches are very useful.
In education, we see this approach used as part of the two most odious reforms of the past few decades: No Child Left Behind and Common Core, with their emphasis on standardized tests, whose results can be quantitatively evaluated to the nth degree, and which are equally disliked by left and right, by teachers, students and parents. But which are now being implemented in schools in Italy where I live, and across Europe as part of EU directives. The teachers’ lessons are to be individually evaluated, evaluation is the mantra, the sacred hymn of the administrative bureaucrat of today. Was today’s lesson in school or in college useful to the individual student to enable them to make more money in the marketplace? Um, it was on Shakespeare, you know…Yes, yes, but we must evaluate the lesson’s income-generating ability.
For scholars who publish academic articles, the key thing today is to publish only in peer-review journals and only those that have “impact factor” – an algorithmic value that is determined by how many other peer-reviewed journals have cited the articles published in that journal. Want to know why intellectuals for the past 20 years have mostly been talking to themselves, saying more and more about less and less? Because this is the only way they can keep their jobs. You want funding for your scientific research Prof. Einstein? How many peer-reviewed journal articles have you published in the past two years? Um, you know it takes a long time of meditating and working things out to come up with the Theory of Relativity to explain how the universe works. We are not interested in that Dr. Einstein, just the facts, and publish your empirical findings in a peer-review journal and make sure it has impact factor or no money for your work. And so on.
I have respect for the brilliance of the Obama campaigns, but this is a long way from mobilizing voters for change by talking with union members at work, church members at congregation picnics, block parties, or other places where Americans come together to be part of a community of other Americans and see politics as about common interest, not about their particular interest.
Which brings me to my two conclusion points:
1) These statistical methods are not bad in themselves, and often tell us stuff we need to know. But alone, they do not only give us only a one-sided view of for example what might motivate people to vote, or what makes a good teacher or student, but they also assist in the project of turning us into those people that the statistics show we are. That is, by isolating our activity on an individual basis, evaluating us as employees, as individual departments of a company (news is losing money, dumb sitcoms are profitable, let’s dumb-down the news or else cuts its budget and put the money into more sit-coms), as individual schools, teachers or students, as players in baseball, it puts us all into competition with one another, and also rewards our punishes us – with employment, pay, promotion, demotion, status, honors, grades, funding – one how well we fulfill or meet the measures of those specific statistical interests. So a teacher that inspires their students, or a colleague that others appreciate because of their ability to mediate and work out differences and conflicts among others on the work team in the office are not appreciated by these methods because these roles can’t be measured statistically. It may even be that productivity – students learn more, the whole team of colleagues works better, the team wins baseball games – improves because of their presence. But by definition that role cannot be seen or measured by these methods. In and of itself that is not a problem, EXCEPT IF WE DECIDE, ACCEPTING THE CLAIMS OF THE ADVOCATES OF THESE AS THE ONLY ACCEPTABLE SCIENTIFIC MEASURES OF EXCELLENCE, PERFORMANCE OR ABILITY, THAT THESE REALITIES DON’T EXIST BECAUSE IT CAN’T MEASURE THEM !! This is by definition a circular, and therefore illegitimate and invalid logic. That you create a system to measure A and not B, and then when you have an anomaly – Derek Jeter is called a great team leader by everyone who encounters him in baseball, but since his mere presence on a team can’t be measured, only his fielding range, and hitting, it doesn’t show up so you would just as soon have Albert Belle on the team instead, cause what effect could human relations possibly have on humans? It is not like anyone ever commits suicide out of lost love, or depression, or that some people engage in heroic sacrifice out of patriotism, or inspiration from a cause they believe in. That never happens. Right?
So because these methods wish the other realities that they don’t measure out of existence, and base rewards and punishments, attention and notice and analysis and concern only on those things they can measure, they literally force us into behaviors that make us conform ourselves to the abstract statistical model that they are using to measure our performance. So that is point 1.
2) The other issue is why these particular ways of measuring baseball performance should have become so important today, instead of decades ago. After all, baseball made do with batting average, home runs, RBI, runs, Wins, Losses, ERA for more than 100 years, and while we have discovered that this or that player was over- or under-appreciated for their time, I think most of us could agree that in seeing Cobb, Ruth, Mathewson, Johnson, Mays, Aaron, Williams, etc. as among the greatest ever, that baseball and fans mostly did pretty well, even if we could quibble with or adjust our own rating of this or that player here or there compared with another. But the idea that OPS or WAR settles the issue of who the best players were in order forever is absurd. What if Ty Cobb was so stressed out by having to play against black players that he had a nervous breakdown on the field in his rookie season? What if World War Two had not happened and the Cold War never occurred and Ted Williams had played those seasons? What if instead Babe Ruth had been drafted and gassed in World War One? What if there had been a cure for Addie Joss’ meningitis? What if Curt Flood had played today? Or Satchel Paige, or Josh Gibson? Who the f..knows? Taking players out of their actual team, historical, cultural time and place as a context is silly, and of course a lot of fun. But to think that it can REALLY be done, by WAR, instead of done as part of baseball fans’ perennial way of arguing about the game and enjoying it, as we do at WIS, is counter-productive, which is not to say to ban the use of WAR, but instead to think that those who like to use it to evaluate players have their method to do so, but the rest of us are not under an obligation to genuflect at the altar of that stat or any other. There are no clutch hitters? All sorts of new statistical approaches show that. I will tell you what, you get the best hitter you can find using WAR and give me David Ortiz, each of our teams’ will bat down 2 runs with people on first and second and two outs.
So why are these statistical methods happening now? Marx – I don’t bring him up for political reasons here but because I have learned so much reading him over the years – would tell us that whenever we see a new set of ideas arising in society it is because the way people work, the social relations of production as Marx called them, have changed. Scientists today are working on the idea that our whole universe is actually a holographic projection (put the keywords “holographic universe” in Google or YouTube and you will see that this is increasingly replacing Stephen Hawkings’ previous view of black holes swallowing all light and information as the main theory of how things work) – then, Marx would say, probably a lot of people are doing kinds of work with simulations and with writing software and the like, maybe making video games, and other forms of work involving the digital creation of simulated worlds. So the thinking about the universe of such a society will be that it is a big simulation, just as in the Feudal Middle Ages people saw Heaven as a fixed hierarchy of statuses – God, Angels, etc. or in Newton’s time they saw the universe as a mechanical device that operated with regularity.
So what has changed in the social relations of production in baseball? Free agency and enormous pay for players. Take those two things and a lot of what has happened in the world baseball follows: the incentives for steroids – since to make an extra $5000 in the time of Ball Four by Jim Bouton maybe you would cut some corners, but to make $5 million you are willing to do a lot more. Or the concern to rest pitchers, since they are now a big investment, not just an employee, they become a form of fixed capital expense. No risking them. So managers who believe in complete games, or long relievers or whatever still won’t risk it, because they are breaking company property if they screw up, and property worth millions. And then there is Fantasy and Rotisserie Baseball. John Thorne, the baseball writer has said, correctly, even exactly: “When you root not for a locale, but for a range of individual players on different teams, you are not rooting for a team, you are rooting for an investment portfolio” (The Tenth Inning, Ken Burns’ Baseball documentary, Special Features – interviews on Rotisserie Baseball).
An investment portfolio, that is what teams too often see themselves as now, and too often our industrial and commercial companies see themselves as such as well – look up the controversy engulfing Yahoo in recent months and the hedge fund insisting it divest of its core business , or the great report by Reuters journalists on how corporate buybacks have now exceeded money spent by US companies on research and development, on product, or on expanding the business – “The Cannibalized Company” – Google that title and then worry about the future of US Business.
Baseball players, like increasingly all of us, are being told to “do what they do just to be nothing more than something they invest in” (Bob Dylan “It’s Alright Ma” – 1965). Free agency means they don’t stay on the same team for most of their careers anymore, so their role on a specific team seems irrelevant to evaluating them as players. They are individual entrepreneurs in a marketplace, or seem to be, so the statistical measures that historically and traditionally measure their role as a team player – wins, RBI, no longer interest, especially since their pay is not based on helping to win the World Series for their team (yes, I am talking to you Johnny Cueto !) but presumably on how well they did according to factors that their agent can show their prospective new team’s GM as an individual player isolated completely (if we buy what the stats are showing) from their context of playing on a team in the first place. Indeed, just like national borders and laws and regulations in the economy or the global marketplace (the Economist magazine continues to support completely open borders), the fact that players play on teams, just as workers or businesses are based in countries, is seen as an unfortunate distortion of the market, not as the whole point of the economy or baseball respectively.
Wait, what do I mean? The whole point of the economy is to make more money, and the national interest is of no relevance and any national government activity is always called “intervention” into the supposedly external marketplace no?
Answer: quick, someone tell me the name of Adam Smith’s famous book that founded modern capitalist economics.
So there we are, we have these stats, which are useful in many ways, because players are less attached to teams and make a hell of a lot of money. The need to evaluate players separately from teams is important financially to teams and players. And one could make the argument that it is crucial to winning, except that I don’t believe it and here is my closing argument:
We know that so many players are being trained from a very young age in Latin American countries by Major League team baseball academies and then signed to contracts if they pan out because it costs less to train 100 kids in the Dominican Republic than to train 2 in Harlem, Detroit, Houston or Terre Haute, Indiana. This is a big reason why the numbers of US-born African Americans has fallen to so few. But let’s remember that “Moneyball” is called that for a good reason: these statistics are about investment portfolios, not players. They are not measuring talent, but cost-effectiveness. The players of course are often among the greatest in the game. But there is no reason to think that suddenly there are no African American players that are equally talented. It just costs more to develop them, whereas in the 1950 and 1960s the former Negro League players were the cost-effective ones.
In agriculture, there are at least two different measures of productivity: one is output per worker-hour cost – how much grain is produced in an hour of work and how much does it cost. By that standard, not surprisingly, US large-scale, highly automated agribusiness (automated harvesters, petroleum-based fertilizer etc.) is the most productive. Moneygrain we could call it. But another measure is output per acre (or hectare). And the last time I looked Japanese or Scandinavian family farms were the most productive. They get the most out of the soil, in the real world, not the accounting page. Both are legitimate ways to measure productivity, as is the difference between rice and wheat say, since rice is so productive that you can support the populations of China on it, in a country with limited arable land, whereas wheat needs more room and indeed we, with our vast expanses of fertile land, grow a lot of it on the Plains. Two realities, both true, different measures.
So I am not arguing that RBI is a better measure of how good a hitter is than say OPS – it almost certainly is not, though the RBI records are held by people like Gehrig and Hack Wilson, not by Denny Doyle or Bucky Dent, so, since our real standard for judging ANY system of measure is how well it seems to explain the phenomena that we see in the world around us. If a stat tells us that Bucky Dent was a better hitter than Lou Gehrig, we would rightly throw it out. Well, if a stat tells us that Dante Bichette, or Sammy Sosa, or Jose Canseco or Rico Petrocelli were better hitters than David Ortiz was in 2004 when his OPS was .983 – and if you look for batters with higher OPS in seasons you find these and many others – and so you should want one of them up in 2004 against the Yankees in the ALCS, I would support that statistic ---- because I am a Yankees fan ! Don’t take Ortiz, the data show that Danny Tartabull in 1991 was a better hitter than 2004 Ortiz, are you crazy? Go with Tartabull, a sure winner.
RBI are limited as a method of understanding what is happening, but they also measure actual runs driven in in actual games played, not what OPS measures which is, how effective the batter would have been had on some generic team his teammates been on base with a certain regularity - it does not measure that or ask that, I know, but in a sense, if you want to argue that the hits and walks that a hitter got when no one was on base were as or more important than the ones hhee got when they were on base, that is what you are saying, at least if we care about having that player on a team because we want to score runs. So we are measuring the imaginary runs that should have been driven in or scored, not the ones that actually were. Yet how do we know that this same hitter would have gotten those hits in a different situation - maybe the pitcher was not bearing down because no one was on base in a blowout because the supposedly better hitter - let's call him Mr. OPS -played for a last-place team, and so got some easier HRs to make his team lose only by 10-1, while Mr. RBI on a pennant-winner had to deal with the best pitchers in the 9th inning in close games with the pennant on the line. And got the job done, but got fewer hits and overall bases than Mr. OPS. What are we measuring really?
And if we see that Steve Carlton wins 27 games for a last-place team, how hard is it evaluate that compared to say Catfish Hunter winning (I forget so bear with me) 21 for a World Series team? Carlton was clearly better (I cherish Catfish and his memory and Carlton is a weirdo, but facts are facts). Does WHIP tell us that? If it does, great, let's find out how much better, if it doesn't, let's include it as one side of the issue, but admit that seeing Carlton pitch for Oakland in 1972 would have been fun. Heh, let's start an early 70s prog and find out.
I am arguing that theories and methods of measurement are both descriptive and prescriptive – they describe a certain reality, though every method of measurement will leave some things out – Imre Lakatos’ anomalies, and should acknowledge these as legitimate parts of the reality being studied, needing other methods, but present as the limits and boundaries of the knowledge we can get from any given one, and theories and methods of measuring or analyzing things are prescriptive, they are acting, whether intended to or not, to make reality appear as A instead of B, of prescribing a certain set of behaviors that it does highlight as being those that are important for making important decisions.
Thinking should not be locked into one or another box. As Gareth Morgan, in the best book ever written on managing companies, “Images of Organization” explains, the metaphors we use for setting up an organization, running one, acting in the real world, have real world effects. Neoclassical economics and the statistical methods that have accompanied its hegemony in the past 35 years certainly has. But if we try to make the world fit into the boundaries of a system of thought, instead of acknowledging that all of our ways of understanding the world are limited since they look closely at some things and not others (think of Google Earth and how you can see cars parked in front of your house or see the whole of North America, but not both – yes you can split the screen but in any case you can only focus on one or the other at a given moment, yet both are “true” or accurate pictures; and b) need to be judged by us, as tools to be used by us as human actors and thinkers, not be our judges or masters by which we are evaluated (“The Sabbath was made for man” said Jesus, “not man for the Sabbath” – human tools and institutions are to serve humans, not the other way around), and experience of the real world is what we want explained. The best method, best statistic, best theory or idea is that which best explains what we see happen in the world around us, knowing that it is not telling us everything and can’t be the only one we use to explain the world.
Instead if we rely only on methods that tell us that what we see around us is not happening, or that deny that they can even be judged based on whether they explain what is really happening or not. Think of the endless promises of politicians that globalization and free trade create jobs – explain why selling the same product to someone in Japan should create more jobs than selling it in Kansas City, all other things being equal, and at the same time, if our selling a product there creates jobs, what does their selling products to us that compete with one we make do in Japan and in Kansas City? Yet the idea that trade can also eliminate jobs is negated time after time, so what we all know, that industries have closed down, etc. instead of being explained, is ignored as an anomaly by a method designed to show how much better trade is, not whether it is, and by what criteria, nor are what kind of jobs, how well they pay, what job security and quality they produce, of any measurable interest or significance, and so are ignored as unscientific questions.
So the stakes are high, despite the seemingly trivial nature of arguing about baseball statistics, hence my taking the time and effort to go through these things in my own way in these Forum pages the past few days.
I for one consider the basic units of analysis of baseball to be baseball teams, seasons, and games, and once we have these contexts, we have the additional unit of individual players to analyze which is fun, and also of great economic importance to teams and players and agents, but also should remain fun.