Showing posts with label baseball statistics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label baseball statistics. Show all posts

July 10, 2007

More of the Rise of the Mulatto Elite

The starting catcher for the National League All-Star team tonight is my new favorite baseball player, Russell Martin of the Dodgers. He's an example of a phenomenon I've been noticing. As African-American culture becomes more narrowly focused on a few areas, such as football and basketball but not baseball, that leaves big openings for part-black people raised in white culture. Martin's father was an African-American and his mother a white Quebecois. He spent a few years of his childhood living in Paris.

Catching is a highly technical skill, unlike playing the outfield where sheer footspeed matters most. So, as African Americans have lost interest in baseball, the number of African Americans catchers has dropped particularly sharply. In Bill James' second version of his Baseball Historical Abstract covering 1875-2000, there are only four African American catchers among the top 100 catchers, and those from fairly early after integration (Ray Campanella, who had an Italian father, Elston Howard, John Roseboro, and Earl Battey). In contrast there are 27 African American centerfielders (the position demanding the most speed) among the top 100.

So, it's not surprising that a star catcher with some black descent will have grown up in a largely white cultural milieu.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

July 9, 2007

Ol' times there are ne'er forgotten

In Los Angeles, the main (and perhaps only) manifestation of traditionalism is that elderly sportscasters and broadcasters are seldom put out to pasture. The airwaves are full of decrepit old gents from my childhood. For example, Chick Hearn, the Lakers' basketball broadcaster, dropped dead in harness at about age 85. Today, during his Dodger broadcast, Vin Scully told a story about something Hall of Famer Frankie Frisch (who first played in the majors in 1919) told him in 1950 or 1951 when Vin was announcing Dodger games from Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, which was torn down after the Dodgers left in 1957. Now, that's continuity.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

July 3, 2007

Juan Pierre's bunt double and a new baseball statistic

I went to the Dodgers baseball game tonight and saw something extremely rare in baseball: a bunt double. Speedy Dodger centerfielder Juan Pierre tried to dribble a bunt down the third baseline for a single, but popped it up over the head of charging Braves third baseman Chipper Jones. The mishit bunt landed a little past third base and trickled off into foul ground. Pierre reached second easily.

Here's a YouTube of Pierre getting a bunt double in an earlier season, although in the video he appears to be intentionally bunting the ball hard into left field. What I saw was a pure bunt executed poorly, but Pierre appeared to be the least surprised person in the stadium and exploited his luck nicely.

By the way, young Dodger catcher Russell Martin, who will start the All-Star Game a week from now, looked great with four hits and non-stop hustle on the basepaths.

That reminds me of a baseball statistic that doesn't exist, but should. Hitters' statistics are biased by the home ballpark they play half of their games in, so honors like Most Valuable Player and the All-Star Game often go to guys who just happened to be at the race place at the right time to drive in 130 runs. Everybody knows that Colorado Rockies hitters aren't as good as their eye-popping statistics suggest because of the mile-high elevation means fly balls travel farther and faster due to less wind drag, but it's hard to keep track of how the other 29 parks bias statistics. This is especially true because park factor can change from year to year. For example, Wrigley Field in Chicago is normally a terrific hitter's park because on hot days the wind from the south blows out to left field, turning outs into homers. But, in the summer of 1992, it was almost never hot in Chicago due to the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines the previous year spewing ash into the atmosphere.

Even statistically adjusting batters' performance for park factor (runs scored at home / runs scored away) has its problems because it's not all that stable: e.g., Dodger Stadium jumped from 25th best hitter's park to 10th best from 2005 to 2006. Was this due to some objective change in hitting conditions in Dodger Stadium or just because of luck (e.g., pitchers having worse outings at Dodger Stadium than in away games)?

On the other hand, dedicated fans can typically tell you with a lot of accuracy who is the most valuable player on their own team, not from statistics, but from the number of times he was the best or almost the best player in the game. For example, Russell Martin was clearly the best player on the field last night. If I attended, watched or listened to Vin Scully (now in his 58th year announcing Dodger games!) every night, I'd have pretty accurate impressions of who the best player on the Dodgers was, and by how big a margin.

This approach is independent of park factors. For example, back when the Houston Astros played in the old Astrodome, one of the worst hitters parks in history, they came up with a long string of terrific players like Jimmy Wynn, Rusty Staub, Cesar Cedeno, Bob Watson, and Jose Cruz. But only Joe Morgan made the Hall of Fame ... because he got traded to Cincinnati, a reasonable hitter's park. But Astro fans knew how good these guys were because they saw them holding their own night after night against competition who came to town with flashier statistics..

This kind of relative game analysis could be institutionalized. Right after the end of hockey games, the announcer traditionally proclaims the top three players in the night's games. I presume a few sportswriters make up the list. This could become an entertaining tradition in baseball as well. You'd then sum the game rankings over the entire season. (It would be best to rank all the players in the game, to prevent low-average sluggers from getting an unfair boost by just including games when they were in the top 3 and leaving out games when they didn't do anything.)

Or, you could do calculate the best players in each game statistically, giving a point for every total base and on-base, as in the OPS average.

Still, a subjective ranking for each game could be useful. For example, I followed the Dodgers closely in the 1971 pennant race, and it was clear that 38-year-old shortstop Maury Wills was their most valuable player, even though his statistics were merely average (.281-3-44 and 15 stolen bases). Night after night down the stretch he made the big plays that made him among the best players in many crucial games. That year he was well-recognized for his contributions, finishing 6th in the league in the MVP voting, but he was lucky because he was a famous old player with the spotlight of a pennant race on him, so the national media heard about his contributions. Less well known players could benefit from some kind of game-by-game ranking system.

It's a little bit like how you rate movie character actors. Paul Giamatti, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Frances McDormand, and Gary Oldman don't often get the big role that every star in Hollywood wants, or the best screenplays or best directors, but in whatever movie they are in, they more than hold their own relative to the other actors. For example, in 2005, Catherine Keener out-acted Sean Penn in The Interpreter, and held her own with Daniel Day-Lewis in the Ballad of Jack and Rose, Hoffman in Capote, and Steve Carrell in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. That's a pretty good year.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

June 27, 2007

Do you do voodoo?

Confirming that the 1989 comedy "Major League," with Dennis Haysbert as Pedro Cerrano, the slugger who keeps a Santeria shrine in his locker, was ahead of its time, the LA Times reports:

Religion under wraps
Santeria finds a following among baseball's Latin American players, who'd rather not discuss it for fear of misperceptions.
By Kevin Baxter Times Staff Writer

CHICAGO — On a shelf in the office of Chicago White Sox Manager Ozzie Guillen, mixed in among the family photos, the Roberto Clemente bobblehead and the Napoleon Dynamite figurine, are four small but intimidating religious icons.

"If you see my saints, you'll be like 'Golly, they're ugly,' " Guillen had said before inviting a visitor to come in. "They've got blood. They've got feathers. You go to the Catholic church, the [saints] have got real nice clothes.

"My religion, you see a lot of different things you never see."

Guillen's religion is Santeria, a largely misunderstood Afro-Cuba spiritual tradition that incorporates the worship of orisha — multidimensional beings who represent the forces of nature — with beliefs of the Yoruba and Bantu people of Africa and elements of Roman Catholicism. And Guillen, born in Venezuela, is one of a growing number of Latin American players, managers and coaches who are followers of the faith.

How many major leaguers have converted to Santeria is impossible to say because most, aware of the stigma the religion has in the United States, refuse to talk about their faith.

"It's like the forbidden fruit," said one player. "It's something personal. It's something you don't talk about."

But among those who have acknowledged their devotion are Angels pitcher Francisco Rodriguez and Florida Marlins third baseman Miguel Cabrera — both Venezuelan — and the White Sox's Cuban-born pitcher Jose Contreras, all of whom have been All-Stars and won World Series rings. Others, such as Cincinnati Reds shortstop Alex Gonzalez and Chicago Cubs infielder Ronny Cedeno, have experimented with it.

With all that spiritual power on his side, you'd think Ozzie Guillen could have gotten a few more walks during his playing career. (Guillen's name has become a by-word for a player who will not take a base-on-balls no matter how much the team needs it.)

Anyway, it's all just part of the vibrant future we Americans have to look forward to.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

June 21, 2007

Where are the famous old gay baseball players?

One of those dog-that-didn't-bark questions is why, despite the vast number of books written about baseball players, I have never heard of a single prominent player in history who sounded like he probably was homosexual. There are currently 750 major league baseball players. There must have been at least 10,000 major league ballplayers over the last 130 years

Two really obscure players -- Glenn Burke (who died of AIDS in 1995) and Billy Bean (not the celebrated "Moneyball" general manager of Oakland -- that's Billy Beane) -- came out of the closest, but that's it for admitted homosexuals in the history of big league baseball. (In contrast, AIDS claimed the lives of numerous male figure skaters).

But what about famous players? Maybe 1,000 ballplayers in history would be more or less "famous" and thus would be subject to constant reminiscences and research.

The only rumor I've heard about about a prominent player of the past being gay reflected desperation more than evidence. A New York gossip columnist claimed Sandy Koufax was gay, which would be a surprise to his live-in girlfriend (who is First Lady Laura Bush's old college roommate), his two ex-wives, and his neighbors in all the small, conservative rural towns the Jewish, Brooklyn-bred Koufax has chosen to live in in Idaho, Maine, North Carolina, and Oregon since he retired from the LA Dodgers in 1966. Koufax denounced the rumor, then had to put up with a lot of tsk-tsking about how backward baseball players are not to come out of the closet.

What about famous players who displayed traits that correlate to some degree with homosexuality? There aren't many.

For example, I looked up the life story of Earl Averill, one of the lesser Hall of Famers, who played centerfield for the 1930s Cleveland Indians. Why? Because he hadn't played baseball professionally until he was 24. Instead, among other jobs, he'd worked as a florist, a job with an above-average concentration of gay men. Maybe flower-arranging was his true passion and hitting a ball with a stick was just something he did to make money?

But, it appears that he'd been a florist mostly because he'd married young and he needed a sure paycheck. He and his wife were married for half a century and after he retired together they long ran the Earl Averill Motel in his hometown of Snohomish, Washington. His son Earl Jr. played in the majors, too. I can say with a high degree of certainty that Earl Averill wasn't gay.

Now, you are probably saying, "Okay, but what do we really know about individual ballplayers of long ago?" Actually, we know quite a lot. At least since Jim Bouton's 1971 bestseller Ball Four, there's been a big market for tell-all baseball books. Reporters constantly interview cranky old retired baseball players, who often love to gossip maliciously about their contemporaries.

Compare baseball to a more obscure sport, tennis.

In contrast, we know that the greatest tennis player of the 1920s, Bill Tilden, was a homosexual pedophile. He was arrested twice in the 1940s for corrupting minors and served a prison term, so it was in all the papers at the time. He is a minor character in Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel Lolita, where Bill Tilden is called "Ned Litam:"


"I tried to teach her to play tennis so we might have more amusements in common; but although I had been a good player in my prime, I proved to be hopeless as a teacher; and so, in California, I got her to take a number of very expensive lessons with a famous coach, a husky, wrinkled old-timer, with a harem of ball boys; he looked an awful wreck off the court, but now and then, when, in the course of a lesson, to keep up the exchange, he would put out as it were an exquisite spring blossom of a stroke and twang the ball back to his pupil, that divine delicacy of absolute power made me recall that, thirty years before, I had seen him in Cannes demolish the great Gobbert!"

Frank Deford, Sports Illustrated's top writer, wrote a frank biography of Tilden back in 1976 precisely because, as he wrote in SI at the time, so few famous male athletes are gay.

Also, Baron Gottfried von Cramm, the leading German tennis player of the 1930s, who played a famous match against American Don Budge in the 1937 Davis Cup, was so publicly flaming in manner that Hitler couldn't make up his mind whether to promote the tall blond von Cramm as the perfect Aryan hero or arrest him for his affair with a Jewish male actor.

I'm not saying there have not been any famous gay baseball players, but I am estimating that less than 1.0% of the top 1000 players of the past were homosexual.

Update: Commenters suggest a fairly prominent name in baseball history who sounds plausible, so if you are interested, check the comments.

June 20, 2007

Speak of the Devil

The day after I accused sainted baseball statistics maven Bill James of intentionally ignoring the steroids outbreak of the 1990s in his 1,000 page 2001 book The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, the WSJ interviews James in his Fenway Park office (he's been a paid insider since 2002):


His theory on baseball and steroids may or may not be odd, but it is certainly not in vogue. "I don't know," he says, when asked if steroids account for the surge in home runs in the late 1990s. "Speaking globally . . . the reality is that there are many changes in the game which could cause batting numbers to jump. And no one really knows to what extent the increase is a consequence of steroids. I strongly suspect that the influence of steroids on hitting numbers is greatly overstated by the public." Other factors include ballpark dimensions and bat design. "I've never understood why nobody writes about it, but the bats are very different now than they were 20 years ago," Mr. James says, with different woods and finishes. "[Barry] Bonds's bats are still different from everybody else's," he notes.


He's being disingenuous. Of course lots of factors contributed to the home run surge, including all the recent retro-design parks that are built like old hitters parks such as Ebbetts Field. And everybody took up weightlifting, which is perfectly admirable as long as they don't use performance-enhancing drugs. (Honus Wagner was the greatest player of the first decade of the 20th Century because he was just about the only player of his era to lift weights.)

But we now know that many of the historic seasons of the the last two decades were drug-tainted, starting with Jose Canseco's 1988, when he became the first player to hit 40 homers and steal 40 bases, and including the late Ken Caminiti's MVP surge in the second half of 1996, McGwire's (and likely Sosa's) famous 1998 homer binge, Jason Giambi's monster MVP season in 2000, and Barry Bonds' surrealistic seasons in this decade. (Here's my 2004 American Conservative article on steroids.)

This wasn't a surprise. Thomas Boswell accused Canseco in a Washington Post column in October 1988 of taking steroids. A baseball agent told me in the early 1990s that Canseco was the "Typhoid Mary of steroids."

How can we be sure if any recent MVPs and Cy Young award winners were clean? Okay, skinny guys like Ichiro Suzuki and Jack McDowell, sure, and unimposing guys like Greg Maddux, and guys who didn't lift weights, like Ken Griffey Jr.. But for lots of the other guys, who knows?

James had to know that, say, Barry Bonds suddenly having in 2001 the greatest season (according to James' own Win Shares metric) since Babe Ruth his .393 in 1923 was ridiculous, new bat or not. But, making a stink about steroids wouldn't have done James' chances of getting hired by a big league team like the Red Sox much good.

I suspect that James was able to kid himself that using steroids was just like pitchers (such as Hall of Famer Gaylord Perry) throwing the spitball (which had been outlawed in 1920, a couple of decades before Perry's birth). Everybody knew Perry was throwing the spitter, but the baseball ethos is the opposite of golf, where players call penalties on themselves. In baseball, it's the umpires' job, not yours, to catch you cheating.

But steroids aren't spitballs. They have serious side effects on the players' health, and on their mood, which affects people around them. When, say, the Canseco twins beat up people in a nightclub in the throes of 'roid rage, that's not at all like the spitter.

By the way, I discovered in James' Historical Abstract a new explanation for Stephen Jay Gould's famous observation that in the early decades of baseball there was more disparity between the best players and the average player (although there have been a lot of super-spectacular seasons since 1993). Gould, being an intellectual, attributed it to intellectual disparities -- Wagner, Cobb, Ruth, etc. knew how to do things that other players didn't yet know how to do.

There's some truth to that. Ruth, for example, taught himself how to take a huge uppercut swing to hit home runs, which gave him a big lead over the rest of the league. Cobb pointed out that Ruth was allowed to get away with this because he was a pitcher -- if he'd been a hitter, his manager would have forced him to swing level to hit line drives like everybody else. But nobody cared what a pitcher did when fooling around in batting practice.

A few years earlier during the heart of the dead ball era, right-handed slugger Gavvy Cravath figured out how to hit opposite field home runs over the short right field fence in Philadelphia, hitting a record 62 in three seasons. Almost everybody knows how to hit opposite field homers today, but Cravath's breakthrough wasn't followed up on for decades.

Another reason for the disparity is that until Branch Rickey built the farm system, the proportion of the top players in the major leagues wasn't as high so the quality of the average player was lower. Cravath spent two of his peak years in the minors. Lefty Grove, maybe the greatest pitcher ever, spent five years playing for an independent minor league team in Baltimore. West Coast athletes often spent years in the Pacific Coast League -- for example, Joe DiMaggio spent three seasons from age 19-21 with his hometown San Francisco Seals when he was no doubt perfectly ready for the majors, as Ken Griffey Jr. was at the same age. But the Seals were an independent team, not a farm team, and thus didn't sell DiMaggio until they got a fair price.

But, a new reason I hadn't thought about before was that in the old days only superstars could afford to devote their offseasons to staying in shape (or just relaxing and getting recharged for the coming season). The average player had to get a job. When Ruth had a lousy 1925 season at age 30 due to hedonism, many observers assumed he was washed up. Instead, he hired a personal trainer and spent his winters tossing medicine balls around in a gym (or whatever it was they did back then for exercise). He came back to enjoy nine more spectacular seasons, including hitting 60 homers in 1927. If you spent October through February working in a mill or lifting crates on a loading dock, it was hard to compete in the summer with a superstar.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

June 19, 2007

Bill James is NOT perfect!

I bought baseball statistical analyst Bill James's New Historical Baseball Abstract for $3.99, which is a pretty good deal for a 1,000 page book. Over 600 pages are devoted to ranking from #1 to #100 the top players at all nine positions. I was explaining to my wife that was way too many players, because when he gets past about #60, nobody has heard of these guys. To prove this, I randomly opened to the back of the second baseman section and started reading off names to prove to her how nobody had ever heard of any of these guys

"Like, who ever heard of #78, Juan Samuel? I mean, I guess I have -- fast, led the league in triples all the time when he was young, never took a walk, a disappointing career despite some tremendous skills. Or #79 Horace Clark? Well, he wore glasses for the Yankees 40 years ago. I had his baseball card. #80 Johnny Ray? Decent hitter but got slow..."

And on I went. While I was ranting about how much I hate #87 Jorge Orta because Lasorda pinch-hit him for Fernando Valenzuela in the 7th inning of the last game of the 1982 season with men on base and he grounded out weakly, likely a worse at-bat than Fernando would have managed, so Fernando had to come out and the reliever gave up a pennant-losing homer to Joe Morgan, I had a sudden revelation about my half-vast knowledge of baseball statistics: "Oh my God, I've wasted my life!"

Anyway, I had another revelation, like Sherif Ali's in "Lawrence of Arabia" when he realizes Awrence is not perfect. Bill James's book goes up through the 1999 season, after the McGwire-Sosa homer orgy of 1998, but as far as I can tell, the word "steroids" only appears once in its 1000 pages, in an afterword mentioning that Ken Caminiti had admitted his 1996 MVP season was due to drugs. I mean, I knew in 1993 that steroids were driving up batting statistics, so why didn't James? And if he did, why didn't he mention it?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer