I just finished Michael Lewis’s terrific book about Billy Beane, the Oakland A’s general manager who consistently fields a great team with one of the lowest payrolls in the major leagues. The A’s are baseball commissioner Bud Selig’s particular albatross. Selig harps on the need for more baseball socialism (“revenue-sharing”) because of the alleged “inability of small market teams to compete,” when in fact it is only incompetently managed small market teams who can’t, Selig’s own Milwaukee Brewers prominent among them. Beane must drive him to drink. Now to anyone who has played fantasy baseball and read Bill James, which seems to be half of the male portion of the blogosphere, how to put together a winning baseball team with little money is no secret. You exploit inefficiencies, which is to say, you take advantage of the fact that many baseball executives are stupid. Certain traits are overvalued by other teams, like sculpted physiques or blazing speed or cannon arms. These don’t translate very well into on-field success anyway, and you ignore them. Other, more useful traits, like a deceptive pitching motion or the ability to draw walks, are undervalued, and these are what you look for.

The golden rule is that past performance indicates future performance, and ugly doesn’t count. Essentially you work from the spreadsheet instead of the scouting report. Scouts hate that. So do fans, stat geeks like me excepted, because it slights any knowledge of the game that comes from actually watching it. When I played in a fantasy league I would regularly tell other owners that they watched too much baseball, and that they needed to stop believing their own eyes. I was delighted to note that Beane often tells his scouts the same thing.

Beane himself is a former major-league player and hot prospect of exactly the type that he has trained himself, and his staff, to ignore. He was a high-school “tools” player, the type who looks better playing than he actually plays, and so highly regarded that many scouts and executives wanted to draft him first in his class, ahead of such future luminaries as Darryl Strawberry. But Beane’s tools never translated into major-league success. By his own account, his temper destroyed him as a player: he couldn’t cope with failure, and one bad at-bat would wreck his game, or his week.

In other words, Beane, instead of hiring in his own image, has become a brilliant success by doing the opposite. If there are other executives who have done this, I don’t know who they are.

(Dr. Manhattan reviews the book at greater length.)

(Update: Floyd McWilliams comments.)

(Update: Robert Birnbaum has an interesting interview with Lewis.)

It’s been a while since I’ve thrown a sop to my baseball-oriented readers and the season is under way, so I’m gonna make it up to you with a new statistic, because the one thing baseball suffers from is not enough statistics.

I was trying to explain the game to an Icelandic friend of mine the other day. What’s with guys charging the mound? he wanted to know. (This from a hockey fan.) Well, they get upset when pitchers throw at them, I said. So why do the pitchers throw at them? he asked. To instill fear, I said. It’s a lot harder to hit when you’re worrying that the next pitch might come at your head. Don’t pitchers get thrown out for doing that? he asked. Yes and no, I explained. It’s complicated. He asks, can’t they at least keep track of the pitchers who do it all the time and punish them later? Why yes, I mused. Yes they can. And then and there I conceived the VI, or Viciousness Index.

VI relies on the premise that a pitcher’s true wildness can be roughly judged by the number of walks he allows. The fewer he allows, the better idea he has of where the ball is going most of the time. So if he allows very few walks and still hits a lot of batters, the way Pedro Martinez does, one can assume that it’s not entirely or even mostly by accident. Therefore VI = HBP/BB. I submit this will prove an excellent index to pitcher viciousness.

I’d like to oblige you with some actual numbers, but HBP pitcher data turns out to be scarce. It’s not in the Lahman database, Baseball Reference doesn’t have it, and that means I don’t have it either. In lieu of numbers, I offer two hypotheses. First, pitchers with headhunting reputations, like Bob Gibson and Don Drysdale, will have high VIs. Second, the VI leaders, seasonally and career, will be a better set of pitchers than the VI trailers. (This is of course largely because the trailers walk more hitters. A stronger version is that if you match pitchers with similar walk/inning ratios, the ones with the higher VIs will tend to be better.) If somebody out there has HBP data for pitchers and wants to share it with me so I can confirm or deny, I pledge that I will not only publish the lifetime and 2002 leaders for the Viciousness Index, but I will add the data to my pitching search engine. Now is that a deal or what?

(Update: I’ve mentioned before how impressed I am with my commenters — it’s a regular little salon around here — but Greg Padgett has outdone himself. He actually grabbed the HB numbers from the Yahoo MLB database and posted the VI leaders and trailers, both raw and adjusted, for 2002 in the comments. He also extracted a few VI comparisons for pitchers with similar walk rates. I’ll have more to say about this later, but on casual inspection the results are inconclusive. There are some excellent pitchers at the top, like Pedro Martinez, Brad Radke, Derek Lowe, and Mark Mulder, but there are some pretty good pitchers at the bottom too, like Bartolo Colon and Jason Schmidt. Each end of the list has its share of washouts too. I suspect career results will be more conclusive, since we’re dealing with a relatively rare occurrence. Adjusted VI doesn’t range much beyond plus or minus 5 in a single season. But go read Greg’s comment.)

Read Part One. Go on, it’s short.

Watching baseball actually impedes understanding. When I was fourteen my father took me to a Yankee game. The Yankees lost and Bobby Bonds struck out four times, twice on changeups in the dirt. After the game my father said, “I never realized Bonds was such a bum.” Now, of course, Bonds wasn’t a bum; Bonds was a borderline Hall of Fame player in the middle of one of the best seasons of his career. But that’s what happens when you string up a hammock at some local minimum or maximum and proceed to draw conclusions about the shape of the graph.

When blowhards like Joe Morgan and Tim McCarver exult over “the little things that don’t show up in the box scores” this should be regarded as a paid commercial announcement — as if you have to listen to them to know what’s going on. Just about everything shows up in the box scores, and if it doesn’t, then we just need better box scores. Box scores used to show next to nothing, not even walks. And then they showed hit-by-pitches, and intentional walks, and pitch counts, and ball-strike ratios, and stolen-base attempts, and caught-stealings. Soon they will show runners advanced, and groundball/flyball ratios, and out charts, and the margin of baseball events that don’t show up in the box scores (what Bill James used to call “the swamp”) will dwindle, inexorably, to zero, just as science gradually asserts its dominion over all kinds of problems that used to belong to philosophy.

In the meantime, at least turn the sound down.

Several premises underlie Bill James’s new book, some of them radical, and it seems best to examine them individually.

1. It would be valuable to have a single number to represent the value of a player’s season. Well, sure. Wouldn’t it? People spend a lot of time rating things on a scale “from 1 to 10.” James proposes to do the same thing with baseball players, except it’s on a scale of 0 to about 50 or so (there are only about a dozen seasons in baseball history that rate higher than 50, including Barry Bonds’ 2001, which clocks in at 54). Each integer represents a third of a win, a “Win Share”. This would come in handy to resolve salary disputes, trade questions and bar arguments, for sure.

2. It is impossible to evaluate players by taking the average as a baseline. This too is true, and it has already been acknowledged by many other analysts who have introduced the concept of replacement value (the Baseball Prospectus boys with VORP, among others). James justly says that the value of a player is not in how far above the average he is but in the fact that he can play at this level at all. Poor Pete Palmer and his Linear Weights system take it on the chin for using average performance as a baseline, implying that a slightly-below average major league player has a value of less than zero.

3. The best way to analyze performance, particularly fielding, is to look at the team’s performance first, and then allocate it among the individual players. True again. For hitters it’s easy to separate individual hitting performance by ignoring situation-dependent statistics like RBI; for pitchers it’s a little more difficult; but fielders cannot be evaluated properly apart from the team.

4. The Win Shares of the players must add up to the wins of the team. Here we start to get into trouble. A team’s record can be predicted quite accurately by a Pythagorean formula, and in Win Shares James introduces a new formula, based on “marginal runs”, that is nearly as accurate. (In fact calculating Win Shares is just a matter of figuring a team’s marginal runs and allocating them among its members.) Some teams, however, significantly overperform or underperform, relative to the number of runs they score and allow. The 1984 New York Mets, who finished 90-72 despite being outscored by 24 runs, are a notorious example. It follows from James’s formulae that each marginal run a 1984 Met contributed was more valuable than each marginal run from an underperforming team, say, the 1984 Pittsburgh Pirates, who finished 75-87 despite outscoring their opponents by 48 runs. The adjustments here can range to 20% or more, dwarfing things like park factors. And it follows further that Hubie Brooks and Tony Pena both get 21 Win Shares, despite the fact that Pena outhit Brooks slightly and played a far more difficult defensive position far better. In other words, Brooks, according to James, was a better player in 1984 because his team was lucky. (All analysts agree–James himself may have been the first to say so–that when teams win a lot of close games, it’s mostly luck.) James defends such conclusions obliquely in an essay called The Snider/Mays Dilemma, as follows:

But in that case [of another overachieving team, the 1969 Mets], it seems OK, because, after all, we know what this team accomplished. We all understand that this isn’t the usual case. But in the Win Shares system, we follow the logic that whatever is accomplished by the team is credited to the players, wherever that leads us.

Now maybe we all know what the 1969 Mets accomplished, and won’t be thrown by Cleon Jones’s 30 Win Shares, but do we all know what the 1984 Pirates failed to accomplish, or will we take Tony Pena’s and Hubie Brooks’ 21 Win Shares apiece at face value? I am not certain that we should evaluate players relative to their teams’ expected instead of actual won-loss records, but I am certain that James can give a better defense of his method than he does here.

Smaller points: James says in The New Historical Baseball Abstract and elsewhere that closers are overrated and managers ought to ignore save situations and pitch their best relief pitchers when they are most valuable, i.e., in tied and one-run games. Couldn’t agree more. But in Win Shares he appears to ignore that argument, giving relievers arbitrary extra credit for saves to make his numbers work out. James also asserts that stopping the running game constitutes 50% of a catcher’s defense, although he admits that such an estimate is desperate work. This should be easy to add up, however, because we know, offensively, what stolen bases and caught stealings are worth. When I am feeling less lazy I will add up the alleged defensive contributions of some cannon-armed catcher like, say, Ivan Rodriguez, and see if they match up with what the offensive result of his SB/CS record would be worth.

(Update: Read Part 2.