Pilot
Welcome to the first post at the new home of Walk Like a Sabermetrician. I have been maintaining a blog using this name since 2005, and have finally done something I should have done years ago – abandon a platform that was becoming increasingly hostile to free expression, particularly expression that deviates from what is increasingly being a homogenous ideological succession vertically integrated across the state, the media, and major corporations.
Now, this is not a blog about hot button political issues – as advertised, it consists of “occasional commentary about baseball and sabermetrics”. Even so, moving to a platform that has vowed to respect free expression and to date has done so much more broadly than its competitors is important for two reasons. The obvious one is that I wish to support entities that share my values and not those that oppose them. The less obvious is that the creep of a totalitarian political mindset is rapidly infecting every aspect of life. A few brief examples of how this has begun to infest baseball commentary will suffice:
* I am a longtime fan of the Cleveland Indians. Many publications have refused to even print the name Indians for the last several years. While the team is now known as the Guardians for better or worse, and I will refer to this name going forward, I will not be retroactively changing history. If I am writing about the 1995 season, I will be referring to the Indians, not refusing to use the name or retroactively imposing Guardians.
* I think that it is inappropriate to punish ballplayers for opinions they express when evaluating their value, or their award candidacy. This goes for Bruce Maxwell as well as Curt Schilling, but if I was to advocate for Schilling to be put in the Hall of Fame, this would be a controversial position. You can rest assured that if Trevor Bauer is permitted to pitch in the future, he will be punished in Cy Young voting by some cadre of voters.
* The lockout has made plain what has always been obvious – that the sympathy of most writers of the sabermetric milieu is with the MLBPA in labor battles with MLB. Mine are as well, although for very different reasons than the kind of reflexive left-wing support for labor (so long as they aren’t Canadian truckers or other people expressing political views in opposition to those of the smug progressive consensus) that drives many. I cannot help but chuckle at the worldview that leads to excitedly agitating for players to get a larger share of MLB revenues, while turning around and advocating fiscal policies that would result in most of it being taxed at confiscatory rates.
* Sabermetrics was defined by Bill James as “the search for objective knowledge about baseball”. The very notion that there is or could be such a thing as “objective knowledge” is rapidly becoming controversial, and would be portrayed by growing number of people as somehow “upholding” a set of values that are bizarrely tied to a nebulous racial group and its alleged objectives. It will not be long before anyone engaging in analysis of baseball will be asked to state their racial, ethnic, or sexual characteristics and consider “other ways of knowing” rather than simply asserting that the number of plate appearances a team will generate in a game is a function of the rate at which it commits outs.
As to what you can expect from this blog, for now the answer is “not much”. I do not have a ton of ideas for posts at the moment, so content may be scarce. I practice what might be called “classical sabermetrics” – that is, sabermetric analysis that primarily relies on traditional data such as seasonal totals that once would have been published in Baseball Weekly, the Sporting News Guide, or The Baseball Encyclopedia. In referring to “classical sabermetrics”, I in no way mean to imply that it is a distinct field from the broader world of sabermetrics or “advanced analytics” or whatever the preferred nomenclature of the day happens to be. It is wonderful that new data sources like first pitch tracking and now advanced data on fielder positioning and batted balls is available, and it can (and already has) exponentially expanded the topics that can analyzed and the precision that can be brought to bear. By saying that I practice classical sabermetrics, I simply mean to set expectations on what kind of content you might expect to see here. If you are looking for cutting edge work using the hyper-granular data, you will not find it here – but I encourage you to seek it out where it is available, and learn from the great work being done by others as I do.
Most of the great insights available from a classical approach have likely already been found, with the final major one likely being Voros McCracken’s work on BABIP, which was originally published twenty-three years ago now. On one level this is hard to believe, since I was posting on BaseballBoards.com when Voros published his findings, and eagerly participated in discussions as we all tried to variously digest, expand upon, and tear apart his findings. I am not arrogant enough to proclaim that everything that could be gleaned from the classical data has been – I simply think it is reasonable to assume that the probability of additional revelations is fairly low. Luckily, I have always been very interested in having methods that were applicable across as wide of a range of baseball contexts as possible, and so am interested in trying to refine run or win estimators so that they work for theoretical teams that average 0.4 runs scored and 0.6 runs allowed per game, or that have .750 on base averages. There is still some tinkering to be done there, although the result would be of no practical application to anyone who is trying to run a major league team, which is what an increasing share of the people who engage in this type of analysis are actually endeavoring to do.
So you can expect occasional posts as I stumble across something of interest, or as I engage in frivolous posts like predicting the order of finish or hypothetical award ballots that I largely do not because I think others will find value in them but because I find them fun and would like to preserve for myself a contemporaneous record of my opinions in the moment. Hopefully this is the most political post that I ever post here as well.