This offseason and spring has been the official coming out party for Bill James. I know people have known him before, but he’s now a household name. The latest to get in on the act is the NYT’s Freakonomics blog. By the way, I love the fact that Stephen J. Dubner is a baseball nut. He posts on baseball about once a week.
I especially liked this question and answer:
Q: Generally, who should have a larger role in evaluating college and minor league players: scouts or stat guys?
A: Ninety-five percent scouts, five percent stats. The thing is that — with the exception of a very few players like Ryan Braun — college players are so far away from the major leagues that even the best of them will have to improve tremendously in order to survive as major league players — thus, the knowledge of who will improve is vastly more important than the knowledge of who is good. Stats can tell you who is good, but they’re almost 100 percent useless when it comes to who will improve.
In addition to that, college baseball is substantially different from pro baseball, because of the non-wooden bats and because of the scheduling of games. So … you have to pretty much let the scouts do that.
Now, this isn’t to say the general importance of scouting outrates statistical analysis by a 19 to 1 margin, although this is a bit higher than I might have guessed someone like James would estimate. I wonder what the percentages would be for a big league manager setting his everyday lineup. I won’t hazard a guess. Anyone want to take a stab at it?
1 response so far ↓
1 John M // Apr 4, 2008 at 1:47 am
This is a great topic. My own feeling, for years, is that stat use is overrated. It only gets you so far and probably won’t get you to the end goal of winning a championship unless you have a truly killer roster that always performs ‘correctly’.
Stats don’t reflect human character, per se, they only project probabilities. They are, like a lot of economic statistics, backward-facing. One of the biggest mistakes in logic (and economics, and stock market investing…) is to extrapolate the future as an extension of current trends. This can get you into a lot of trouble, but humans are prone to it. It’s how our brains our wired.
I don’t think you can put a numeric value on how much managers rely on stats day to day. For an above average manager, I think it will vary a lot, even within a specific game, although in general I think it will be somewhat less than average/below average managers.
For the latter, I think stats become more important in decision making, simply because these guys learn that the stats are consistently righter than they are. The result of this, I think, is a winning record that correlates very closely to raw team ability. Give this type of manager a bad team, you consistently get a bad record. Give him a mediocre team, you get a mediocre record; a great team, a great record.
Superior managers are those who achieve results greater than raw team ability. They recognize when stats are viable and when they should be ignored. Their judgment results in statistical anomalies that couldn’t have been predicted from past stats, on a team, situational and select player basis.
What would really be great to have is a stat that reveals how often the stats are right or wrong in game situations, but I don’t think we’ll be getting that number anytime soon. Too hard to compile, for one thing. And it might show that the stat guys are not quite as valuable as they tell people they are.
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