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February 04, 2004
Speed Kills
Posted by Nick
Interesting reaction from my post on Billy Ball, mostly from folks telling me I have no idea what I'm talking about (see the excellent comments here and here for more on that).
Let me be clear: the bias against speed that the A's have based on their data crunching certainly needs to be considered in context -- if they had all the money in the world, they'd take speed AND hitting, but since they don't, they prefer hitting (and several other things) over speed.
I was making a point about how the game of baseball itself changes from April to October.
Interestingly, I think baseball does this in a way that football and basketball do not, in part because they are sports with a clock. Baseball has unique mental and psychological components that change throughout the season because there is no clock.
Billy Ball is predicated on putting together a team that wins 90 to 100 games. It's not predicated on putting together a team than wins 90-100 games AND is necessarily well-positioned to go deep in the playoffs. This is my one knock against it.
My suggestion (not proven yet, but one day it may be) that speed matters more in the late season (think of the Cards and Royals in the 80s) is not just the small-ball-wins-ballgames point. It's not even really a point about the relative importance of speed (after all, the Yankees of the late 90s were not dominated by speed). It's simply that there are elements to winning playoff baseball that don't lend themselves well to statistical modeling.
UPDATE: Oldfishinghat has some great material here on Bill James.
Comments (2)
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Nick Schulz is the Editor of Tech Central Station and has worked in media circles and the ideas industry as a writer, editor, television producer and policy analyst. His writings have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Slate, The National Post of Canada, The Baltimore Sun, Investor's Business Daily, The Washington Times, National Review, Reason, Policy Review, and several other publications. He is also, it should be said, a rabid sports fan whose fandom is inversely proportional to his overall athletic ability.
1. Hei Lun Chan on February 4, 2004 10:56 PM writes...
The advantage of power is that in the long run more runs will be scored; the advantage of speed is that while fewer runs are scored, there is more control to when the runs are scored--it's easier to steal a base than to hit a home run, though it's not worth as much. In the playoffs, fewer runs are scored, which means more close games. In close games, the utility of being able to manufacture one run goes up compared to the utility of being able to score multiple runs, but with less control of when they're scored. Also, there's more good pitching in the playoffs. While good pitching reduce the utility of a power hitter, because good pitchers give up fewer extra base hits, good pitching has less impact on speed, because there's almost no correlation between how good a pitcher is and how well he can prevent a baserunner from stealing a base.
Permalink to Comment2. fling93 on February 17, 2004 08:09 PM writes...
Sabermetricians often point out that stolen bases are overrated, because the penalty imposed by the caught stealing is pretty steep: loss of both the baserunner and an additional out (the whole business about it changing the fielding that was hammered about during the World Series is overemphasized -- probably gives the subsequent batters only a couple of points or two on their batting averages).
The control part that Hei Lun Chan mentioned is interesting. Note that speed tends to matter more at the end of close games because the possible benefit becomes more valuable. Of course, power matters even more at the end of a close game. And speed is useless unless you have a good OBP in the first place.
In my opinion, what really hurt the A's isn't lack of speed. It's bone-headed managing that stubbonly stuck with a 3-man rotation on 3 days rest despite the overwhelming statistics against that strategy. Plus the low payroll means a team stocked with a lot of young players that can have a tendency to choke under pressure they've never experienced before.
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