Today’s lunchtime reading put me in an inquisitive mood. So let’s do it up as a questionnaire:

From 38Pitches, Curt Schilling would like to know: why wasn’t Kyle Farnsworth ejected for throwing at Manny Ramirez last night?

From Deuce of Davenport, why does Marty Brennaman hate Cubs fans so much?

From Slate, why are today’s ballplayers more likely to be born in August, and why are tomorrow’s stars more likely to be born in May?

From PhilSox Blog, why could that whole buried-Sox-jersey-in-the-Bronx thing have been an elaborate hoax?

From Fire Joe Morgan, why are “gamers” always white?

From Home Run Derby, why can Carlos Pena only hit home runs?

From Beantown West, why is Torii Hunter annoyed that white players wore #42?

From Cobra Brigade, why do the Cubs always get such freak injuries?

And speaking of freak injuries, Sports by Brooks would like to know: why the heck is Joel Zumaya doing keg stands?

Now for some questions of my own:

Why is Baseball-Bats calling first-pitch throwing Victoria Beckham a D-Lister? (Posh rocks! Posh is fierce! Posh is going to kill you!)

Why is Baseball Digest Daily arguing to get rid of batting average? (If you don’t like it, you don’t have to look at it!)

And why does Joel Sherman of the New York Post think that the Sox-Yanks rivalry ended in 2004? (Do you not remember Johnny Damon switching sides in ‘05? The five-game sweep in ‘06? The ‘07 pennant race?!)

And of course, UmpBumpers, we’re always looking for good reading here at UmpBump. Have you read something neat lately? Let me know!

Ever since I stopped playing baseball competitively, I’ve feared that I’d be losing some of the more subtle nuances of the game. As I’ve written before, I’m a fairly tiny man who can probably fit in the cabinet below your sink. As such, I was what you’d call a “small ball” player - a guy who you should never count on for an extra-base hit but knew how to put the ball in play or draw a walk. I wasn’t very talented by any stretch of the imagination but I took pride in the fact that once I was on the field, I knew what to do.

Having been away from the game (aside from pick-up games in Prospect Park in Brooklyn) for five years now, my views have been altered. My appreciation for “small-ball” players have greatly diminished once I learned the importance of slugging percentages. Obviously, I know it’s not the be-all-end-all and the stat still takes a backseat to OBP as far as value is concerned, but time and again, I’ve convinced myself that you can’t be that valuable to your team if you can’t at least belt 25-30HRs a year. I began to view things like the stolen base as high-risk, low-reward propositions.

Well, I was wrong.

As is often the case, it’s numbers that make me feel stupid. This time, Tom Tango, aka Tango Tiger, gives a quick cheat sheet to explain how to calculate the break-even point for stolen bases, as in, what your success rate has to be before your thieving attempts are actually worthwhile:

1. take runs per game and divide by 2 (so, a 5.0 RPG gives you 2.5.  That’s close to the breakeven of SB, 2.5, to CS, 1).
2. Figure the percentage (2.5/3.5 = 71.4%)
3. Subtract 3%
4. Breakeven is: 68.4%

In The Book, I said the breakeven point for 1999-2002 (5.0 RPG) was 68.7%.

So, a 4.0 RPG environment would give you: 2.0, which is .667, which becomes .637.  This is why it really pays to play small ball against a great pitcher.

Firstly, 68.4 is a lower percentage than I previously thought for some reason. Looking at the 2005-2007 seasons, there were 6856 stolen bases on 9360 attempts throughout baseball. That’s a 73.2% success rate.  So right off the bat, there was a lesson to be learned - trying to steal a base is a good thing (news flash, I know) in the current baseball environment. Generally speaking, today’s baserunners are good. I really forgot that.

But the bigger thing to be gained is that last sentence. In a low run-scoring environment (i.e. pitcher’s duel), the value of each out decreases. Put more simply, if you’re facing Jake Peavy, chances are pretty good that the guy at the plate is going to make an out anyway so why the hell not try and steal a bag? Conversely, in a high run-scoring environment, say, if you’re facing Jeff Weaver, you should pretty much anchor yourself to the bag. It’s hard enough for a guy like Weaver to get outs. Why should you help him by risking yourself on the bases? Makes sense, right? It’s not that stolen bases appreciate/depreciate depending upon the nature of the game. It’s that caught stealing does because the value of outs fluctuate. I’m not sure why this was a such revelatory thing for me to learn, but it really was like a light went off in my head.

There is some value in sacrifice bunts!  Hit and runs? Knock yourself out! Bunting for hits? Absolutely!

Based upon the general perception that statisticians are hell-bent on disproving old baseball axioms, it’s kind of ironic isn’t it?

As regular visitors to UmpBump know, I have no love for Derek Jeter’s glove. I have no personal animus against Jeter, despite my disdain for the Yankees, which is less of a raging hate-on and more of a well - I’m - a - Red - Sox - fan - so - what - do - you - expect? kind of thing. I’ve always felt that Jeter seemed like a pretty classy guy and that he definitely has one of the finest boohiners in baseball. I even felt a twinge sympathy for Derek Jeter when I read recently that despite his raft of “objectively hot” model-stripper-singer exes, he might need a few tips in that department. Apparently, he hit on hot indie actress Sienna Miller at a club, only to get ignored when Sienna didn’t even know who he was. Ouch. (Dude, she’s already going out with the Anti-Jeter anyway!).

Yet I could only spare Jeets so much sympathy. After all, Derek Jeter has won multiple Gold Gloves, yet his defense sucks. And even more infuriating, no one in the professional commentariat seems able to admit his defense sucks. I will agree that Jeter has pretty sure hands, and so you rarely see him bobble the ball, but there is simply no evidence that Jeter’s defense is actually that good. And in fact, there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary:

1) Last year, Derek Jeter ranked in the bottom half of major-league shortstops in fielding percentage, put-outs, and assists. He ranked second-to-last in range factor. He was dead last—in all of baseball—in zone rating. In fact, the only stat in which Derek Jeter even ranked in the top ten of MLB shortstops was double plays. And last year, the year he took home the trophy, he caboosed it there, too. Simply put, there is no statistical evidence that Derek Jeter is even a good defensive shortstop, let alone a great one deserving of praise and trophies. Now, I’ll admit, he had a pretty good year in 2005. But he had absolutely abysmal defensive years in 2001, 2002, and 2003. When you look at other, more abstruse stats—David Pinto’s DER leaps to mind—the evidence is clear: Derek Jeter is not good at defense. And the weight of all of these metrics taken together is clearly on the side of sucks-more-than-he-doesn’t-suck.

2) Lee Panas, a Detroit Tigers fan and research analyst, looked at six different systems for evaluating a shortstop’s fielding and combined them to devise the number of runs that player would have prevented if he had played in 150 games. In fact, Derek Jeter came in dead last. Jeter actually cost the Yankees a whopping 27 runs with his glove last year. That is some hardcore defensive suckage.

3) A professor at the Wharton School recently finished an evaluation of nearly half a million baseball plays (every play from 2002 to 2005) and estimated that Jeter was one of the worst defensive shortstops in that span, costing his team an average of 14 runs a year with the leather during that period.

4) Francis Bacon would have agreed.

5) Tom Tango of The Hardball Times wrote an essay about how awful Jeter’s defense is, and I believe it’s in the 2008 edition of their book. However, I can’t find it online, so here’s BP’s summation:

[W]ith Jeter on the field the shortstop makes an out on 11.6 percent of balls in play. However, when looking at all pitchers that Jeter has played behind when pitching with other shortstops on the field, the rate goes up to 12.5 percent—that’s a difference of 38 plays over a full season, and the second-worst mark for a regular shortstop in baseball, behind only [Michael] Young. Tango then does likewise controlling for batters (Jeter is 25 plays worse, fourth from the bottom), a runner on first base (11 plays worse, ahead of only Felipe Lopez), and park (18 plays worse, ranking in the bottom half).

And yet, somehow, the people with the microphones just refuse to believe the evidence that is staring them in the face. When I was watching some Red Sox Spring Training coverage over the weekend, there was NESN’s Tom Caron chatting it up with the Boston Globe’s Nick Cafardo. The two of them just went on and on about how great Jeter is on defense, and how you can make stats prove anything, and how only lame homer Red Sox fans don’t “respect” Jeter (as if “respect” is synonymous with “think his defense is really great, even when it’s clearly not”). They even claimed Jeter’s defensive ability is actually just really clutch (oh, is that what they’re calling it these days? those crazy kids!). Cafardo kept talking about Jeter’s skills ‘after the seventh inning,’ as if Jeter is just keeping all his defensive range in reserve for those close-and-late situations. Even worse, to cap it all off, they finished up the segment by showing a clip of Jeter with the Gold Glove trophy and saying, “Well, Jeter has the hardware and you can’t argue with that, ha ha!” I would posit that one actually can argue with that, as I hope I have just effectively demonstrated.

I respect Derek Jeter. I respect his ability to reliably hit .300 with moderate power. I respect his ability to sell flavored water on TV. I respect his dimples.

I just think his defense sucks.

We UmpBump writers have spent far too much time debating the relative merits of many different kinds of statistics. Does a high RBI total actually signify a skill? Why should we care about a pitcher’s Win totals? Is WARP3 actually necessary?  The list continues.

But this past week, something wonderful has happened. Someone actually created a stat that could finally end the war between the awesome intergalactic sabermetric fleets armed with X-Wing Fighter Jets and the “classic” statisticians with their… umm… vaudeville shows and toothbrush mustaches and 23-skidoos… I don’t know. I wasn’t alive during this time.

Yes, friends, someone has finally created a quantifiable stat to measure GRIT.

<loud applause>

The good folks over at Flotsam Media, a sports blog, actually went through a data set beginning in 1955 to determine who was the most/least gritty player during this span:

I hold that gritty players are those who sincerely want to win or succeed at baseball (determination), but due to a lack of natural skill (talent), are forced to do so through the least efficient means possible, resulting in an excessive amount of dirt on their uniform.

This DIRT factor was created by looking at stats such as HBP (the ultimate form of grittiness) , and Stolen Bases and Caught Stealing. Other factors that were determined through similar methods were:

DETERMINATION

Gritty players want to succeed. They just happen to not have the talent to actually do so. This results in inefficient baseball plays. For example, Jerry Hairston is gritty. He slides head-first into first base. A true sign of someone gritty enough to want to get to first base, but shitty enough to (not) actually get there efficiently.

TALENT

It is my contention that “grittiness” is a subset of talent that cannot translate well statistically. Two players may very well have the same raw amount of grit, but one player may have more tangible talent, making him appear less gritty because the grit is too diluted. Gritty players are those who have the largest concentration of grit. As such, too find the grittiest players, we should look for players who have as little tangible talent as possible.

I’ll stop cribbing because the Flotsam post is really worth reading for yourself (there you can also find out who the grittiest of the gritty were).  But I wanted to simply tip my cap to them. Maybe now, I can stop squirming when people call Miguel Cairo anything more than crappy.

Bill James, who needs no introduction here, and John Dewan, author of The Fielding Bible, have assembled a 10-person panel to pick the best defensive players in the majors. According to the Boston Globe:

The panel includes the Baseball Info Solutions video scouts; Strat-O-Matic Baseball creator Hal Richman; Kansas City Star columnist Joe Posnanski; Seattle Mariners scout Mat Olkin ; Chicago sports talk show host Mike Murphy; Nate Birtwell, who oversees the BIS data collection; and ESPN.com baseball columnist Rob Neyer. Results from a poll taken on the fan website Tango on Baseball (tangotiger.net) was also used.

King Kaufman’s Sports Daily at Salon.com has an easy-to-read summary of the project and rundown of the winners:

The alternate universe Gold Gloves are a publicity stunt for the “Bill James Handbook 2007,” where they’ll appear. But I think it’ll be interesting to see how the picks of Dewan and his impressive panel, listed below, differ from the real Gold Gloves. I wish they’d picked the best fielder at each position in each league, like the awards, but for some reason they just went with the best in the majors.

Here they are:

Albert Pujols at first base, Orlando Hudson at second, Adam Everett at shortstop and Adrian Beltre, just beating out Scott Rolen, at third. Carl Crawford, Carlos Beltran and Ichiro, left to right, though the real Gold Gloves generally go to three center fielders, which is dumb. Greg Maddux and Ivan Rodriguez as the battery.

How does this list mesh with this year’s Gold Glove winners? Pujols, Hudson, Ichiro, Beltran, Rodriguez, and Maddux all won Gold Gloves as well as making the panel’s list. But the following Gold Glove winners were left off the list: Scott Rolen, Omar Vizquel, Brad Ausmus, Andruw Jones, Mike Cameron, Torii Hunter, Vernon Wells, Derek Jeter, Eric Chavez, Mark Grudzielanek, Mark Teixeira, and Kenny Rogers.

Adam Everett, Adrian Beltre, Carl Crawford didn’t receive Gold Gloves, but did make the list.

All of this info seems to yield more questions than answers. Are Everett, Beltre, and Crawford just underrated? Or are certain Gold Glovers just overrated? Is Derek Jeter, for instance, really the AL’s best defensive shortstop? (I find this hard to believe. We all know he’ll dive into the stands when he has to, but he’s not the slickest glove out there.) And how much do individual awards matter in a team sport, even a team as individualistic as baseball? (For instance, despite their flamboyant collapse at the end of the season, the Red Sox still finished the year with the fewest errors in the majors. Yet not a single Red Sox was awarded a Gold Glove.)

Does all this mean that the Gold Gloves themselves are irrelevant—meaningless door prizes handed out to star players on winning teams, awarded to the same old saws year after year after year? Or are the metrics used to pick the winners just a titch obsolete?

King Kaufman asked Dewan about the process he used to pick his fielders:

I asked Dewan if anyone other than he used fielding metrics like his, that is, those beyond the ones easily found on numerous baseball-stat sites.

“Statistics, both old and new (for example, fielding percentage and plus/minus numbers), were provided to the panelists for their reference along with this note: ‘Feel free to use it, or not use it, as you see fit,’” he wrote in an e-mail. “One of the main purposes of having an award and a voting procedure was to consider the non-statistical aspects of evaluating defense. While ‘The Fielding Bible’ puts a lot of emphasis on the numbers, I feel that visual observation and subjective judgment are very important parts of determining the best defensive players.”

Non-statistical aspects? Subjective judgment? Visual observation?!

My God, gentlemen—are we returning to the days of guts and instincts and hunches? Is the Bill James of the future a middle-aged scout with a chewed-off cigar in his mouth and a bit of flint in his eye? Has the statistics revolution come full circle?

At any rate, let’s hope The Fielding Bible throws some needed attention on an oft-overlooked part of the game. (Would it kill ESPN.com to have more fielding stats more readily accessible, for instance? Their sortables are killing me.)