Sports

Baseball analysts’ old-fashioned ways bring bad press

In print | November 20, 2008

This past week was awards week for Major League Baseball, when the Baseball Writers’ Association of America votes on who the best managers, pitchers, rookies and all-around players were for the past season. The fun thing about these awards is that they provide a lot of room for debate.

Ultimately, it comes down to how you define value and how you choose to evaluate performance, so a lot of these awards are open to interpretation. It’s almost impossible to fill out an objectively wrong ballot.

Almost.

This year, the Cubs’ Geovany Soto won the NL Rookie Of the Year. This was a fairly obvious choice. More notably, the Reds’ Edinson Volquez finished fourth in the BBWAA’s votes for the award, garnering three second-place votes.

Volquez had a tremendous season, delivering dominant, consistent performances on the mound — he made it to June 9 before giving up more than two earned runs in a start. His sterling season, accompanied by the expected emergence of fellow youngster Jonny Cueto, should make the Reds confident that they will soon have a dominant one-two punch at the top of their rotation. However…
Edinson Volquez was not a rookie in 2008. The rules say that a pitcher cannot be a rookie if he has thrown more than 50 innings in his career prior to the current season, and Volquez pitched 80 from 2005-7. 80 is more than 50. Volquez was not eligible.

Three out of 32 voters said that the second-best rookie in the National League was a player who was not even a rookie. This is an embarrassment. If 10% of the votes are so poorly thought out that they could be cast for ineligible players, what do the awards even mean? Why bother voting if the voters have no credibility?

As I thought of the three now-shamed sportswriters filling out their ballots, not bothering to do the research to see whether Edinson Volquez was in fact a rookie, I thought of another man who became somewhat famous in another recent election. Political junkies out there may have come across Nate Silver during campaign season. The creator of FiveThirtyEight.com, Silver used incredibly detailed, statistically-based simulations to project the winner of the presidential election. His final projection, made soon after precincts started reporting, was shockingly accurate. He missed only Indiana, predicted the popular vote within tenths of a percentage point and was on the money on almost all of the Senate seats as well. (Also, he said Missouri was too close to call, and it still hasn’t been called).

Before Silver turned his attention to politics this summer, he was a baseball writer, but not in the sense that those three mistaken voters are baseball writers. Silver wrote for Baseball Prospectus, which writes about baseball from an almost strictly statistical point of view. While there, Silver developed a system — similar in ways to the one he would soon use to be the first pundit to definitively declare Barack Obama’s victory — to project the future performances of baseball players.
When no one else saw the 2008 Rays coming, Nate Silver did. When he predicted the White Sox to win 70 games in 2007, he was widely mocked, as his projection seemed to badly underestimate a team that many predicted to contend. The 2007 Sox won 72 games. And there are myriad individual performances that Silver forecast, such as the emergence of multiple-Cy Young Award winner Johan Santana in 2004 and the breakout of 2008 NL ROY Geovany Soto. But Nate Silver was not in the BBWAA. He could only rarely get press credentials to get near the game, he was never allowed to vote on the year-end awards and, most frustratingly, he and his craft were regularly mocked in the mainstream. Statistical analysis is derided because “people play baseball, not computers,” and so Nate Silver was held on the margin of the sports media.

While you could open up any newspaper in March and find playoff predictions based on groundless conjecture and flimsy reasoning, you needed a subscription to an obscure online source to see what Nate Silver was predicting. (And, as any good member of the BBWAA would remind you, only a nerd who lives in his mom’s basement needs a computer to help him understand baseball.)

Those three errant votes for Edinson Volquez, contrasted with the Nostradamus act Silver pulled during the 2008 campaign, highlight the incompetence of the BBWAA. If you give votes to people who won’t even do the research to determine eligible candidates, and you refuse votes to Nate Silver and people who analyze the game through statistics, why should anyone give a damn what you think?

Much of the BBWAA has long stood adamantly against statistics, marginalizing that type of analysis because anyone with a computer can do it — it doesn’t require a press pass, so it erodes their expertise. But these past couple weeks have proven without a doubt that the BBWAA needs serious change — in viewpoint and in membership.