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Ask The Experts

Baseball and Measurement:
Now Who's On First?
Have new ways of measuring player performance changed the way baseball is played?

By Special Baseball Correspondents
Ed Peaco and Bob Cannon

In recent years the baseball world has embraced new ways of calculating the effectiveness of players and teams. PR people are fond of saying "You become what you measure," and we're wondering if that maxim holds true for baseball. So we Asked The Experts: Has the game of big league baseball changed in response to different ways of measuring the performance of baseball players?

From Bob Cannon
Regular Contributor, Entertainment Weekly

BOO-YAH, and Other Scientific Terms of Measurement

A couple years ago, Michael Lewis' Moneyball drew back the curtain on sabermetrics, a relatively new form of statistical measurement for evaluating baseball performance. According to the sabermetricians, on-base percentage and slugging percentage were more important than old-fashioned batting average. Naturally, this kicked up a controversy in baseball circles, since baseball is the most tradition-bound of all major sports. (This is a nice way of saying they embrace change about as quickly as a glacier covers a continent.)

But agents embraced sabermetrics mighty quickly, because they could selectively measure most any aspect of a player's performance, which was both good and bad. They could tell you in precise mathematical terms why Albert Pujols was the game's most dangerous hitter (as if any opposing pitcher couldn't already), or why a journeyman like Scott Hatteberg was a valuable addition because he was an "on-base machine." But they could now also sell batting ciphers like Mark Bellhorn (whose habit of either whiffing or walking every time at bat has given him a lifetime strikeout average higher than his batting average), or slugger Adam Dunn (who has struck out an average of 183 times a season) as worthwhile commodities. The term "snake-oil" comes to mind.

Naturally, adhering to the old expression "Home run hitters drive Cadillacs," players started adapting to the new measurement rules. Slugging percentage dictates that a home run is four times as valuable as a single or a walk—and it's a surefire way to get some footage on that evening's SportsCenter and give your agent more leverage down the road. So why not swing for the fences every time up? In fact, you could strike out three times, then go yard (hello there, Adam Dunn!), and your slugging average for the night would still be 1.000! That's gotta be worth $10 million a year, right?

Now, old-timers who remember pitching duels that yielded only 10 hits between the two teams and ended 1-0 lament this development. Why? It takes away the little things like a sacrifice bunt, a stolen base, or giving yourself up just to move the runner up. After all, nobody on SportsCenter will give you a "boo-yah" for that stuff, so why do it, right?

A few years ago a friend took me to front-row seats at Coors Field, whose mile-high elevation made it the most hitter-friendly park in creation at the time. It was disconcerting: From only 60 feet away I could hear pop-ups come off the bat, then be amazed when they reached the warning track or, incredibly, went over the fence. Boo-yah! The game ended 11-10, but I was bored by the fifth inning. It was certainly not my idea of baseball -- more like batting practice with umpires. But with baseball enamored by the long ball (and willing to look the other way on steroid-filled sluggers), this was considered a great game. Plenty of highlight footage for ESPN.

Maybe I'm the problem. Maybe I haven't adapted to the new measurement system, which dictates that sacrifices and moving up the runner are worthless strategies, because now the only worthwhile moves are those that can be measured in terms of total bases accumulated. They provide tangible results, the lifeblood of any fantasy team owner.

One thing is for sure: They won't be going back to old-school measurement, because the new system makes a lot of people very wealthy. And no matter what measurement system you use, that's always going to be the bottom line.

From Ed Peaco,
National News Editor, Springfield News-Leader

Two topics come to mind...

Salaries

I've always thought players should get as much as they can, just like any other participant in the American economy. But the owners truly have lost their minds during this off-season. With a vast influx of cash from new TV deals, they are throwing huge sums at mediocre players. The most recent example is Boston giving J.D. Drew a $100 million contract. As a Missourian who observed Drew's career in St. Louis, filled with injuries, unrealized potential and frequent failures in the clutch, I'm here to tell you that this is a spectacularly misguided decision. If Drew were playing during the time I collected baseball cards as a White Sox fan, I would toss his card into the same pile as Tommy McCraw, Pete Ward, Carlos May and Bill Melton. Imagine paying Bill Melton $100 million.

The only people I know of who are challenging this spending-spree approach are Jerry Reinsdorf and Ken Williams of the White Sox. They are taking several contrarian actions:

1. Flatly refusing to deal with Scot Boras, the top player agent famous for landing giant contracts for his clients;
2. Locking up some players into short-term, less expensive contracts;
3. Unloading others whose contracts expire in a year or two, before the White Sox will have to pay these players much more money or let them go;
4. Trading for young prospects who can step in for departing multimillionaires.

By this strategy, they're apparently trying to create a churn of quality that keeps the team competitive while moderating payroll costs. It's not clear whether the White Sox will succeed, but they are an exception. For the rest of the league, the measuring stick for gauging players' worth seems to have morphed into a yeasty, doughy baguette constantly expanding, the increments between hashmarks ever widening ...

Steriods and Performance

The baseball writers' snub of Mark McGwire in this year's Hall of Fame vote points up a controversy about how to measure stats of the steroid era.

Some writers have said that, without evidence or confessions, there's no way to know who has been juicing; therefore, the only choice is to rely on stats. That's clearly a minority view, in light of the fact that McGwire didn't make it.

Other people are trying to discount home-run stats by some factor. For example, Yastrzemski's 40 homers in 1969, at the nadir of offense and the height of pitching dominance, would correspond to a Bonds/Sosa-like 60-HR season during the Juice Era.

Suspicion is spreading to other types of players beyond sluggers, based on changes in physique and sudden improvement of stats later in life. Why, for example, is Roger Clemens a better pitcher in his mid-40s than he was in his mid-30s? In this way, the measuring method for examining steroid suspicions and gauging steroid-era performance has become an old-fashioned eyeballing-estimating approach.

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