Crash course in Sabermetrics (detroit tigers)

I’ve often referenced the science of sabermetrics on this blog, but have only lightly touched on exactly what it entails. On this post I’ll try to highlight a few basic fundamentals, which should help to give support for many of my arguments.

Essentially, sabermetrics is the analysis of baseball through objective evidence (mainly statistics). Bill James is credited as the founding father, doing the first deep statistical analysis and then applying it in the formation of a few guiding principles, many of which debunk long held baseball thinking. Here’s a couple of examples of making managerial decisions based on the application of sabermetrics:

Bat your best hitters as high as possible in the order. Traditional baseball thinking holds that your best hitters bat 4 or 5, assuming there will be more runners on base when they come to bat. However, historical evidence finds that over a long season, the increased number of at bats received from hitting higher in the order will far outweigh any ancillary benefit of hitting in the traditional power spots (4 or 5). If you bat 1st or 2nd in the order you WILL get more at bats per game. While if you bat 4th or 5th you only MIGHT come to bat with runners on base.

Use your closer at any point late in the game when the game is in doubt, instead of saving him for the 9th inning. This seems obvious. Let’s say your team has a 2 run lead in the 8th inning with 2 men on and nobody out. Is the game more in doubt at that point, or in the 9th with a 2 run lead and nobody on base? Yet managers still trot out half assed setup guys to get out of jams in the middle/late innings instead of bringing out their best pitcher.

Managers like Jim Leyland (and Sparky Anderson before him) often talk about making decisions based on “gut” and “feeling.” Leyland does not apply the fundamentals of sabermetrics, as evidence by only using his closer in the 9th and batting Ordonez and Cabrera 4th and 5th in the order, respectively.

To me, making decisions based on intuition and gut (or because everyone has always done it this way) is simply a cop out for not putting in the hard work of studying stats and making rational decisions based on hard evidence.

You may be thinking that this all sounds good in theory, but has it ever been applied? Billy Beane has applied sabermetrics in nearly all of his decisions as general manager of the Oakland A’s for years, and continues to take the small market/low budget A’s to the postseason despite losing almost all of their good talent to wealthier teams. The aforementioned Bill James was hired as a strategic consultant to the Boston Red Sox before the 2004 season. We all know how that is working out.