Searching For Reasons

Last week, Dave discussed how inept analysts have become in terms of assessing when players considered to be over the hill fall off said hill. Most wrote off David Ortiz as being done, washed up, having nothing left in the tank, and then June rolled around and he “found his stroke.” Personally, I think the problem extends way beyond just determining when aging players become washed up, and deals more with our obsession to find reasons capable of explaining potentially unexplainable phenomena.

There are certainly areas within the game of baseball that lend themselves to individual skills and not chance, but there are an equal number of areas that fluctuate randomly. Trying to pinpoint a single reason as to why one of these random fluctuations occur makes very little sense and proves to be nothing more than a futile exercise. Not everything can be explained, concisely wrapped up in a neat little bun, and then brushed aside as an issue solved.

Over the weekend, a good friend of mine and I were discussing Johan Santana and how he has not looked like himself lately. After several back and forth ideas, wondering about Santana’s health or the competition he had been facing, it dawned on me that this might be a non-issue and searching for an explanation could pave the way to inaccurate claims being dished out. In a piece I wrote for BP earlier in the year, I investigated the idea of consistency, checking to see if it mattered or if consistency itself was stable. Short answer: consistency itself was inconsistent. Johan may have looked mortal recently, but the fact that his performances did not match his early season dominance really does not tell us anything. At season’s end, we are probably going to look at his gamelogs and chalk this recent stretch up as a rough patch everyone goes through that eventually corrects itself.

Think about that Raul Ibanez fiasco a few weeks ago and how that almost exponentially found itself the topic of interest amongst sports sites, radio stations, and television productions.

If I recall correctly, Person A, who partakes in a fantasy league, asked Person B about Ibanez’s revival. Person B then looked into the numbers and wrote a lengthy diatribe about Ibanez’s career, searching for a definitive reason as to why Raul had been hitting like Albert Pujols. In his search for a reason, performance enhancers were brought up, and within days, Person B had to defend himself on national television against Ken Rosenthal. No, Robothal isn’t Dave Winfield-esque in stature, but the point remains that searching for a reason to explain what could potentially amount to nothing more than an extended hot streak not necessarily foreign to Raul, who has posted some insane streaks in years prior, led to an extremely overhyped media frenzy.

There are certainly times when looking for a reason makes sense, like with the current performance of Jimmy Rollins, but for the most part doing so is useless. Non-Pujols players always fuse together various ups and downs in a season before arriving at their bottom line. Just because a player slumps and then gets hot doesn’t mean that he lost some skill in the former and gained it back in the latter. Assign grains of salt to reasoning or explanations derived from small samples of data, especially if they involve an area of the game that fluctuates randomly.





Eric is an accountant and statistical analyst from Philadelphia. He also covers the Phillies at Phillies Nation and can be found here on Twitter.

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The Ancient Mariner
14 years ago

As H. L. Mencken pointed out, for any question there is an answer which is simple, easy to understand, and wrong.

MPC
14 years ago

As Occam’s Razor points out, “of several acceptable explanations for a phenomenon, the simplest is preferable.”