Archive for joe posnanski

I don’t care about the Manager of the Year award. If fired Royals manager Trey Hillman won it this year it would be fine with me. In fact, I’ll start the campaign now: Hillman for 2010 American League Manager of the Year!

But seriously, folks… if Ron Gardenhire wins Manager of the Year, I’m fine with it. If he doesn’t, that’s fine with me, too. I don’t care. If he does win, I know that it will drive many saber-oriented Twins fans crazy, as I’ve read many of their criticisms of his decisions. You can find enough of those around if you look around the ‘net. I’m not here to say that Gardenhire is a bad manager. I don’t really know.

That last sentence is key to my post, as a couple of my favorite saber-friendly writers seem to think that a lack of knowledge about whether “Gardy” helps the Twins win or not redounds in his favor. Joe Posnanski writes:

I think Ron Gardenhire is the best manager in baseball. I think that not based on what we see but what we can’t see.

Commenting on Posnanski, Rob Neyer blogs:

Managers make moves that don’t make sense, based on the numbers we’re looking at … but we often don’t have all the numbers…. If we did have absolute knowledge, Gardenhire might look better than we think.

Posnanski’s appeal to our lack of knowledge either way is more obvious, but it is also present in Neyer’s strange thought about the “absolute knowledge” we don’t have — we “don’t know everything” going on with the Twins, so Gardenhire must be making more of a difference than other managers. I’m not going to criticize Gardenhire, but rather to point out the obvious problem with this claim.

To be fair, Neyer does make some other points (although doing so cuts against his “we don’t know” claim). He notes that the Twins have historically had a low payroll (although he also notes they don’t this year [thanks to the taxpayers’ largesse towards the impoverished Twins owners], which sort of makes the point irrelevant when considering 2010), but what does that have to do with Gardenhire? It was their front office that signed Jim Thome and Orlando Hudson and traded for J.J. Hardy. When the A’s were winning despite a low payroll in the first half of the decade, did everyone credit Art Howe? Yeah, I think they did — wasn’t that what Moneyball was all about, how Billy Beane was a mere figurehead and Howe was the real mastermind behind Oakland’s success?

Some will say that Gardenhire should get credit for the Twins’ winning despite injuries to Joe Nathan and Justin Morneau. The Twins were heavily favored to go to the playoffs long before the season started, and when Nathan went down I (incoherently) predicted that certain writers would use it as an excuse to give Gardenhire credit even though the best closers don’t matter all that much. Over the last three seasons, Nathan has averaged about 2 WAR. This season Jon Rauch has been worth 1 WAR. Obviously, a brutual loss. As for Morneau, he’s actually been worth 5.3 WAR this season — a career best. The “R” (“replacement”) in WAR accounts for the playing time element. Maybe Gardenhire saw this coming, and came up with the great idea of asking Morneau to hit for a Bondsian .446 wOBA in the short time he did have. “Strawberry, hit a home run!” “Okay, Skip.” “Ha-ha! I told him to do that!”

Going through these arguments (and there are others) distracts from my main point regarding the Poz/Neyer quotes, however. In both of them, it is asserted that we can’t say that Gardenhire isn’t a key to the Twins because we don’t know/don’t have all the information. Taken on its own, it is a fallacious argument from ignorance. “I’m asserting something without argument, and it’s your job to disprove it.” I’m not even claiming that they necessarily need numbers to back it up (it would be nice, of course). The problem is that just asserting that “we don’t know why the Twins are having success, so it must be due to Gardenhire” isn’t a valid argument. What would Neyer and Posnanski say to someone who claimed that the reason the Yankees are winning this season despite Derek Jeter’s season is because of Jeter’s “intangible” leadership? Hey, Jeter’s around, the Yankees are winning, there must be some connnection, right? We don’t know, but it would be “prudent” to be open to the possibility, right? How is that any more baseless than asserting that Gardenhire must be doing something we can’t see in the numbers or in his tactics? Maybe there are other managers around baseball who have helped their teams even more than Gardenhire has; how should we select which manager has done the best at things we don’t know about?

Maybe Gardenhire is making a difference. Maybe he isn’t. But the proper inference from “we don’t know” isn’t “he probably is,” but rather “we don’t know.”

Pretty much everyone loves Joe Posnanski, including me. But while “Poz” has been perhaps the most prominent advocate of objective analysis among “mainstream” sportswriters, few would call him a “radical.” His blog post today, in the aftermath of a series of Tweets and counter-Tweets regarding Matt Thornton’s appearance in last night’s All-Star Game, however, paints a different picture. While he doesn’t explicitly say so, Posnanski implicitly has a pretty radical idea about what sort of pitcher belongs (and does not belong) in the All-Star Game.

While acknowledging that Matt Thornton is a good middle reliever, Posnanski does

not want to see a middle reliever, no matter how good, pitch with the game on the line in the All-Star Game. I just don’t. I’m not necessarily overjoyed by the way managers use their staffs, but I know the realities of the game — managers put their best pitchers in the rotation, and they put their best reliever in the closer role, and they take the best of the rest (or the young pitchers they are trying to break in) and put them in middle relief. Some thrive in that role. And their value tends to be undervalued by everyone … including me.* But that doesn’t make it interesting in any way.

This is set up by this perfectly reasonable point:

Middle relief is a specialty position. It’s extremely important in day-to-day baseball, but, to me at least, the All-Star Game is not day-to-day baseball. It’s a game for the best. And in a league that has Lee, Liriano, Lester, King Felix, Verlander, Price, Greinke, Weaver, Sabathia, Pettitte and many other great, great starting pitchers, I’m sorry, I don’t want Matt Thornton pitching in the most important moment of the game. I don’t buy that having that “experience” of pitching the seventh inning with runners on is of great value, not in this kind of game. Give me the best pitcher.

Poz is right: we want to see the best pitcher out there, and we know that relief pitchers are generally relievers because they aren’t good enough to start. Yes, most fans would rather see Zack Greinke or Jon Lester than Matt Thornton — they are better pitchers than Thornton.

The “experience” point is also excellent, and pushes this idea over into the “radical” category. After all, if the “‘experience’ of pitching the seventh inning with runners on” isn’t important in the All-Star Game, then really, why would “experience of pitching in the ninth” be any different? The “experience” issue is a major part of the basis for modern closer “position,” one of the myths that sabermetric analysis has been debunking for a while. Closers do what they do because, just like every other reliever, most of them couldn’t handle starting for some reason or another. This gets at the heart of Posnanski’s implicit radicality: if we want to see the best pitchers, why should any relief pitchers make the All-Star Game?

If we agree with Posnanski that Matt Thornton isn’t good enough to pitch in the All-Star Game, which relievers are left? Among qualified relievers 2008-present, only two had a better FIP than All-Star Scourge Matt Thornton (2.50): Jonathan Broxton (2.13) and Mariano Rivera (2.36). Has Thornton been lucky on home runs? Here is an exhaustive list of qualified relievers with a better xFIP than Thornton (2.84) 2008-present: Broxton (2.32) and Rivera (2.57).

Of course, Rivera and Broxton are both “proven closers,” but even if you buy that load of “clutch” nonsense (you shouldn’t), as Posnanski pointed out, that kind of “experience” shouldn’t matter in the All-Star Game. In any case, leverage accounts for just how important the situations in which the pitcher has been placed in have been. Wins Above Replacement (WAR) helps us properly value “mere specialists” by incorporating leverage into their valuation as well as how much they’ve pitched. Since 2008, Matt Thornton has accumulated 5.9 WAR. Which relievers are ahead of him? You guessed it: Jonathan Broxton (6.9) and Mariano Rivera (6.4).

Maybe guys like Rivera and Broxton could make an appearance in the All-Star Game, if all the starters were used up or something, but hey, if we don’t want to see Matt Thornton, one of the most valuable relievers (middle or otherwise) in the game over the last few seasons, what’s the point of having relievers on the roster at all? Heck yeah, I’d rather see King Felix pitch than Matt Thornton. I hope Posnanski uses his prominent position to advocate for the position logically implied by his arguments.

However, I suppose in one way Posnanski should probably be happy that Matt Thornton was the reliever inserted into the game. Can you imagine the backlash Posnanski would have endured from Royals fans in his hometown of Kansas City if he’d tweeted about the silliness of Joe Girardi putting in Joakim Soria, someone Thornton has clearly outpitched the last several years?

Like many wannabe saberdorks, I love Joe Posnanski’s work. It’s not just because he’s so much better than, say, [horrible-and-inexplicably-award-winning columnist for major newspaper] or [rumor-mongering baseball reporter prone to bouts of self-righteousness]. This isn’t a Posnanski tribute, but in short: Posnanski is great because he tells an engaging story and incorporates good baseball analysis without confusing one for the other.

This doesn’t mean that I always agree with Poz.* I disagree with many things written by sportswriters. In Posnanski’s case, I think highly enough of him that it’s worth quibbling over minor points, unlike, say, with [arrogant breaker of stories for your dad’s favorite sports magazine that we would have found out about anyway], who is only worth refuting because of his [alleged] influence. I hold Posnanski to a higher standard (not that he knows I exist).

*Or “JoPo”; has a sports journalist ever had so many different nicknames?

Which brings us to today’s Poz post on likely future Hall-of-Famers currently under 30. It’s an entertaining (if unsurprising) read. One claim in particular caught my eye. Posnanski writes that Ryan Zimmerman is “probably better defensively” than Evan Longoria. Now, Longoria didn’t qualify for the list (hasn’t played 500 major-league games), so while I do think he is the better player, that isn’t the point here. The issue is whether Zimmerman is “probably better defensively” than Longoria, as Posnanski claims.

Although he doesn’t cite specific defensive numbers in this piece, Posnanski has used Dewan’s plus/minus system in the past (although he has increasingly cited UZR). Here are the Dewan numbers for Zimmerman and Longoria in seasons in which they’ve both played (2008 and 2009):

Plus/Minus 2008:
Zimmerman: +10 plays (+11 runs) in 910.2 innings
Longoria: +11 plays (+9 runs) in 1045.2 innings

Plus/Minus 2009:
Zimmerman: +28 (+22 runs) in 1337.2 innings
Longoria: +21 (+17 runs) in 1302.2 innings

Over the last two seasons, Zimmerman has been 7 runs better in about 100 fewer innings according to plus/minus. Seven runs is seven runs, but given everything that is rightly said about the large error bars on defensive metrics, the gap isn’t as significant as it looks.

Given the various issues with defensive metrics, looking at other systems will give us a more perspicuous overview. Here at FanGraphs, UZR is used to measure fielding. I’m not qualified to argue which metric is the best; I’m simply using them as separate data points. UZR has a helpful “rate stat” version, UZR/150 (runs above/below average per 150 games). I’ve included the “non-rate” runs in parentheses.

UZR/150 2008:
Zimmerman: +3.4 (+2.1)
Longoria: +20.1 (18.5)

UZR/150 2009:
Zimmerman: +20.1 (+18.1)
Longoria: +19.2 (+14.9)

Suddenly things are less obvious. While 2009 was practically even, in 2008 UZR has Longoria almost two wins better. Their career UZR/150s: +12 for Zimmerman, +19.6 for Longoria. It’s a smaller sample for Longoria, but if you check Jeff Zimmerman’s regressed and age-adjusted 2010 UZR/150 projections, Zimmerman is at +10, and Longoria +12.

Defensive stats are obviously important, but when estimating fielding skill, in particular, we need to weight visual evidence — scouting — heavily. I’m not a professional scout, and unlike Posnanski, I don’t have access to them. Perhaps legendary scout Art Stewart, who told Poz “You will remember this day for the rest of your life” after Royals great Chris Lubanski’s first batting session at Kauffman Stadium, thinks Zimmerman is way better than Longoria. Jokes aside, scouting is essential for estimating defensive ability.

While most of us don’t have access to professional scouts, we do have access to the
Fans Scouting Report. In both 2008 and 2009 Longoria was rated as (slightly) better than Zimmerman.

Given that plus/minus seems to “prefer” Zimmerman — and UZR, Longoria — does this make the Fans Scouting Report a tiebreaker in Longoria’s favor? No. Given the relative closeness of the rating, neither the numbers nor the testimony of observers has the degree of reliability for us to make that kind of call. However, contra Posnanski, I do not think we can say that either player is “probably better defensively” than the other.

Molehill converted to mountain? Check. Happy American Thanksgiving, everyone!