Archive for Why We Write

Last week, as part of his Thursday Throneberries, Rob Neyer wrote — in re the Why We Watch post that I’d submitted to these electronic pages — he wrote that “the only thing missing [from said post]… is a points system that would let us put a number on each game.” That is, Neyer was curious if it might be possible to assign points to each game on a particular day in order to tell which might be most appealing to the sabermetrically inclined viewer.

Neyer’s challenge put a bee in my proverbial bonnet. And when you put a bee like that in Carson Cistulli’s bonnet — proverbial or otherwise — he’s not gonna stop until that bee is either dead or, if not dead, at least captured and successfully rehabilitated.

Which is why I’ve spent every waking minute of the last five or so days — and some of the sleeping minutes, too — working on the problem.

A few minutes of consideration reveal two facts:

1. It’s a big-ish task, this, to devise a points system for every possible aspect (pitching, hitting, uniform design, stadium, broadcast team, etc.) that might contribute to the viewing experience.

2. Despite the verity of point 1, it seems as though we can say with some certainty that pitching matchups — because the pitchers are constantly playing — go the greatest way towards making a game either compelling or not. Therefore, that’s where I’ve elected to start.

So the question I posed to my own brain is: what makes a starting pitcher interesting to the baseball nerd? And also: of the things that might make a pitcher interesting, which of them are easily measured? And finally: what ought one call a stat designed to address these urgent questions?

The last question is the easiest to answer. Were I to construct a stat designed to appeal to the baseball nerd, I’d call that stat NERD. What would/does it stand for? Hard to say, but it just feels so right.

Now, as for the first two questions there, let’s take a look at some possible answers.

Components of Pitcher NERD
• Pitcher Ability (xFIP)
At the center of the baseball nerd’s quest is the desire to understand, quite simply, who is good at baseball and who is less good. While, as Tommy Bennett rightly notes, metrics that evaluate process (as opposed to outcome) aren’t flawless, Expected FIP (xFIP) is both pretty damn sweet and pretty freaking accessible.

• Strikeouts (SwStrk%)
Swinging strikes correlate very highly to strikeouts — are, in fact, more predictive of future K rate than K rate itself. Also, they’re awesome to watch. Yes, strikeouts are a part of xFIP, but there’s a pleasure to the strikeout that ought to be recognized. It represents a pitcher’s total pwn-ing of his opponent. Consider: despite having absolutely no ties to San Francisco or its environs, I consider it a great privilege to watch Tim Lincecum throw his change-up. Yeah, the crazy wind-up is pretty sweet, but his change-up — which gets whiffs about 25% of the time — is what really gets the party started.

• Strike Throwing (Strike% of Total Pitches Thrown)
It’s nice to watch a pitcher who throws a lot of strikes — even those not of the swing-and-miss variety. Phrased differently, it can be super boring to watch a pitcher who doesn’t throw strikes. Consider Rich Harden of 2009. He had a swinging-strike rate of about 16% in 2009, but he only threw about a league average number of strikes. That’s enough to make him less watchable. (And, of course, he’s much harder to tolerate this season, now that he’s getting about half the swing-and-misses.)

• Luck (ERA-xFIP)
It’s a fact: nerds like watching regression happen. Scientists are efforting day and night to figure out why — to no avail as of yet. Anyway, it’s a fact.

A Note on Weighting the Components
Though each of the components listed above probably all contribute to making a pitcher interesting, that’s not to say that each of them ought to be weighted equally. Value luck too heavily and Charlie Morton is the most interesting player in the world. Do the same to swinging strikes and Brandon Morrow makes his way to the top of the charts.

As the goal of this exercise is not to uncover an objective truth — like, for example, how many runs a player has produced or how much he might be worth on the open market — but rather to address questions of an aesthetic nature, I’ve allowed myself to abide by intuition in assigning weights to the components in consideration.

Here’s how I’ve opted to go about it.

Calculating NERD
To calculate NERD, I found each pitcher’s z-score (standard deviations from the mean) for cats 1-3. I multiplied the xFIP score by 2, divided both the swinging strike and strike percentage scores by 2, and then added Luck to the total.

In re that last part, about luck, a couple notes: I opted only to add bad luck to the overall equation. A pitcher who’s overperforming his xFIP is less interesting to me (and to baseball nerds, in general, I’m guessing) than one who’s underperforming it. If a pitcher’s ERA-xFIP is less than 0 (i.e. lucky), I just counted as 0. In other words, I only real care about pitchers who will seem to be improving.

Also: I capped the Luck “bonus” at 2. Otherwise, seriously, Charlie Morton is the highest-ranked pitcher.

Adding a constant (in this case, 4.69) gives all 150 or so pitchers (with 20+ IP) a score between 0 and 10, with average exactly at 5. I had to round the top two guys down to 10 and the bottom three guys guy up to 0, but that’s it.

The Final Equation
Looks like this:

(xFIPz * 2) + (SwStrk%z / 2) + (Strike%z / 2) + Luck + 4.69.

Results
Here are the current top 20 starters (with 20+ IP) by NERD:

Here are the bottom 20:

Discussion
Bill James once suggested that, if a stat never surprises you, it’s probably worthless. This is an idea I embraced while attempting to fine tune NERD. Which is to say, I wanted it to be occasionally surprising.

For example, one might wonder how Randy Wells ranks higher than the very talented Tim Lincecum. Well, in addition to actually being quite good so far this season, Wells’ ERA is almost a full point above his xFIP. With time, the former is likely to crawl back down towards the latter. When it does, Wells will very likely not occupy his current spot. Still, in the meantime, it’s worth wondering when we’ll see Wells’ luck turn for the better.

Future Considerations
Pitcher NERD is definitely not complete. Undoubtedly, it makes sense to consider at least a couple-few more components. Components such as (though not limited to):

• Player Age/Experience
Rookies are exciting. Young players, generally, are exciting. It makes sense to factor something like player age or service time into the equation.

• Repertoire
My good friend Leo writes, “Should a guy like Justin Verlander be higher because he throws 100 MPH? That’s fun to watch.” The same friend also would like see Ubaldo Jimenez further up the charts. And who can blame him: watching Jimenez pitch is fun.

• Fat Heads
Vincente Padilla has one. That should count against him somehow.

If you’re interested in fooling around with the weights, by all means utilize this spreadsheet that I’ve uploaded to Google Docs. It also includes data for 2009, which saw Javier Vazquez, Ricky Nolasco, Roy Halladay, Tom Gorzelanny (!), and Tim Lincecum finish in the top five.

What follows marks the fifth installment in this absurd experiment, which has already seen Bryan Smith, Craig Calcaterra, Tommy Bennett, and Will Leitch bring the lyrical pain.

Today’s willing participant is Jesse Spector. Mr. Spector serves not only as a copy editor for the New York Daily News, but also as the keeper of that paper’s Touching Base blog, from which post he’s able to proselytize the gospel of sabermetrics to one of the widest readerships in the fifty nifty.

Please note that this installment of the series is packaged in two unsullied parts: Spector’s initial response and then his answers to my follow-up questions.

For an answer to your series’ titular question, I write for the same reason that Tim Lincecum pitches. He’s a pitcher. Not to put myself on his level, but I’m a writer. The difference is that “writer” is not really my job. Seven years ago, I was working part-time at the Daily News, and the full-time job that opened was on the desk — as a copy editor, I edit stories and write headlines. That job brings with it a lot of downtime over the course of an evening (I work from 6 p.m. until 1:30 a.m., with the “crown jewels of the week,” Tuesday and Wednesday, as my days off). I mostly use mine to either watch games or work on writing ideas — since a lot of my ideas come from things I notice while watching games, I guess that’s really one and the same.

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Last week, I introduced to the wide readership a line of inquiry down which the very famous Jonah Keri had gotten me started. The line of inquiry concerns those bloggers who, despite almost no promise of financial compensation or notoriety, have persisted in their craft.

The question I posed — after having considered Will Leitch’s suggestion from his Costas Now episode that blogging is a really hard work — the question I posed goes like this:

Why do it? If, as Leitch suggests, it’s hard work, why do it? If, as I can tell you personally, it provides very little in the way of fame and/or cash money, why do it?

I’ve posed this same series of questions — or at least ones very similar to them — to some of the interweb’s more thoughtful baseball writers. This (and maybe next) week, I’ll be sharing their responses in these electronic pages.

Today’s willing participant is actually Mr. Leitch himself. Besides serving as the founding editor of Deadspin and a current contributing editor to New York Magazine, and besides authoring a number of real-live books (including the very recent Are We Winning?, available wherever the internet is present), Will Leitch is also one of the few living humans capable of expressing seven emotions at once, as this photographic evidence suggests:

Leitch: I’m not sure I’m the ideal person for this, because I’d been starving as a writer for nearly a decade before Deadspin finally launched. I started writing on the Web, back at The Black Table and, before that, with Life As A Loser, because I wanted to get better, because the Web was the perfect place to hone your craft out in public, in real time, with people letting you know what was working and what wasn’t. It also allowed me to do all this for free, and I mean “allowed”: I would have never been able to develop a voice had I been having to sing for my supper. It was an advantage to work it all out with nobody paying and few people reading. I did it because I have no idea how to do anything else. I wrote about a subject I know and care about and, with any luck, I’ll get to keep doing it forever.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I introduced to the wide readership a line of inquiry down which the very famous Jonah Keri had gotten me started. The line of inquiry concerns those bloggers who, despite almost no promise of financial compensation or notoriety, have persisted in their craft.

The question I posed — after having considered Will Leitch’s suggestion from his Costas Now episode that blogging is a really hard work — the question I posed goes like this:

Why do it? If, as Leitch suggests, it’s hard work, why do it? If, as I can tell you personally, it provides very little in the way of fame and/or cash money, why do it?

I’ve posed this same series of questions — or at least ones very similar to them — to some of the interweb’s more thoughtful baseball writers. This (and maybe next) week, I’ll be sharing their responses in these electronic pages.

Today’s willing participant is Mr. Tommy Bennett. Because you’re the sort of reader who demands quality in his baseballing analysis, you’re undoubtedly aware that, after having risen to the top of the charts with Beyond the Boxscore, Bennett currently wrecks the mic right for Baseball Prospectus.

Please note that this installment of the series is packaged in two unsullied parts: Bennett’s initial response and then his answers to my follow-up questions.

I write because I consider it to be the noblest of daily habits, because writing stimulates critical and literary thinking in a way that no other activity can. Just as writing that is ungirded by structured thought tends to be uninteresting, I find it hard to construct my thoughts without writing them down. Because baseball is such an emotional pursuit, even for spectators, this is doubly so when I try to think about baseball. When I go to write an essay, I am forced to give justifications, reasons, and evidence for my arguments. Certainly, non-written arguments can be structured and not all writing is well-constructed, but at least when I write I am most conscious of those requirements.

Let me give you an example. I grew up rooting for the Phillies, and the single most severe emotional response baseball has elicited from me came in 1993, when Joe Carter hit a walk-off home run in Game Six of the World Series. It happened, that evening, to be my ninth birthday party, and all my friends were there. I was crushed. For years, I hated Joe Carter in a way that led me to drastically overstate how good he really was. Like many commentators, I focused too much on home runs and RBI, and not enough on other aspects of offensive production. By the time I read Jonah Keri’s essay on RBI in Baseball Between the Numbers (“What’s the Matter With RBI?”), I had completed my transformation from young boy whose baseball enemies took on outsized greatness to thinking baseball fan who realized Carter was a beneficiary of a friendly batting order position that was essentially as valuable as Dave Kingman.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I introduced to the wide readership a line of inquiry down which the very famous Jonah Keri had gotten me started. The line of inquiry concerns those bloggers who, despite almost no promise of financial compensation or notoriety, have persisted in their craft.

The question I posed — after having considered Will Leitch’s suggestion from his Costas Now episode that blogging is a really hard work — the question I posed goes like this:

Why do it? If, as Leitch suggests, it’s hard work, why do it? If, as I can tell you personally, it provides very little in the way of fame and/or cash money, why do it?

I’ve posed this same series of questions — or at least ones very similar to them — to some of the interweb’s more thoughtful baseball writers. Over the next week-plus, I’ll be sharing their responses in these electronic pages.

What follows is the product of a lightly edited email correspondence with Craig Calcaterra. Calcaterra, in case you don’t know, made his name by way of his ShysterBall — which blog eventually earned Calcaterra his own damn corner of Hardball Times. Last November, Calcaterra moved over to NBC’s HardballTalk, from which site he quietly manipulates the mind of the common man. (In a good way.)

Calcaterra: It’s all about the women, really.

Wait, that’s not true.

In all honesty, it began as escapism — I hated what I was doing as a lawyer day-to-day, and baseball was a nice way to think about things other than rich people suing other rich people for a little while. I couldn’t really watch games in the office, and I couldn’t sort baseball cards on my desk, but writing about it (a) scratched the itch and (b) made it look like I was working on real stuff, so no one bugged me about it. I wish for my legal career’s sake I was lying about it, but that’s the truth.

As I really got into it, the motivation to keep doing it became less of a reaction and more of a desire. I realized I was pretty good at it and people liked what I was writing. I got the notion in my head some time in late 2008 that maybe, just maybe, I could get a job doing it, and it was around that time — just before I moved the blog over to The Hardball Times, actually — that I began a conscious effort to make baseball writing a career.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I introduced to the wide readership a line of inquiry down which the very famous Jonah Keri had gotten me started. The line of inquiry concerns those bloggers who, despite almost no promise of financial compensation or notoriety, have persisted in their craft.

The question I posed — after having considered Will Leitch’s suggestion from his Costas Now episode that blogging is a really hard work — the question I posed goes like this:

Why do it? If, as Leitch suggests, it’s hard work, why do it? If, as I can tell you personally, it provides very little in the way of fame and/or cash money, why do it?

I’ve posed this same series of questions — or at least ones very similar to them — to some of the interweb’s more thoughtful baseball writers. Over the next week-plus, I’ll be sharing their responses in these electronic pages.

What follows is the product of a lightly edited email correspondence with Bryan Smith. In addition to being a bona fide prospect maven, Smith is also a real-live thoughtful person. And if you haven’t read it, his Staring Down the Sinkerballers series is like woah.

Smith: I started blogging when I was 15 or so, almost eight years ago now. So, I think I have sort of run the gamut as far as “base motivations” are concerned. Originally, and for probably the first 4-5 years, I think the predominant reason was a practical one — I thought that blogging would help me learn about baseball (I didn’t know sabermetrics at all, then), and in turn, would help my teenage dream to work inside the game.

In college, that began to change a little bit, particularly around when I started Baseball Analysts with Rich. I began to find that the writing process was as fun as the baseball element — we had a guest section called the Designated Hitter and got some great writers to pen some great, inspiring pieces. Being on the Internet, and writing so often, led me to the Journalism/English major that I chose. I think I continued through college for another practical reason: money. I didn’t have to wait tables or haul boxes or anything, my job was to write an article 1-2 times a week that ten thousand people read. Which leads to another reason: self-importance. I loved creative non-fiction writing more than anything, but baseball was the outlet that allowed the biggest audience and the only money.

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While I’ve never met Will Leitch in person — and have certainly never posed with him like in those disgusting, poorly Photoshop-ed pictures of us floating around the internet — there’s a debt of gratitude I’ll always owe him for his performance on a certain, now pretty famous, episode of Costas Now.

It’s not the way his presence there turned Buzz Bissinger into a rabid, frothing mess — although I certainly have no problem with that. Rather, it’s the way he (i.e. Leitch) was able to articulate, more or less on the fly, the merits of sportswriting in the electronic age.

For it’s during that discussion that Leitch says:

One of the nice things about the web is [that] it’s a meritocracy. Sure, anyone can start a blog, but to get a readership you have to be serious, you have to be consistent — it’s hard goddamn work doing a blog.

As an unabashed classist, democracy is something about which I’m inherently skeptical. When left to their own devices, the teeming masses rarely seem to make good decisions. (I mean, seriously, the Toronto Raptors?)

The thing is, it works on the internet — or, at least with baseballing analysis it seems to. Craig Calcaterra, Dave Cameron, Rob Neyer: these guys are, by and large, products of the internet. Without the benefit of electronic print, there’s a good chance that we, as readers, are never introduced to their voices. Even Joe Posnanski, though he wrote for the Kansas City Star — well, he wrote for a paper in Kansas City.

I invoke that Leitch thing here, because, a couple days ago, I was corresponding via something called “G-Chat” with MC Jonah Keri. After performing the secret handsake of the Mutual Admiration Society (yes, you can do it over the internet), we somehow got to wondering: What is it that motivates the sporting blogger? Fame? Cash money? All the Cristal a man can drink?

Mind you, it’s not just the big guns we’re talking about, either. The “we” in the title of this post refers to anyone who says to him- or herself, “I’mma write me some words.”

The question is: Why do it? If, as Leitch suggests, it’s hard work, why do it? If, as I can tell you personally, it provides very little in the way of fame and/or cash money, why do it?

Well, you shouldn’t expect to find the answer here, today. But it’s my intention, over the course of some posts that’ll be coming out over the next couple days, week, whatever, to harass some smart guys — some guys who’re articulate enough to express their feelings on the topic — and approach some answers.

Before I bring the current post to a conclusion, it’s only right to share some of Jonah’s own thoughts. Here they are, however incomplete, in their original G-Chatty form:

10:11 AM me: Do you have any one-line answers as to why you, in fact, write?
10:11 AM Jonah: I can tell you why (and you can note it publicly, or not, up to you) but it’d be slightly longer than one line)
10:12 AM I write because I have no other discernable skills
I write because I like creating
I write because I’m a social animal and producing something tangible and public engages others to come talk to me about it
10:13 AM I write because as a kid, I thought Ring Lardner and W.P. Kinsella and Bill James and the Sports Illustrated crew were really cool.
10:14 AM I write because I love sports, and realized by age 12 I’d never be good enough to play in the NBA
I write because the Expos roped me in, and I became so attached to them that I had to tell people

Tomorrow: why Bryan Smith writes.