Bill James admits he's wrong

[santo=dorf]

Link

 

James, who made his name writing the "Baseball Abstract" books and currently advises the Red Sox, said he no longer had faith in the numbers he and others long used to make their arguments about clutch hitting and the like.

 

The statistics now seem far too noisy to him - based on too little data - to trump ideas with an inherent ring of truth to them.

 

"I was wrong about something, wrong about something important, for a long time," James said by e-mail last week. "And since I had contributed heavily to creating the problem, I realized that I had to do what I could to address it."

[Punch and Judy Garland]

I've always believed in clutch hitting but that is pretty big of him to admit he was wrong

[CWSGuy406]

The link requires a login/password.

 

Does the article specifically say clutch hitting or a clutch hitter? I've always been on the fence as far as that goes -- I think there's the such thing as a 'clutch' hit, but I don't necessarily believe in a clutch hitter.

 

And I certainly don't believe in giving a guy $1 million based on how 'clutch' he is, when his career OPS+ is 81...

[santo=dorf]

I'll break the law, just for you.

 

with the score tied, the bases loaded and a division title at stake, Steve Finley walked to the Dodger Stadium batter's box in the ninth inning last October with a grin. "I knew the game was over," he said afterward. On the second pitch, he sent the ball flying through the late-afternoon California sunshine toward the bleachers, and the Dodgers had beaten the Giants.

 

The grand slam seemed a proper season's capstone for Finley, a veteran outfielder whom the Dodgers had acquired from Arizona before the trade deadline.

 

When games were on the line in 2004, he did his best hitting.

 

What you think this says about Finley, and about what he is likely to do for the Angels this season, offers a good litmus test of your place in baseball's ideological universe.

 

If you believe his 2004 heroics prove him to be a clutch hitter, you belong to the majority party. Call yourself a traditionalist, and know that most managers and players stand with you.

 

If you think Finley is no more likely to be a big-game performer this year than Alex Rodriguez - who tended to melt in the clutch last year - consider yourself a Jamesian. You share the view of many statistics lovers who have been inspired by the writings of Bill James. You consider clutch hitters to be the Loch Ness monsters of baseball, because you know that players who outdo themselves in the clutch one season rarely repeat the performances during the next.

 

The debate had not changed much for years. Then Bill James himself announced that he was thinking of switching parties.

 

In an essay published this winter - in something called The Baseball Research Journal, a Jamesian outlet if ever there was one - he argued that clutch hitters might indeed walk the earth. Not only that, but he also proceeded to challenge a handful of other numbers-based doctrines, including the belief that hot and cold streaks do not exist.

 

James, who made his name writing the "Baseball Abstract" books and currently advises the Red Sox, said he no longer had faith in the numbers he and others long used to make their arguments about clutch hitting and the like.

 

The statistics now seem far too noisy to him - based on too little data - to trump ideas with an inherent ring of truth to them.

 

"I was wrong about something, wrong about something important, for a long time," James said by e-mail last week. "And since I had contributed heavily to creating the problem, I realized that I had to do what I could to address it."

 

The central idea behind much baseball analysis is persistence.

 

Hitting for average, hitting for power, drawing walks, striking out batters and stealing bases are all obvious skills because the players who do them well one year tend to do them well again the next.

 

But if there is no pattern from one season to another, Jamesians argue, there is probably no underlying skill.

 

Steve Finley, as it happened, hit worse with runners in scoring position during 2003 than he did when nobody was on base. Did that make him a choker? Or did 2004 make him clutch?

 

Neither, statistics mavens say. He is just a good hitter who sometimes succeeds in big situations and sometimes fails. You do not get one head and one tail every time you flip a coin twice, and Finley will not replicate his career statistics in every given situation.

 

There seems to be no persistence, in other words, to clutch hitting. "Here today, gone tomorrow," James wrote in the essay. The same can be said of a handful of other traditionalist chestnuts, like streakiness. The problem, James now says, is that his old argument rested on a shaky stack of statistics.

 

Imagine if a doctor checked for breathing problems once a week by placing a stethoscope over a patient's winter coat and listening for changes. Every exam would be flawed - filled with noise, as statisticians say - because of the coat. But the comparison of one exam with another would be even worse, with any small differences between them overwhelmed by uncertainty.

 

In baseball, luck and randomness - weather, ballpark dimensions, the pitcher - play the role of the winter coat. And the search for clutch hitters involves not just one comparison that compounds the statistical noise. It has two: the differential between a player's normal and clutch batting averages and the difference between this differential across seasons.

 

This messiness could disguise any clutch hitting.

 

"We ran astray because we have been assuming that random data is proof of nothingness," James wrote, "when in reality random data proves nothing." (The essay, "Underestimating the Fog," is available at sabr.org.)

 

But the richest thing about James's mea culpa may be the conclusion worth drawing from it. Just as common sense says that some people handle pressure better than others, it seems likely that these differences are not large among major leaguers.

 

True chokers will flame out well before reaching the big leagues. Players who discover an edge in clutch situations, meanwhile, will almost certainly try to use it at other times, too.

 

If it exists, clutchness probably creates only a few extra hits for a batter over the course of a season, despite announcers who claim to see it in every game.

 

So James's old view might have had the rare distinction of being wrong and still being closer to the truth than the other side's argument.

[witesoxfan]

I'll break the law, just for you. 

 

There seems to be no persistence, in other words, to clutch hitting. "Here today, gone tomorrow," James wrote in the essay. The same can be said of a handful of other traditionalist chestnuts, like streakiness. The problem, James now says, is that his old argument rested on a shaky stack of statistics.

 

...

 

In baseball, luck and randomness - weather, ballpark dimensions, the pitcher - play the role of the winter coat. And the search for clutch hitters involves not just one comparison that compounds the statistical noise. It has two: the differential between a player's normal and clutch batting averages and the difference between this differential across seasons.

 

This messiness could disguise any clutch hitting.

 

Which gives every Timo hater more ammo.