Baseball: A Game of Math

“It was my understanding there would be no math during the debate.”  -- President Gerald Ford (Chevy Chase, 1975)

It’s funny.  We, as Americans, turn to baseball to get away from the daily chaos of our trying lives and the strife we must endure.  Baseball offers us a peaceful calming calm peace with its simplistic rules and slow pacing.  (Of course, if you’re a fan of the Cubs, it serves as the main cause of your strife.)  But that’s changing now as the sport contains more mathematics than you ever had to deal with in school.

Where we used to consider whether we wanted just peanuts or cracker jacks at the ballpark (Why not have them both?!), now we’re forced to spend the down-time (95% of a game) understanding calculations with concepts we deliberately ignored in school, if not skipped altogether. 

A new motto has been born:  Baseball – It’s Math Class, Only with Beer

Baseball has become decidedly more academic.  But is that a good thing for the sport?  A recent study of 890 baseball fans revealed that just over 146 percent of them didn’t like math and found routine concepts such as percentages tough to grasp.

Instead of “see the ball, hit the ball” – the most famous Pete Rose quote before his now more famous quote, “See the game, bet on the game.” – it’s become “How often do they pitch a certain pitch?  How will hitting this first ball affect the rest of the balls I might see and, therefore, the game?  Where should I hit it?  How are they playing me?”

Remember the good old days when you just had to know the basics?  Just give me batting average (comma) home runs (comma) runs batted in and we’re done.  “How’s he doing?”  “He’s hitting .280, 24, 91.”  “Good enough for me.  Put him in the All-Star game!” 

I remember Jim Rice (excuse me, that’s Hall-of-Famer Jim Rice) always considered it a good year when he hit .300, 30, 100.  He liked big round numbers.  And therefore, we liked him. 

But those big round numbers weren’t enough for the powers that be.  There’s so much more to baseball than just batting in runs and hitting a ball over a fence.  With the escalation of salaries causing stadium parking rates to bankrupt formerly wealthy families, every measurable now must be, well, measured.  No player gets through without a thorough stat check.

On-base percentage is the new “golden stat” nowadays.  Batting average is so passé, what with its average of batting and all.  Yessir, O.B.P. – “You down with OBP? Yeah, you know me.”—is the new darling because it, get this, includes walks.  It’s the difference between a chocolate sundae with whipped cream and a chocolate sundae with whipped cream and nuts.  (Unless you’re allergic to nuts and then you should stay far away from on-base percentage.)

This calculates the percentage of time that a player reaches base.  “Time,” of course, limits the dividend to only consider time spent at-bat and does not include a player’s time in the bathroom, at home, playing with his kids at the beach, sleeping in the clubhouse, or other non-game activities.  Otherwise, I’m sure the numbers would be lower considering that someone like Albert Pujols spends a healthy eight hours per night sleeping.

The new breed of general manager loves this stat.  If the government were to legalize interpronounal marriages and allow humans to marry stats, many g.m.s would pick this one to be their lawfully wedded significant other.

But the additional numbers don’t stop there.  Seemingly out of nowhere over the past decade, the “basics” have given way to a glut of new stats.  A baseball stat sheet reads more like a company’s prospectus, and has more numbers than a drum full of Lotto balls. 

You can make a ratio for any two stats, really.  BB/K is the number of walks received for every strikeout.  1B/GS is the number of singles for every grand slam slammed.  BS/HT is, of course, the number of bats splintered to every holdout threatened by a player.  GO/TL measures ground outs per every torn ligament a player has suffered.  And TR/IF is the number of tickets requested by a player per the number of members in his immediate family.  (That’s an important stat for the traveling secretary.) 

Over the past few years alone, we’ve encountered a seismic shift that has led to an integration between simple, wholesome baseball stats and complex, evil calculus. 

The man responsible for much of this is Bill James, otherwise known as “Wild Bill” (by no one other than me).  He is the chief architect in what is being called “the Nerd Movement” (again, by no one other than me).  The Kansas native and baseball writer has turned player evaluation on its ear with formulas that allow anyone to determine what will happen for sure, without a doubt . . . unless it doesn’t. 

He created Sabermetrics which, of course, is named after former Kansas City Royals star Bret Saberhagen which comes from the Dutch word SABR meaning Society for American Baseball Research and hagendaas, meaning “ice cream.” 

These new general managers who never played an inning on the field as youngsters, but “batted clean up” for their middle school’s Math Olympiad squad are now en vogue.  (En Vogue, on the other hand, hasn’t come out with a decent R&B song since the early 90s leaving many to wonder what ever happened to them and many more to wonder what the hell I’m talking about.)  They subscribe to Sabermetrics religiously, many of them majoring in it at business school.

Instead of just looking at a pitcher and getting a feel for a pitcher’s stuff, James’ guide takes the guesswork out of player acquisition and promotion.

Take the situation of a pitcher jumping from the National League to the American League.  The AL is known to have stronger lineups so it stands to reason a pitcher’s Earned Run Average will jump.  How do you know if your new player won’t suck it up under the bright lights and loud bats of the new league?

In the old days, you would just sign him and tune in to talk radio to figure out how much he sucked.  You don’t have to wait for an actual game anymore.  Predicting a player’s performance can be done with this standard metric devised by Bill James's disciple Jim Hassenpfeffer who describes it here:

You add a pitcher's E.R.A. in his home league, walks to strike-out ratio, balls hit out of play, percentage of foul tips that glance off the umpire, and average number of signs shaken off, then divide that by the number of calluses built up on his pitching hand and if you've got a MTZLPLK under 18.76, chances are you've got yourself a winner.

It makes a lot of sense.  In 2005, the Red Sox signed Matt Clement away from the Chicago Cubs to a lucrative deal because his MTZLPLK was a glowing 13.90 which meant that he would pitch well until just after the All-Star break when a batted ball would careen off his noggin causing him to suck for the rest of his career. 

This type of projection is not unique in the offices of professional clubs.  They can even rate you when you don’t play.  It’s called VORP and it means “value over replacement player.”  It calculates if one player is better than a fictitious guy they could certainly get to replace him. 

This logical analysis proposes that most players on the field suck and can be easily replaced by other less sucky players.  It was created by “Ron from Queens” who calls in with a trade suggestion every time the Mets lose.

There is still a small portion of baseball aficionados who don’t need these stats.  They just need what they see in front of them.  Did he make an out or not?  Does he look scared stiff or not?  It’s olde-timey baseball at its best. 

Which reminds me of a story – the first batter hits a fly ball to the center fielder, who makes a nice running catch.  A guy sitting in the bleachers writes it down and then turns to the man next to him and says, “Score that play an 8."

The next batter hits it directly to the right fielder who catches it in his tracks.  The scorekeeper writes that one down and says, “Score that play a 9,” at which point the man leans over to him and says, “I though the first catch was better.” 

This is the problem with baseball today – too much time for these stories.  It beats doing math though.