What Grinds My Gears

I hate to go all Peter Griffin in this space, but do you know what really grinds my gears?

When ignorant baseball commentators make statements that are factually inaccurate.

Disclaimer: I am also about to do my best Fire Joe Morgan impersonation as well.

Let me start with the recent TBS coverage of the American League Division series between the Chicago White Sox and Tampa Bay Rays.

Right off the bat, Harold Reynolds—the man fired from ESPN for alleged sexual harassment, but for the most part a well-liked broadcaster—began discussing the Rays’ lineup by suggesting that Carl Crawford would be one of the best leadoff hitters in the game if he played for another team.

I am paraphrasing that, and it is not an exact quote. But, he then went on discussing how Crawford has been a great leadoff hitter in the past, ect...

Well, Harold—

A. Crawford has said, time and time again, that he hates batting in the leadoff spot.
B. Crawford has not hit leadoff in any game this year.
C. Crawford finished the season with a .319 on-base percentage.

Point C especially shows Reynolds’ severely flawed way of looking at baseball. He is stuck in the past, it seems. No player with a sub-.340 on-base percentage should ever sniff the leadoff spot. Ever.

Sure, CC is fast. He steals bases. Occasionally, he will even drop down a bunt for a base hit. Yes, he does a lot of the things that baseball fans associate with the traditional, typical leadoff man.

The most important thing a leadoff hitter can do, however, is get on base. Above all else. And, with his poor plate discipline, Crawford has shown that this is an issue for him.

Reynolds then went on with his usual tirade on small-ball tactics. Which is fine.

But this leads into my next example, regarding Chip Caray. Let me preface this by saying that Caray has excellent communication skills and is a fairly solid play-by-play man. But, as the following paragraphs will show, he should leave the whole analyst thing to people who, well, know what they are talking about.

Caray was a guest on XM's Baseball This Morning with Buck Martinez and Mark Patrick earlier today.

Shortly into his appearance, Caray, who will do color work for TBS during the upcoming ALCS, began to criticize Moneyball and the value of on-base percentage.

But to make his point—and this is the real kicker—he cited the Los Angeles Angels' first-round exit from the postseaon as an example of why the concepts of Moneyball do not work.

Again, I will paraphrase here. But he basically spewed out the typical Moneyball does not work in the postseason nonsense, saying, “No Moneyball team has made it to the World Series and eventually won it.”

Then Caray cited the Boston Red Sox and Rays as teams that are good because they know how to manufacture runs, or something along those lines.

Now, I do not know where to begin here. There is too much to criticize; this may take longer than I want to spend on this, in fact.

Using the Angels as a poster boy team for Moneyball is like saying, “Barack Obama is a proponent of Reaganomics.” In fact, the Angels, as well-run of an organization as they are, would do well to pay more attention to advanced statistical analysis.

That way, they might have avoided the whole Gary Matthews Jr. fiasco. After all, Matthews Jr. was perhaps the Least Valuable Player in the AL this year while earning enough money to make Barry Zito look underpaid, as he finished with a .675 OPS. If CC Sabathia, granted a pitcher who can absolutely mash, were to play everyday, he would have posted a higher number there.

Bogus contract aside, though, the Angels and Mike Scoscia are perhaps the poster child for incorporating small-ball tactics and manufacturing runs. And they could care less about OBP, one of the few teams left to.

How could Caray use them to make his case?

They actually finished ranked 18th in the majors on-base percentage, and the coaching staff preaches aggressiveness, but why let facts get in the way of an old-fashioned Moneyball bashing? Did Caray even watch their last series? The Angels hurt themselves by swinging at too many first pitches, seemingly hacking at everything. And Scoscia ran his team out of an inning with the whole squeeze bunt on a 2-0 pitch.

That really was such a ridiculous claim. But, more than that, it shows his ignorance about the Michael Lewis bestseller from 2002, which profiles the Oakland Athletics that season.

Moneyball is really not about on-base percentage or being cheap, as most people believe. Sure, OBP and valuing outs more than traditional baseball people have for generations is a major concept to be taken out of the book. However, too many people—especially those who have never read it (we are looking at you, Joe Morgan)—focus on these aspects as opposed to the real theme—finding inefficiencies in the market for baseball players.

Lewis, one of the most intelligent and respected business writers of this generation, wanted to answer one question by following around Billy Beane and the A’s: How could one team with such a low payroll consistently make the postseason, while other small-market teams could not?

The answer, of course, lies is Beane’s ability at exploiting inefficiencies. At the time, OBP was one such inefficiency. Traditional teams overpaid for stats—batting average, for instance—that actually did not have that much a correlation between scoring runs and winning games as many people were led to believe.

Studies have show repeatedly that team on-base percentage goes hand-in-hand with how many runs a club will score over a full season.

Thus, at the time of the book OBP was a major inefficiency for Beane to exploit. Well, that is hardly the case today, as nearly every front office nowadays uses it as a major criterion—well, at the least the smart ones who do not do things like, say, offer huge contracts to Jose Guillen—for making personnel decisions. In fact, any general manager who still ignores the stat when evaluating talent and making roster decisions should be fired for incompetence. Effective Immediately.

But, I digress.

One of those teams that values OBP—the Red Sox, who led the majors with a .358 clip.

In fact, Theo Epstein is one of the ultimate so-called Moneyball GMs today. And, guess what? Last time I checked, Mr. Caray, they have won two World Series championships in the past four years and are in a position to win a third. Boston, an organization that hired the father of sabermetrics, Bill James, as a senior advisor, is a so-called Moneyball team with money—a nearly unstoppable combination.

The key for any front office is to strike the right balance between traditional scouting and advanced statistical analysis—which does not work at the amateur level—to build a cost-efficient organization that can sustain its success.

Under Epstein, Boston has done exactly that, devoting the right financial resources into improving its farm system via excellent talent evaluation and the draft while making cost-efficient, intelligent decisions (for the most part) at the major league level.

The success of the other team that Caray mentioned, the Rays, is a direct result of the effective use of statistical analysis to make shrewd roster decisions and excellent trades. Andrew Friedman, who is a fan of, and open-minded to, all useful information, has shown the ability to find value anywhere by buying low and selling high in the market. All of the talent acquired through low draft picks is beginning to prosper, but the Rays’ success is a result of more than that. Friedman built the rest of his roster by shopping at the equivalent of Wal-Mart for baseball players while locking up a great deal of that young talent before they were eligible for arbitration or free agency.

So, again, they are a Moneyball club by definition, if people still use that ridiculous phrase to describe a team. Yet he used them as an example why teams should not value on-base percentage. Right?

So, to recap.

1. Chip Caray gets paid to talk about baseball.
2. Chip Caray has probably never read Moneyball, yet criticizes it constantly—just like Morgan, who admits that.
3. Chip Caray thinks that a team built on Moneyball principles will never win the World Series, even though the Red Sox have already won two.
4. Chip Caray hates on-base percentage.
5. Someone pays Chip Caray to talk about baseball.

You cannot make this stuff up.