Jack Wilson is closing in on 200 hits. And when he gets them, I hope the feeling is a little anticlimatic. I read yesterday's article by Joe Rutter with mixed emotions.
On one hand, I'm disappointed and angry to hear that Jack fell into the vain delusion of believing his batting average and hit total matter more than winning any game at hand. On the other hand, I'm grateful that he's honest enough to admit that, and I admire Joe Rutter for reporting the story.
But what a sad and childish thing to chase. It requires discipline to keep priorities in order. Personal goals may be good for the team if they help a young player reach back and find an untapped resource of adrenaline or will, but that's debatable. If I was Mac, I'd try to learn to anticipate when personal goals might start to take over for players, and I'd ridicule them, gently but clearly, well in advance of their achievement. If Wilson strikes out chasing a pitch he should have taken, for example, I'd ask him, "You weren't thinking about that 200th hit there, were you?"
I've changed my mind about one personal goal - one not related directly to winning and losing - and that's the Rookie of the Year award. For one, unlike Jack's 200th hit, I do think a Jason Bay ROY would help the Pirates sell tickets and I see that as a key step in the rebuilding process. More important, I think he has earned it.
I also feel that Bay is getting shafted by some of the more irritating fashions in baseball analysis. Put simply, it's all the rage in baseball anaylsis to "translate" pure stats, and the respect for the "translated" stat has now reached a sad and ridiculous height. It baffles me that so many smart baseball people apparently believe that "translated" stats are more real than the real statistics.
In the Bay vs. Greene debate, Bay is getting screwed by the Gospel of Park Effects. Park effects can vary greatly from year to year based on the players who played in those parks and the weather they experienced in those parks. Anyone who paid a bunch of money for the Baseball Prospectus cheat sheet, for example, probably drafted a ton of Expos. They were too confident that Montreal's park inflated stats. The underestimated the hitting performance of 2003 Expos; they attributed too much of their success to park effects. They do make mistakes, people, and since they are in the business of selling information, we can't expect them to be forthcoming about this.
But think on this further. Petco and PNC are brand-new parks. Sure, it's common sense to say that Petco is a pitcher's park, but that doesn't mean it's not foolish to say you know exactly how much of a pitcher's park. We can agree that Khalil Greene's hitting performance was better than the numbers might suggest, but we're fools and suckers if we believe that know exactly how that performance would translate in the Neutral Ballpark in the Sky, which just doesn't exist in this material world of ours. Translations are just guesses. They may be educated guesses, but still, measures like Win Shares or VORP are just guessing at some "more real" value. They may be good guesses, but they are still guesses. Games are not won and lost by Win Shares and VORP. Actual "real" and material stats, on the other hand, are facts. Runs scored is a fact that's as well grounded in reality as any fact. To have real value, translations must be regarded with considerable skepticism.
I admire idealists. These are the people who believe that we live in a world of shadows, and that the "true" world is above us. That's what I see as the philosophic foundation of translating baseball statistics. Vinny Castilla didn't "truly" hit all those home runs; that's just a Coors field illusion. Khalil Greene wasn't "truly" that bad at the plate until August; that's just a Petco illusion. While I respect and deeply admire the Transcendentalism of Translations, I would remind translating gurus and translating disciples that it's a fundamental tenet of all good Idealistic philosophies that we can't access the higher, truer realms of existence. We're chained to the wall of the cave. All the confidence in the accuracy of translations is fundamentally misplaced and surely a cause of much error going forward.
Bay's also getting screwed in the Bay vs. Greene debate by the fact that he plays left field. In our current climate of snake-oil projection salesmen, everyone seems to have learned that you can't win a fantasy league unless you adjust projections by position. Again we have the whole problem of the accuracy of translation. What performance in left field is the equivalent of this performance at shortstop? I'll grant that there's a case to be made for taking the weaker hitting shortstop, but I won't agree that we know exactly how to compare the two players. The translations are guesses. Yet people will revere them as "true."
And don't forget that there is a case against measuring players, in real baseball or fantasy, only by some comparison to a "replacement level" benchmark. When did that become Gospel? Why do we agree that some calculation of "replacement level" is as accurate as, say, the number of runs a player scored? Currently it's the fad to draft in your fantasy league with position adjustments. Is that really the best strategy? There should be more debate about this. It looks I'm going to win my most competitve league this year by drafting with the Steeler way - taking the best available player, regardless of position - (do they still do that?) - in the belief that, while there may be a scarcity of good-hitting shortstops, there's no guarantee of which shortstops will hit well. A-Rod went #1 and I got Barry Bonds at #4. Who played shortstop for me? "Replacement level" guys like Melvin Mora, Jack Wilson, and odd months of streaky players like Bobby Crosby and Khalil Greene. Why should we measure players against a stable and abstract "replacement level" when that never exists? If teams had an "Auto Leftfielder" option - break glass, inflate, point toward field - who played with perfect robotic consistency, then such measures would be accurate. Otherwise it's a guess. We should have more skepticism for calculations of "total value" that assume there's some precisely known and stable measure of things like "park effect" and "replacement value."
I'm not saying that translations are worthless or wrong. I'm just saying we have to be more skeptical of their value. Fielding a baseball team is more like interior decorating than many people realize. You have a bare and empty room (the Pittsburgh Pirates), and you have your choice, an awesome HD television or a rare and choice carpet. The HD television may be less of an upgrade over the piece of shit color monitor than the rare and choice carpet over generic wall-to-wall, but what would you choose first? The TV or the carpet? There's no one mathematical formula to answer the question decisively.
I'm not a materialist myself. In most things I incline toward the ideal. Truth is Beauty and Beauty is Truth. Yes. But the mania for translating statistics has gone too far, I think. We need to keep translating them, for sure, but we need to recover some respect for the actual facts and remember that the translations are just guesses. The data is not perfect and the translations are not perfect and there's error everywhere. For all we know, ten years from now no one will translate by park effect and everyone will translate the stats by the field temperature or the current score. We have to be more skeptical when analysts such as Clay Davenport deliver the box score for last night's game in the Neutral Ballpark in the Sky. The analysts are mortal; they can't see that ballpark any better than you or I. They may have developed a complex Swedenborgian system of detecting correspondences between the real and ideal worlds, but they are still mortal.
Translations have value, but only as guesses. Let's not turn the ROY contest over to some one translating formula.
