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Christopher Shea
Dan Lewis
The Barrage of Nonsense Continues
Dan Lewis · 4 October 06
Q . Didn’t the hit-and-run fiasco sabotage the Tigers early?
A . Not in this view. It seemed imperative coming into Tuesday the Tigers had to play hit-and-run baseball if they were going to stay in a game with Joe Torre’s team.
-Detroit Free Press chat with Lynn Henning
The best way to beat Wang is by playing small ball. And the Tigers tried, they really did.
-Free Press Columnist Michael Rosenberg
You hear this sort of thing all the time. From newspapers to television to sports talk radio, and you hear it because it is the trump card of baseball analysis. If you are pro-small ball it means that you are a more discerning baseball fan, and by far the easiest way to sound “smart” is to espouse this antiquated, illogical brand of baseball. Wisdom like this is offered up in a way that suggests we have all gotten together and agreed on it beforehand, and there is no need to back it up with any evidence. It is what Bill James dubbed a “Bullshit Dump”, a thing you can say in order to avoid having to know what you’re talking about.
Who is guilty of the bullshit dump? Lynn Henning and Michael Rosenberg, to be sure. All of sports talk radio. Oh, and baseball managers, too. People who are paid a lot of money to know the difference. People like Jim Leyland.
In the top of the 2nd inning yesterday, during ALDS game 1 between the Yankees and the Tigers, Chien-Ming Wang did what you’re not supposed to do with a sinker and left it up, and Magglio Ordonez pasted it off of the left-center field wall for a leadoff double. A walk to Carlos Guillen followed, and Wang was in trouble.
Immediately, the inimitably annoying Tim McCarver began saying that the Tigers needed to “get something started” and “be aggressive”, which in this case meant to execute a bunt or, god forbid, the even more asinine hit-and-run play. The theory is, as Lynn Henning posits above, that the Tigers will have to do a little something extra to compete with the Yankees mammoth offense. I agree that they have to do a little something extra. What Lynn Henning (along with every other clueless sportswriter in Detroit and every “analyst” from ESPN) and I disagree on is what would constitute “a little something extra”. In the mystical realm outside objective reality, hit-and-run baseball is a great example. Where I live, back on planet Earth, doing a little something extra means scoring as many runs as possible and crossing your fingers.
What is the best way to score as many runs as possible? The answer, despite what just about every single person at every newspaper or in any radio booth in the country will tell you, is to have as many big innings as possible, and to put crooked numbers on the board. The best way to do that is to avoid outs. Period.
Tim McCarver knew the Tigers would put some kind of play on, and the reason he knew is that Jim Leyland told him. Yes, Leyland went public with information as to which tactics he was going to use to manage the game. This happens all of the time, and while I don’t think it makes a ton of difference whether or not you tell anyone about it, it stands to reason that it might make some difference, and thus I’ve never understood why managers do this. The only reason I can think of is that the press guys are looking for a quote, and as I mentioned, there is no better way to get instant credibility than to say that you’re going to play small ball. After all, when was the last time you heard this exchange?
Reporter: How do you plan on managing these important games?
Manager: Well, we’re going to try to get on base, and then when that happens I’m going to rely on my guys to slug in as many runs as possible. We’re hope to clog up the bases and wait for lightning to strike.
Actually, I’ll bet you Earl Weaver has answered questions this way, and that is why he is the greatest manager of all time. He understood that you don’t spend all season winning 95 games by beating teams with home runs and good pitching only to become a different baseball team in the playoffs. That would be dumb.
The idea that Lynn Henning and Michael Rosenberg think they’re supposed to believe in is that the Yankees offense is so much stronger than the Tigers’ that the Tigers need to do something different to overcome the disparity. It’s true, the Yankees offense is better, but if calling hit-and-run plays is a more effective way to play a baseball game, why not do it all the time? If it’s optimal, why did you spend an entire season running your offense sub-optimally?
How much stronger is the Yankees offense? The modern Murderer’s Row scored 930 runs this season, and in the business that’s what’s called a “shitload”. The Tigers scored 822, which is good for 5th in the league. Not too shabby, but still, that’s a difference of more than a hundred runs. A hundred! Divide by 162 games, and it’s an enormous, gigantic, Ruthian…..three quarters of one run.
The expected runs matrix tells us that when a team has runners on 1st and 2nd with no outs, it can expect to score about 1.5 runs. Let’s be conservative, bump it up, and say that the Yankees are one whole run better, per game, than the Tigers. This means that at precisely the moment the Tigers were competing with the Yankees offense, right at the moment when the Tigers had what amounted to a 1.5-run head start, they ran into an out while employing a one-run strategy.
I’m sure I’ve made this clear by now, but to put it simply, you don’t beat the Yankees by scoring one run in 4 separate innings and trying to hold their offense to less than half its normal output. You beat them by scoring as many runs as possible and allowing as few as possible. The game has changed a little since Ty Cobb’s time. Too bad the same can’t be said of the managers and the columnists.
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