Hitting the Foul Pole

We decided to dust off this blog and give it another try in 2012.  Between busy years for both of us, and a lousy on field product, 2011 was a difficult year to blog about the Twins.  So we didn’t do it.

Earlier this week I finally got around to reading Jonah Keri’s The Extra 2%.  It details the Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays rise from laughingstock to elite AL contender.  The driving force behind this change was a new ownership group.  Led by Stuart Sternberg and a cadre of Wall Street trained analysts.  The rest you know.

I came across this article while reading Hardball Talk this morning.  The cubs have signed a deal with bloomberg sports for a new player evaluation system.  This is something I can only assume the Twins do not have, but would laugh the Bloomberg Sports sales rep out of the room. Probably while giving him wedgies or something.  As with most people (or person) who read this blog, I am very frustrated with the arcane approach to player evaluation the Twins have taken, well, forever.

The extra 2% spends about half a chapter with quote from AL east executives lamenting the Garza/Young trade of 2007.  Because Tampa got such a good deal, they knew they would have another strong team in their division.  Even with Terry Ryan back in charge, I’m not sure I can envision the Twins staff outsmarting the likes of Freidman, Epstein, Cherrington, etc.

I am hesitant to blame ownership, because the Pohlad family has always been pretty hands off.  So the brain trust that has been in place  since the 90s is running this team with a pretty good head of steam, and it does not appear is if they will be changing course anytime soon.

Welcome back to the  blog everyone, anybody have any thoughts on the topic.

The stats vs scouts “debate” continues to rage on, with the “stats” side of the argument pushing the radical notion that a good front office should combine both statistical analysis and scouting into its decision making process, while the “scouts” side chomps on sunflower seeds and chewing tobacco while screeching that anyone who believes in any stat besides batting average doesn’t know anything about real baseball.

Was that fair? Who cares?

As we all know too well by now, the Twins were one of the last holdouts in the “scouts only” camp, and have recently hired “a guy” to “look at” some statistics. At the time, I wondered if they’d listen to that guy, or if they just hired him as a salary-wasting figurehead, whose only purpose is to have a title that the franchise can wave in the noses of people who call them ignorant to new methods of understanding the game. That’s still an important question, and I doubt it’ll be answered until several more moves are made and we can get some information as to who was behind the moves. I’d say 6-24 months.

But I don’t want to wait! What do we know now?

Well, the whole point of hiring a team of statistical analysts is to gain a competitive advantage against other teams. The A’s found an advantage in the market for high-OBP/low-average players, who would help a team win but were undervalued by the marketplace at the time — everyone knows that they found that market inefficiency by paying very close attention to their statistical analysis, which was the class of the league at the time. Since then, the rest of the league has caught on and high-OBP guys are no longer undervalued by the market — and look at what it’s done to Oakland’s ability to compete. They still have not found a new market inefficiency, and I’m sure it’s not for lack of trying.

Other teams, notably the Mariners and Red Sox, have tried to exploit what they saw as a newly formed market inefficiency: great defensive players. They’re relying heavily on advanced defensive metrics, but those metrics are not yet advanced enough to be truly reliable; you can probably see that in the win-loss records of those teams. Someday, perhaps, there will be a good way to measure defense objectively, but that day has not arrived yet.

Meanwhile, the Twins continue to compete, and many around the league have wondered why … especially teams in similar markets who find themselves stuck at the bottom of the standings but for the occasional burst of fate which brings them some wins. But the thing about fate is that she’s a bitch.* Those other teams want to know: what’s the deal with the Twins?

* Or something. I don’t know exactly how that saying goes.

In order to compete consistently without outspending your rivals, you basically must find a market inefficiency that you can exploit for as long as possible; the A’s lost their advantage only once other teams started using the same methods to seek out the same players. And because it’s basically impossible to keep things a secret nowadays — you are currently reading an example of why it’s impossible for things to stay secret, even if you don’t tell anybody the recipe for your magic sauce, someone will probably come up with it, or something close — you have to choose between getting so good at finding new inefficiencies that you can exploit a new one every time the old one closes, and getting so good at exploiting a particular inefficiency that nobody else can do it even if they know what it is.

So, the question is: have the Twins found a market efficiency, how are they exploiting it, and which method of protecting their advantage have they chosen? Jerry Crasnick recently wrote an article that may be able to shed some light for us. Here’s a hint: strike-throwers.

It’s not easy to project how an 18-year-old high school senior’s control will look when he’s 24, but Twins scouts focus on the traits that will give a prospect a head start. The pitcher who maintains the same arm slot, breaks his hands at the same place and drops his landing foot in the same spot after each throw has an edge over someone with an inconsistent delivery. Similarly, a pitcher with the self-assurance to pitch to contact and the demeanor to shrug off a bad-hop single or adjust to a tight strike zone is a better fit for the organizational approach. Makeup is just as important as mechanics or stuff.

“We emphasize it at the acquisition level,” [longtime scouting directory Mike] Radcliff said. “It stems from a manifesto we put together way back in the day: As a small-market club, how are you going to get an edge? We believe that command and control and makeup are true separators in the pitching category.

“We put stock in it and believe that it matters. It’s a part of our DNA now at every level — from scouting through our player development to the big leagues.”

The Twins believe in strike-throwing pitchers who boast a consistent delivery even at a young age, along with makeup, or the (mythical?) mental/emotional ability to rebound from failure and persevere through adversity.

At the same time, many other teams seem to value guys who can rack up big strikeout numbers, or guys who can light up radar guns, or maintain a low ERA, or generate ground balls, or who have electric raw stuff. What’s the market value of a guy who doesn’t strike many guys out, but also doesn’t walk many batters, who pitches to contact and relies on his defense behind him? Not high. So the Twins seem to have found an inefficiency.

I think it’s clear that those qualities can’t come across in any statistic, nor even in radar gun readings or box scores … perhaps not even on television. In order to find guys who meet this profile, you must use scouts. Lots of them, all over the country, watching high school games and college games and semi-pro games and amateur league games, and minor league games — all of these widely divergent leagues and ballparks and playing environments, where stats mean less and less and the eye of an experienced scout means more.

The Twins, as an organization, are exploiting this market inefficiency by relying heavily on scouts, at the same time that most front offices are pushing hard in the opposite direction, towards more and more statistical analysis. That seems to leave plenty of room for the Twins to continue exploiting these undervalued pitchers for some time to come.

And what if another team wants to horn in on the Twins’ turf? Will they turn into the A’s, struggling along as they fail to find a new well after the old one dried up? How are they protecting their competitive advantage?

Well, it goes back to how difficult it is to scout all these players, in all these games, in all these leagues, all over the United States and even the world (the Twins are pioneers both in Australia and Europe). It’s difficult and expensive to send scouts to all those games, and many franchises will be loathe to commit that kind of money without some guarantee of positive returns; my guess is that’s why so many were so slow to adopt statistical analysis in the first place.

And then, even if you’re spending the money to send scouts all over the world to see these games, who’s to say they know what to look for, or will find the diamonds in the rough anyway? The Twins have kept the same scouting staff in place for decades, with low churn and, without a doubt, plenty of handing down the wisdom of the elders through oral tradition.

The Twins are finding guys that other teams aren’t even looking for. They’re looking for guys in places that other teams aren’t looking. And if other teams were looking, the Twins have a substantial head start on accurately evaluating young players.

This, all at the same time that they’re emerging from the economic depths of the small market teams, and signing checks with the big boys.

I wouldn’t expect the Twins to suffer the same fate as the Athletics any time soon.

Want to have some fun? Ed Price over at Fanhouse just “penned”* an article about the Twins’ bullpen situation, defending Gardenhire for selecting Rauch as the closer instead of going with a closer-by-committee situation. It’s not clear if Price actually thinks Rauch was the best option; instead, his article is about how Joe Sheehan doesn’t know shit about baseball because he never wore a jock. I love these.

* Should it really be “penned” these days? Maybe it should be “keyboarded” or something? I mean, when was the last time you saw someone write more than a couple sentences with an actual pen?

In an article in the April 19 issue of Sports Illustrated, Joe Sheehan criticizes the Twins and manager Ron Gardenhire for naming Jon Rauch the team’s closer after the season-ending injury to Joe Nathan.

I suppose that since Price apparently reads Sports Illustrated on paper — implied by the fact that he knows the date of the issue — I think he may have actually written this article with a pen. Which should say a lot about the direction he’ll go with his article.

Sheehan writes that Gardenhire decided to go with a single closer “because a statistic — the save — is driving the process.”

Okay, so we know Price uses a pen to write, which means he’s an old guy who hates stats. But it’s not just stats he hates, but rather your stats. Get ready for a defense of the “save” as a statistic, and of managers who work to maximize the number of saves an individual player gets. After all, it’s tradition, and those never change. When was there ever a time when baseball managers didn’t save their best pitcher for the last inning? Baseball must have really sucked back then, if it ever happened.

Which shows that Sheehan doesn’t understand Gardenhire, or baseball players, or the game.

Yup. Classic opening salvo.

Sheehan, who has also written for Baseball Prospectus, knows how to analyze baseball statistics. But the game isn’t played by computer printouts, it’s played by players.

Well, we’ve reached the crux of the argument, I think. Sheehan just doesn’t understand that baseball is real. All this time he was mistaken, thinking that the thing to which he’d dedicated his life was just a meaningless simulation, like in that Star Trek episode.

No, I don’t remember which Star Trek episode. Weren’t they all pretty much like that?

Writes Sheehan:

No matter how strong Rauch has looked so far, Minnesota’s depth and breadth of skills cry out for a bullpen built around something more substantial than the save rule.

To recap: Sheehan says Gardenhire should utilize his bullpen in a way that maximizes the talent of the players he has.

But Gardenhire isn’t building his bullpen around the save rule. He’s building it around his players.

To recap: Price says Gardenhire is utilizing his bullpen in a way that maximizes the talent of the players he has.

What Sheehan doesn’t understand is that managers manage people. And a manager’s No. 1 task is to put his players in the proper situations — in games and in their frames of mind — to succeed.

And Price knows the secret of baseball: that there’s one and only one way to manage people. Anything a manager does that’s different from what Tony LaRussa does is stupid and wrong. That’s why John McGraw was such a fucking dipshit of a manager: he didn’t know the secret, magical way to manage people.

Statistics represent what the players have done; the players do not simply perform to predetermined statistics, like Strat-o-matic cards.

Let me try to explain this, so we can all understand where Price is coming from.

Good baseball players get a hit 30% of the time or so. Great pitchers get outs via a strikeout about 30% of the time. There are other such “numbers,” many of them, which you can use to measure what the players have done. People used to invent these numbers: once upon a time, batting average was invented, and it was good. Decades later, the “save” itself was invented, and that was good too.

Then everyone pretty much realized that the state of baseball knowledge had reached its Platonic ideal, and that any attempt, by anyone, ever, to come up with a new or different way of understanding the game is a fucking asshole who wants to rape your children and burn effigies of your favorite childhood ballplayers. I’m pretty sure these are indisputable facts of history.

So what Price is trying to say is that Sheehan thinks baseball is not real, that it’s no different from Strat-O-Matic, which is a board game that simulates real baseball by playing with cards and dice and such. So you can pretend to be the manager by making decisions like “the next hitter is a lefty who mashes right handed pitchers, and my pitcher is right handed … should I bring in a lefty to face this guy?” You know, stuff that real baseball managers never have to think about.

Because …

And players are people.

That’s right. Because players are people. And that means Dennys Reyes is just as good at retiring Albert Pujols as he is at retiring Ryan Howard.

More than 10 years ago, when I was covering the Arizona Diamondbacks, I asked closer Gregg Olson about a theory I had. What if a team designated an “ace reliever” instead of a closer, and used him when the situation was most crucial — maybe in the ninth, as a closer would, but maybe with men on in the eighth, or with the heart of the order up in the seventh?

That’s quite an interesting theory you had. You must feel pretty good about yourself, because that’s pretty much the same theory that all the smartest baseball minds I know of came up with. But if you’re going to appeal to some authority on the subject of bullpen management, maybe you should talk to a smart baseball mind, like Bill James or Joe Posnanski, or Rob Neyer or Joe Sheehan. No, on second thought, it’s better to ask Gregg Olson. After all, those eggheads never got paid to scratch themselves in a filthy dugout, so what the fuck do they know?

Gregg Olson, on the other hand, racked up 217 saves over his 14 year career. I think that proves a) that he’s thought deeply about the best way to manage a bullpen, b) that he’s a pretty bright guy in geneneral, and c) that he’s bound to be pretty open-minded about shaking up the status quo that earned him $12.75M because he had reasonably good save totals.

Olson told me it wouldn’t work because relievers want to know their roles. Because of the way bullpens have evolved, players expect to be a closer, or the eighth-inning pitcher, or the seventh-inning pitcher, or the long man, or the lefty specialist.

Surprisingly, despite the conflict of interest, Olson sided with the status quo that makes closers disproportionately more money than their equally good setup-man counterparts. Talking to unbiased sources and paraphrasing them in such a way that they precisely back up the argument that you were trying to make from the beginning … this is what you learn in Journalism School. You’d know that if you could find the way out of your mom’s basement, blogging nerd.

Baseball people say that relievers want to know it’s their turn even before the phone rings. If they are handed a certain role, they know how and when to prepare to pitch.

Because your warmup pitches don’t work if you’re told to warm up, and you didn’t already know you were going to have to warm up.

(And no matter what the numbers say, there is something different about the last three outs that some guys can handle and some can’t.)

And no matter what your gut says, outs in the 7th inning can be higher leverage than the outs in the 9th inning. I mean, I just felt like I should point that out, since we’re just saying things that you’re not allowed to disagree with, as if it proves some sort of point.

Now perhaps relievers’ expectations have been created by Tony La Russa and his followers using pitchers in accordance with the save rule. But it’s how relievers have been used for decades, and players are used to it.

Sure, things changed before, and we think they changed for the better. Therefore, future changes cannot also be for the better.

So by picking a closer, Gardenhire wasn’t managing to the save rule. He was managing his players, setting up his reliever usage so the pitchers knew what they would be asked to do and could prepare for it.

If we’re assigning motive to Gardy, to whom you did not speak and did not quote, then why don’t we bother wondering why he selected the guy with the most career saves? I mean, it seems like maybe he might have been thinking about the number of saves.

Perhaps the most annoying thing about the column: It was titled “Inside Baseball.”

Are you sure? Because I clicked on it, and it said the title was “Closing Ranks,” which is much cleverer and more title-ish.

It was written by someone who doesn’t talk to baseball people and is anything but “inside” the game.

And … the one “baseball person” you talked to for this article was a decent-but-not-great closer who retired 9 years ago, you talked to him “over ten years ago,” and you didn’t even directly quote him. So, you know, that’s a pretty high horse you’re on right now.

I just read an interesting interview with Rob Antony — the Twins’ assistant GM — and it focused mainly on a hypothetical situation involving “RBI guys.” The question was, if you’re looking to sign a free agent, would you target a guy who had a high RBI total, or a guy with a high slugging percentage?

Antony replied that he would prefer the player with the higher RBI total. “Because you win with runs,” he said. “And I want that guy because you also have the correlation with a better batting average with runners in scoring position – he’s the guy that can step-up, the guy you want at the plate.”

“I think guys are pitched differently when they have a chance to do damage and they can’t make adjustments. Then, sometimes the guy with a bunch of home runs and few RBI with nobody on base, they challenge him, and you look and a lot of those guys do their production with the team behind and they tack it on and enjoy a solo home run in the eighth inning.”

Yeah yeah, Mr Antony, we all hate A-Rod and all those pointless 8th inning homers. (Though I wonder if the people who think 8th inning homers are pointless would rather not have those runs.) Anyway. Not the point.

If a scout or evaluator “sees something” in a guy that says he has the fortitude to hit well in scoring opportunities, that’s one thing. But if it’s a tautological “he’s a run producer because he had a big RBI year” line of reasoning, that’s where the problem is.

There is a non-statistical way of thinking about baseball. I know that because it’s all anybody really knew for 80 years; I also know that because there are still several teams that subscribe to it. The Twins are one of them.

A problem I’ve seen is when the younger statistically-minded community conflates “the non-statistical way of thinking” with “anti-statistically not thinking.”

Whether the Twins are right and Morneau drives in runs because of something intrinsic to him and his ability to make adjustments better than the pitchers he faces, or the numbers are right and Morneau produces runs because he’s a good hitter with a high slugging percentage and he happens to bat behind Mauer and Span who are always on base, well, does it matter? Morneau is still Morneau.

When the Twins are evaluating a player, I’m curious as to how they do it (that’s why I try to hunt down articles like this one that offer a glimpse). Do they watch the hitter in some run-producing situations and see how he handles it and extrapolate based on their experience how he’d do over the course of a season? Or do they do a cursory, limited version of statistical analysis, see a high RBI total at some point, and conclude that this is an RBI guy?

That’s a lot more important to me than the organization actually using modern analysis to their advantage — I want to know that the Twins are actually thinking — whatever their process — as opposed to being fools.

Obviously, the results this decade have been good. It’s working. But I want to keep up my hope that it’ll keep working.