Reversal of Fortune

[kcmets]

=metsmarathon post_id=90555 time=1651065319 user_id=83]m.e.t.b.o.t. was always focused entirely on outcomes. well, at least as focused as a little tin, cardboard, and duct tape creation could possibly focus on anything, what with his makeshift assembly of used vcr parts cobbled together from the refuse bin behind an abandoned radio shack. the little fella would tell you, if he could talk, mind you, that the baserunning of canha and mcneil couldn't've happened if not for dom's efforts, nor could the defensive miscues, at least per his operating algorithms.



he's not perfect, as he's somewhat poorly designed and certainly poorly constructed, but he always brought a unique perspective to the game, that may or may not have merit.



for the record, m.e.t.b.o.t. always was sure to credit the most recent butterfly to flap its wings for the results of any hurricane. he likes to take chaos theory to its extreme illogical conclusion. he's a strange little robot.

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

Coach little league and you'll learn pretty quick how important preparation and anticipation is in baseball

[nymr83]

=metsmarathon post_id=90555 time=1651065319 user_id=83]
=batmagadanleadoff post_id=90428 time=1650996622 user_id=68]
=metsmarathon post_id=90415 time=1650992362 user_id=83]
btw, m.e.t.b.o.t. woulda shaeffered as follows:



smith 5.10

scherzer 3.21

mcneil 0.71

canha 0.56

diaz 0.24

escobar 0.15

nimmo 0.02

[metsmarathon]

well, sure. that home run added 12.8% chance of the mets winning the game, which is pretty darned good. the poor cards had but a scant 3.1% chance at that point, down from 15.9% after dom's single.



the porblem is, that wasn't the only thing nimmo did as a batter that game.



in the first inning, leading off the game, nimmo made the first out, dropping the mets' chance of winning by 2.1%

in the third inning, nimmo again made an out, with one out already in the inning, with the score tied. this dropped the mets' chance of winning by 1.6%

and in the 5th inning, nimmo made an out, again with the scored tied, with two outs and a runner on second. this dropped the mets' chance of winning by 4.5%

and finally, leading off the eighth inning with the score still tied, nimmo got out a fourth time, dropping the mets' chance of winning the game another 4.3%



so despite adding 12.8% chance of winning in his last at bat, prior to that point he had already reduced the emts' chance of winning the game by a full 12.3%



his net WPA was a scant 0.002 or 0.2% (losing a tenth of a percentage point to pesky rounding errors).



m.e.t.b.o.t. looks at a whole game in total, not a single play in isolation. he's remarkably comprehensive. context matters. he's also a connotation nerd, which usually surprises people.



he's admittedly not good at factoring in defensive contributions. he always credits a batter with a fielder having made an error, as for the error to have occurred, the batter must usually have done something to precipitate the action. but he always wanted to take the blame for defensive miscues away from the pitchers, who, he would always argue, did their job by getting the batter to hit the ball to one of his fielders. so he'd try to dig into the numbers and pull out the WPA delta attributable to errors.



where he really struggled was identifying where the pitcher failed to get the batter to hit the ball to his fielders, but one of the fielders did something incredible to get to the ball and make a play.



he'd benefit mightily by plugging into the treasure trove of statcast data available, but as near as i can tell, it's not yet available to in any kind of format that's remotely machine readable by slapdash coagulations of mismatched plastic gears housed in a repurposed child's toy. but we can still hope.

[roger_that]

Johnny Lunchbucket wrote: Coach little league and you'll learn pretty quick how important preparation and anticipation is in baseball

I have. I found it's important to prioritize, as eight-year-olds can only learn one thing at a time to look out for, and they all learn at different paces.

[Frayed Knot]

I'm not saying anything so absolute as "Never" or "Always." What I am saying is that, maybe, the IBB is called for ten times, or a hundred times, more than it should be.

And I'm certainly willing to entertain the idea that MLB managers over-use the IBB, although I don't recall if anyone has tried to put forth evidence that it is nor do I have any particular opinion on

it myself. Certainly the idea that the Sac Bunt was over-used in previous eras is pretty much accepted fact by now and that current strategy is of the opinion that defensive shifts were under-used

in the past. Point is that trends in thinking can and do shift in sports even if pure momentum means it sometimes takes longer than it should.



I'm just a casual football fan but have long thought that that league is in need of a Bill James-ian kind of examination. In recent years there do seem to be some very slowly moving shifts in their

otherwise conservative mindset such as where punting on 4th-and-inches doesn't always seem to be the first and only option. Two-point attempts, except in those cases where your the situation

dictates that your team is forced into them, still appears to be the equivalent of touching the third rail for coaches but maybe that too will start to move, even if only at the speed of plate tectonics.

[roger_that]

Frayed Knot wrote: their otherwise conservative mindset such as where punting on 4th-and-inches doesn't always seem to be the first and only option. Two-point attempts, except in those cases where your the situation dictates that your team is forced into them, still appears to be the equivalent of touching the third rail for coaches but maybe that too will start to move, even if only at the speed of plate tectonics.

Dunno if you've heard that Gladwell podcast I linked to above, but going for it on 4th down is one of his examples. Essentially, to boil a complex speculation down to a few words, it's a matter of macho, of being one of the "knowledgable" ones, in doing things like they've always been done--and in some cases, it's demonstrably counter-productive. That's what sabermetrics has given us: ways to exploit market inequities. If you can find something that makes no sense, but is widely followed, then you can advance your fortunes by NOT following them, at the considerable risk of being made fun of, mocked, derided, especially if it doesn't have an immediate positive result.



The example in MONEYBALL is famous, of course: sabermetrics show that OBP is the single most important offensive stat there is, yet teams cut, send down to the minors, bench, platoon all sorts of OPB wizards, who can be picked up for very cheap sometime, especially if you're willing to swap a low-OBP, high-BA "star" in exchange for them. Baseball players being what they are, sometimes this will backfire: the high-OBP star costs you a few games, say, with his lousy glove, or lack of power, and you look like an idiot for making a bad deal. Which is why GMs are unwilling to buck the system. But it's inherent to the idea of systems that something in them is inefficient, and can be exploited to your advantage.

[Edgy MD]

A fear of going for fourth-down conversions seems like the opposite of macho, but yeah, I can see how making an annoyingly conservative choice can take on an air of intellectual machismo. And coming from a physical world of football might suggest that the intellectual realm is where coaches might feel most insecure.



I tend to think coaches are like the rest of us, and they do shit in their job that they might even suspect is stupid just for the sake of job security. It's not crazy to think that the coach who fails doing what everybody else is doing lasts longer than the coach who fails doing everything completely different.



Davy Johnson in his early years with the Mets was a revelation. He made the whole industry look stupid. Davey Johnson at each successive stop seemed more like everybody else. Davey Johnson managing Team America made me want to scream. The way he ran his team was an offense to me and everything I believed was true from having watched Davey Johnson decades earlier.



Glad he lost that 'stache though.

[nymr83]

Not sure I agree on the football thing. What could be MORE "macho" than 4th and 1 lining up and saying "we are bigger and stronger than you and running this shit down your throat"

[roger_that]

And a phenomenon as infrequent as the IBB, whose success rate is hard to quantify, might persist for decades. After all, if it costs you games, if it's colossally counter-productive, how many games a year could it possibly cost you? One? Maybe two? And that's after weighing in the number of runs it gains for you.



Another factor in its favor is the inequality of runs. A defender of the IBB can argue that sometimes big innings don't matter, as in situations where the goal is to prevent ANY runs from scoring, since even one run reduces your chance sharply of winning that game. Say, a tie game, bottom of the ninth, men on second and third, one out, and the other team's big guy is up. That's an obvious IBB call, in that it sets up the DP, eliminates the big guy's bat, but MOST OF ALL, the big guy now on first doesn't matter. One run loses the game so that's all you need to prevent. But if the next batter hits a grand slam, on the books it would seem that the IBB cost you four runs--but you don't care if it's four runs or one run.



So not all runs are equal, which makes it even harder to quantify. But still the IBB may be a net loser.

[roger_that]

Not sure I agree on the football thing. What could be MORE "macho" than 4th and 1 lining up and saying "we are bigger and stronger than you and running this shit down your throat"

"Macho" might not be the most precise term. I meant it in the sense of "being one of the boys" or "not looking like a weirdo."



The term "sissy" comes up in Gladwell's explanation of why Wilt Chamberlain refused to shoot his free-throws underhand. He started out shooting free throws very poorly--40% or something like that. Then he switched to underhand, and he became pretty good at it. The season or two he shot underhand, he improved to over 60%. In his famous 100-point game against the Knicks, Gladwell, points out, he actually set the NBA record for most free throws in a game, 28. And he attempted only 32--pretty good shooting, no?



But he soon gave it up, and went back to shooting in the 40% range. Gladwell estimates that this decision cost him up to ten points in some games. And what was Wilt's explanation? "I didn't like looking like a sissy."

[Frayed Knot]

Yeah, I've long thought that coaches shy away from going for it on 4th down and from two point PATs because they were afraid of the backlash and second guessing that would come from failing.

I believe it's a truism that powerful coaches, who were often part of the competition committee where rules were decided, were the ones who kept the 2-point conversion out of the NFL for so

long even as it was a standard in college ball (and the AFL?? ... I forget). If it wasn't allowed then they couldn't be blamed for not using it.

NFL coaches don't have that kind of out-sized power anymore so, like baseball though to a lesser degree, some of these philosophies are being driven from the front office so I detect at least

a whiff of change even as the head coach remains a game-day autocrat.





There's a HS coach (in Arkansas I think?) who runs his team with the philosophy that they Never punt, they Always on-sides kick, Always go for two, and several other 'trick' plays such as

those ... and they almost always win. Now this is HS and their winning could be from any one of a zillion factors so I don't want to equate this to the pros, but to me it just seems like a

much more interesting game to follow and a much more FUN way to play. Plus it's not like it's hurting his school's record.





Will try to catch up on that Gladwell pod at some point.

[Edgy MD]

Ten years ago, Drew Magary took a letter from a guy who wanted to know who Drew thought would be the winner in an All-Pro NFL matchup of Black players against White players. Magary acknowledged what a minefield the issue was to dive into, and then dove into it anyhow. A reader then attempted to put rosters together, and another reader played the game out on Madden 2012 (as best as he could within the confines of the game, anyhow). https://deadspin.com/we-simulated-the-nfl-white-vs-black-race-bowl-on-madde-5873045Recap here!



What made me remember it, apart from the two teams suiting up as the Raiders and Cowboys (I, myself, would choose the Packers or Patriots as the avatar of American Whiteness) but that the all-White team had no cornerbacks, and was forced to play some sadsack safeties out of position, and the all-Black team had no kickers, so they forced Chad Ochocinco into duty as the placekicker and decided to just go for every fourth down rather than force a guy to humiliate himself punting.