Nerds on Sports

The opening line on the Big Game was 14 points. That means that in initial Vegas action, anyone that bet on the Patriots believed that they were two touchdowns and two extra points better than a Giants team that has won on the road in three straight weeks and mounted an effective pass rush against the Patriots the week before. I don’t think I’d take that bet.

The line has come down since then, but the Pats are still favored by a touchdown, a field goal and some change. I still don’t think I’d take that bet. I, and most of the western world, do believe New England is going to win. But by twelve? Thirteen? That’s a fairly tough thing to do. In the past five years, only one team has won by a touchdown, a field goal and some change. And that team wasn’t the Patriots, though they’ve played in three of those games. Granted, this Pats team is far different than the XXXVI, XXXVIII, XXXIX versions, but in a game this big, I’m not going to give the points.

In fact, I challenge someone to tell me why I should. That’s right. I challenge someone!

There, a gauntlet has been thrown down. In the meantime, I believe I still have more mailbag to get to:

Dave L (Somerville, MA) - Do you think baseball will ever have a salary cap? (in say… the next 30 years) why/why not?

I think we’re going to see a “salary floor” of some sort before we see any salary cap. Read more »

I hope everyone enjoyed their Thursday football. I’ve been in a tryptophan induced coma for the last 48 hours and I still haven’t finished all the leftovers. I guess I’ll head back into the coma tonight.

Earlier this week Perich posted his article about the value of Major League baseball players. Well, that got me thinking about some things I’ve read (and you can read too: Baseball Between the Numbers, Player Value: Last Piece of the Puzzle, Dollar Value of a Player: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and the Hardball Times MVPs), and that there has to be a better different way to figure out a players value. Plus, Perich said “If you have a more objective standard of value, let me hear it.” Maybe my way isn’t “more objective,” but I hope it’s a different enough view of the numbers to see some differences. It’s still not a vote, and that’s what counts. I know I want to take into account a players salary, a players performance, and the teams overall performance. The teams performance is where I vary from Perich.

I believe that if you perform well on a good team, you have more of a value. Why? Because a team that makes the playoffs makes more money. And like any other business the goal of the business is to make money. The hard part is to quantify this difference.

I started my calculations the same way, by downloading all the 2007 salaries from USA Today. Then I downloaded the 2007 stats for Total Bases and VORP for 2007. According to VORP Alex Rodriguz is the clear AL winner with a 96.6. Or almost 10 wins more than a replacement 3b, or 9 more wins then if the Yankees had Ty Wigginton. In the NL, Hanley Ramirez had a great year with a VORP of 89.5. Compare that to the actual MVP, Jimmy Rollins, who had 66.1. Lower than other NL powerhouses: David Wright, Matt Holliday, and Albert Pujols among others. Read more »

When a term like Most Valuable Player gets thrown around, it brings out the economist in me. What does “value” mean? When most people hear “value,” they think: a lot for a little. Stretching your dollar. A great reward for a little price.

Then I remember that the MVP is voted on, not decided by math, and I frown a lot. Thanks for making the term “value” subjective and meaningless, you clods. Whoo-hoo, another popularity contest.

So, always the contrarians, Nerds on Sports would like to present their own Nerds on Sports MVP.

How We Decide

Since the MVP is typically a reward for offensive play - fielders get the Gold Glove - we focused on offensive statistics. Our usual standards, like OBP and SLG, aren’t any good here. They’re not weighted by number of games played.

So our formula for MVP is pretty simple:

2007 Salary divided by Total Bases

This gives us Dollars per Base - how much it cost your team to get you to advance one base. The lower your Dollars per Base, the more valuable you are to your team.

(If you have a more objective standard of value, let me hear it)

2007 NL MVP

It was a close race here, but Hanley Ramirez, shortstop for the Florida Marlins, is the most valuable player in the National League. He put up competitive numbers - 0.386 OBP, 0.562 slugging - at bargain basement prices. At a final price of $1119.78 per base, Ramirez was not only the Most Valuable Player in the NL, but in the entire league.

2007 AL MVP

Despite all the love this site (and this columnist) has shown A-Rod in the past, Alex Rodriguez is not the most valuable player in the American League. He’s not even in the top 20. Steinbrenner’s paying $60,395.01 for every base A-Rod reaches. For that kind of money, you could get forty-nine Curtis Grandersons (outfielder, Detroit Tigers). Sure, Granderson might have posted slightly less impressive numbers - 0.913 OPS vs the Rod’s 1.067 - but can you pass him up at a beggarly $410,000? I submit that you can’t.

2007 World Series MVP

This is tricky - not dog-in-the-bathtub tricky, but rock-a-rhyme tricky - for several reasons:
Read more »

Somehow the Yankees writing falls to me. Who’d've thought?

Big news yesterday - A-Rod opted out of his contract with the Yankees. He gave up $72 million in owed salary, which means the Yankees gave up $21.3 million from the Rangers. George Steinbrenner’s son Hank made clear that no effort would be made to reacquire him.

There’s nothing more bizarre to me than the way New York sports fans and media treated Alex Rodriguez. They routinely savaged the best baseball player in a decade for not being a “clutch hitter” or falling flat in the postseason. They mocked or maligned him for only being “in it for the money,” as opposed to all the other mercenaries with hearts of gold that comprise the Yankees roster. First in the American League in home runs, runs and on-base percentage plus slugging? Screw him.

Scott Boras, A-Rod’s high profile agent, made this announcement midway through Game 4 of the World Series. He notified Brian Cashman by way of a voice mail. The timing of the message - during the final game of a World Series sweep by New York’s closest rival - plus the delivery suggest a cool and bitter parting. So be it.

Here’s the thing: if A-Rod’s after money, he ain’t getting it. The only two teams that can supply the salary he’s accustomed to are the Yankees and the Red Sox (who don’t want him). The Giants can’t. The Phillies can’t. The Cubs can’t. So what does the most hated man in baseball - and how does a man as talented as A-Rod get that appellation - want?

The ring, of course. The one ring to rule them all.
Read more »

We all know Major League Baseball is a big money making business. Well that business thinks that it needs to protect itself from stats nerds like us. Because we’re using those stats to create a fantasy world of increased baseball enjoyment. This is nothing new — in 2006 CBC Media (a small fantasy site) sued the MLB because they didn’t think they should fork over some dough to the MLB to use player’s name and stats. A judge ruled that CBC has first amendment rights to things publicly given to everyone in the newspaper.After that loss MLB decided to switch up their thinking. “We’ve agreed that the stats and names are in the public domain,” MLB Advanced Media spokesman Gallagher said after the ruling. “But when you start to use team’s logos and other images as CBC did, you need a license, it’s that simple.”

But that didn’t last long, because the MLB got together a team of lawyers (quick note, this team of lawyers would still finish ahead of the Devil Rays in the standings) to keep fighting the good fight. Just a few months ago as part of the appeal process one of MLB’s attorneys said that a fantasy league using names and stats without permission was analogous to a company printing posters or coffee mugs with pictures of players on them without permission. The judges appeared to be skeptical of MLB’s arguments. “MLB is like a public religion. Everyone knows (the players’) names and what they look like,” opined U.S. Judge Morris Arnold. “This is just part of being an American, isn’t it?” Read more »

Serpico’s excellent post yesterday got me thinking.

A professional baseball franchise has two goals which sometimes conflict: winning as many games as possible and drawing in fans. You might think those two go hand in hand but, as Serp pointed out, swapping out new talent every season makes it hard for the fans to invest in the team.

“Well, yes,” I thought, “but you get to save so much money.”

Then I started to wonder - how much money? And what’s the tradeoff?

So I went to ESPN.com and Sportsline.com and I got two figures:

• Total player salaries by team;
• Average home game attendance as a percentage of stadium capacity

And I made a graph in Excel.

(click the graph to expand to its full size)

Some interesting findings:

• In the lower half, you get two sudden spikes at the San Diego Padres and the Milwaukee Brewers. They get White Sox level attendance despite playing like, well, the Padres and the Brewers. Where’s the draw? What did the Brewers do last season that I and the rest of the world missed?
• The Boston Red Sox had 101.4% attendance on average in 2006. That’s not seats sold; that’s actual home game attendance. Look it up yourself. It pleases me to know that John Henry will admit more fans than the stadium has seats; anything for revenue.
• The trendline continues upward pretty clearly except for one embarassing drop by the Baltimore Orioles. They spent $93.55 million in 2006 on player salaries but only filled 57.1% of their seats on average. They’re spending St. Louis Cardinals money to get Toronto Blue Jays attendance.

I don’t know whether this data supports my thesis or Serpico’s. It may be too soon to draw that kind of conclusion. But I do know that it’s really interesting.

Today’s post is Part One of Two, the “Pro” argument in a NerdsOnSports exclusive debate over “Moneyball” - or stats-driven baseball management. Serpico takes the opposing side elsewhere.

My argument is that a manager can derive superior value in his team by managing based on statistics, rather than what are commonly called “intangibles.”

Consider the following:

(1) The object of a baseball game is to score more runs than the opposing team.

(2) Baseball does not have a clock; it ends when each team suffers 27 outs.

(3) Given 1 and 2, the team that can score more runs while suffering fewer outs will win a ballgame.

(4) Players earn runs by advancing along the basepaths. This can be done either by hitting or by being advanced through a walk or pitcher error (balk, etc).

(5) There is a fixed pool of available players for any given season. There are a fixed number of positions in the starting lineup - nine, to be precise.

As Kevin Bacon said in A Few Good Men, these are the facts of the case, and they are not in dispute. Those are the rules of baseball. All of the above are objectively true.

From that, I will assert the following:

(6) Given #4, a statistic which measures all the ways that a player can advance along the bases (for instance, on-base percentage) will be a more useful tool in evaluating a player than a statistic which does not (for instance, batting average).

That right there is the core of Moneyball - the idea that many traditional statistics, such as stolen bases, RBIs and batting average are not as useful as OBP, slugging or VORP.

Consider: RBI is the number of runs a player bats in. But in order to hit in a run, another player needs to have advanced to scoring position. So your RBI stat hinges on the scoring ability of the player before you in the lineup. This changes every time the lineup is altered, or every time you change teams, but no one thinks to qualify RBI with a little asterisk.

Batting average is neat, too, but it doesn’t measure the times that a player will advance a base through being walked. And for the big hitters like David Ortiz, Rickey Henderson or Joe Morgan, bases on balls constitute a significant percentage of their run production.

(7) Given #5, teams with less money to spend will not be able to outbid teams with more money. As such, the only way to maintain a competitive edge over those teams is to find undervalued statistics - stats which point the way to potential runs without seeming to.

The Oakland A’s do not have as much money to throw around as the New York Yankees (the most lucrative sports franchise in the world after Arsenal Football). Oakland will never beat New York in a bidding war over a hot free agent. What they can do, however, is search for run-generating players who New York overlooks. They do this by mining statistics that no one else looks at (such as OBP, or pitches broken down by ballpark) and turning up players like Scott Hatteberg and Kevin Youkilis.

That, right there, is the core of the Moneyball contention. There are certain statistics which illuminate a player’s potential more than others. If those statistics remain overlooked, a money-savvy manager can scoop up big-hitting talent at bargain prices. Such a case seems indisputable.

Now that you’ve read my argument, go read Serpico’s counter.

Part of the fun of blogging is opening your material up to the world and seeing what the world makes of it. Actually, I suppose that’s all the fun of blogging, unless you’re in that .0001% who are making money off this type of thing. So, like pretty much any editor of any neophyte blog, I get somewhat excited when e-mail from complete strangers arrives in our inbox. The other day, we got a message from a major media outlet, KTVT in Dallas:

Saw that you picked up the story of our interview with Tom Hicks where he talked
about Juando and steroids. If you want to see that part of the original
interview, it’s online at http://cbs11tv.com/video/?id=19196@ktvt.dayport.com .

Ok, so I suppose that’s not that exciting; he’s just monitoring incoming links. But then this comes in, and this is what makes internet life worth living:

(oh, come on, you know you have to click through.) Read more »