Mike Silva of NY Baseball Digest spoke to a “high-ranking official with one of the 30 big-league clubs” about the concepts stated in the book Moneyball (sort of), and the executive said this:
Moneyball geniuses have flopped like DePodesta, Ricciardi, and even the infamous Billy Beane whose exploits have all lacked a World Series trophy. It is all a tool to be used by the uninitiated. I’ll take a good scout and player development people anytime; the statistics are very secondary. How do you account a .220 hitter for being the hero of the World Series or a guy who hits three home runs a year wins the pennant clincher with a home run?
With all due respect to this high-ranking official, this high-ranking official is a dunce.
I do not pretend to have “all the answers,” as Silva suggests many sabermetricians do. I have far more questions than answers, and I’ve never said otherwise.
I know this for sure, though: If you don’t understand why a .220 hitter could be the hero of the World Series or a guy who hits three home runs a year can win the pennant-clincher with a home run, you do not deserve to be a high-ranking official with one of the 30 big-league clubs.
And to him, I’d ask the same question so frequently lobbed at sabermetricians from sanctimonious and misguided old-school baseball minds:
Do you even watch the game?
Or are you suggesting to me that a seeing-eye single is somehow the product of a player’s skill or will? Are you saying that a hard-struck line drive hit right at the shortstop is bad form, not bad luck? Do you really mean to tell me that some .220 hitter — some guy who can’t hit better than .220 in the regular season — can actually magically make himself a better player when it counts more? Good lord, if someone had the ability to make himself a better player when it counted, why wouldn’t he do it all the time? Is there somehow really not enough pressure in a regular-season for that .220 hitter to morph into Albert Pujols? And in that case, wouldn’t he be the exact type of player you’d label a headcase and eschew from baseball?
It’s random. It’s a random game and a random world and randomness pervades everything. Sometimes things don’t need explanations. They just happen, especially in extremely small sample sizes.
I really don’t even want to fight this battle anymore. I recognize that some people will never agree, and they’ll just think A-Rod magically became clutch this year after being unclutch for three postseasons and clutch in the two before those. I mean, hey, it’s the magic of Kate Hudson!
But I bring it up here because it’s scares the crap out of me that people like the guy Silva quotes — who not only demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what Moneyball was really about, but also a fundamental misunderstanding of the way baseball actually works, not to mention a fundamental misunderstanding of the rules of standard written English — are in positions to make decisions for the baseball teams we all love. It’s a pitch-perfect justification of what I wrote about yesterday, asserting that people in Major League front-offices screw things up all the time.
And holy crap, no one ever said that book was about canning every scout and letting calculators make decisions. It wasn’t called Numbersball. It was about exploiting market inefficiency, and just because Beane hasn’t done a good job of it over the past few years doesn’t mean GAGLWEJHRKJ^@#$. I’m done.
“Dadadadadadadada.” – Marcel Duchamp.
Tedquarters 
Terrific.
Bravo, my man, bravo.
(Slow claps). Great response.
You’ve just depressed me so very much. Because Silva and “high ranking official” and “statistics are very secondary” means mets official, no? It has been looking like this is how they think, but how on earth could they really be this willfully stupid?
I’m in despair. I love baseball. I can’t switch teams.
daniel murphy is going to be the new mascot for baseball people who hate numbers. be ready.
That “high ranking baseball official” wasn’t, by any chance, named “Omar,” was he?
nah, cause overwise, there would’ve been a “you know what I mean” in that quote
“they’ll just think A-Rod magically became clutch this year after being unclutch for three postseasons”
so I gather there is no possible room for circumstances changing, attitude changing, growth occuring, protection in batting order changing – so that obviously NOTHING changed about A-Rod this post-season – it was just flat out random occurence, and the BA (sorry for bringing up that antiquated and discredited stat) of like .032 with RISP (there I go again – I know, it’s all random and therefore this is also totally irrelevant) in October is just…bad luck. And of course any attempt to assess body language is BS, and Buck and McCarver and everyone else who cited it are wrong and you, the armchair expert, can safely dismiss the meaningless ramblings of guys who’ve actually been involved with the game for decades. You should hear yourself.
Oh wait, Tim McCarver said otherwise? Nevermind then.
“Original Met”
Don Zimmer is that you? Welcome to the Internets!
carl everett has been involved with baseball for years too. do you think people should listen to him?
So, I guess there are certain assumptions on this site with which one dare not argue ( I don’t know for sure, having not visited here before, got the link from SportSpyder) Evidently, for example, ANYONE with any intellegence thinks McCarver is a dinosaur to be ignored by everyone except the unwashed plebian masses who buy whatever is fed to them, and anyone who thinks that there are actually some players who hit better in pressure situations than others are blindly ignorant or uneducated. Yes?
Actually, Original Met, that couldn’t be any further from the case. This is in general a respectful place that welcomes intelligent debate. It’s just that you came in guns ablaze with an obnoxious tone and were met with a perfectly appropriate amount of snark. Normally I’m way more patient with contentious readers, but I was rushing to get out the door on a Friday afternoon, and based on your rhetoric, I assumed you really weren’t going to change your mind anyway. But you really can’t throw stones, then get all huffy when they’re lobbed back
I will further address the nature of randomness next week, and if you’re interested in hashing it out in the comments section then, I’ll look forward to it.
Performance isn’t random. It all tends to normalize over time. Give the pluckiest, scrappiest .220 hitter an infinite number of postseason at-bats, and guess what he’ll hit … .220.
Or, to use a very un-Moneyball cliche, you are what you are. Hence, Alex Rodriguez played like a Hall of Famer this postseason because, and here’s the kicker, he’s a Hall of Famer.
Now this is random:
If you were to assign letters of the alphabet to combinations of digits, and were to do this for all human alphabets, syllabaries, and ideograms, then you could fit any written character in any language to a combination of digits in pi. According to this system, pi could be turned into literature. Then, if you could look far enough into pi, you would probably find the expression “See the U.S.A. in a Chevrolet!” a billion times in a row. Elsewhere, you would find Christ’s Sermon on the Mount in His native Aramaic tongue, and you would find versions of the Sermon on the Mount that are pure blasphemy. Also, you would find a dictionary of Yanomamo curses. A guide to the pawnshops of Lubbock. The book about the sea which James Joyce supposedly declared he would write after he finished “Finnegans Wake.” The collected transcripts of “The Tonight Show” rendered into Etruscan. “Knowledge of All Existing Things,” by Ahmes the Egyptian scribe. Each occurrence of an apparently ordered string in pi, such as the words “Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate / That Time will come and take my love away,” is followed by unimaginable deserts of babble. No book and none but the shortest poems will ever be seen in pi, since it is infinitesimally unlikely that even as brief a text as an English sonnet will appear in the first 1077 digits of pi, which is the longest piece of pi that can be calculated in this universe.
What he said.
Original Met.
The Kate Hudson thesis is actually taken seriously by people. There are real human beings who are so stupid as to think Kate Hudson inspired A-Rod to be clutch.
Will you at least accept that this is waaaay dumber than the randomness thesis.
I actually think that these things do get in players’ heads and it’s not all randomness, but it’s definitely mostly random. If A-Rod isn’t a good example look at Dub’s clutch record.
2005–clutch neutral
2006-clutch-king (Tim McCarver calls him one of the great clutch hitters in baseball.)
2007-clutch-neutral
2008-unclutch
2009-clutch
I could make up some narrative that explains this variation in terms of life events, grit, heartandsoul, (Paul LoDuca left after 2007!) etc. just like I could devise a whole Pantheon of deities who I must have pissed off to have made it rain today. Life is too short for either.
It’s randomness.
who is Mike Silva and why would his opinion on anything matter to anyone?