Let’s give away another one, boys!

See, by using the word “damned,” I could be saying that he only kills damned rallies, rallies that are doomed to failure anyway. Now that’s coverage.

Not everyone has the patience for statistics, even though they’re readily available (along with past game information down to the pitch-by-pitch level), and some won’t be swayed by them anyway, so you can’t argue with them. The upside is that you don’t have to argue with them then.

Something that’s gotten under my skin lately is use of the term sample size. I can’t cite an instance where it was abused, but I suspect that sometimes “small sample size” is being equated with “useless information.”

Without going into a big rant, I’ll just say that sample size is important when you’re to trying to predict things and make projections. Otherwise, you don’t need a large sample size to evaluate and pass judgment on what’s already happened.

Absolutely. I know I don’t. Serious non-professional students of baseball could, however, do the subjective well enough to enlighten people like me without getting overly technical. If I could wish DTW posters into being, one of them would be someone who watched all the games and gave us a useful, non-conventional defensive box score of sorts after each one. So apprised, we’d be less inclined to be swayed by drama and hearsay in our opinions on this or that player’s defense.

I am going to educate myself in the newer defensive metrics. Right now I’m like a movie critic trying to review a film on the basis of secondhand reports, only having seen short clips from it myself. My reservations might evaporate once I know exactly what the methods are.

But in addition to battling the subjective you’re also improving the denominator. The conventional fielding stats only measure your performance on balls you get to. You’ve got to get behind that.

Maybe for the typical fan it doesn’t make a bit of difference, but if I’m a GM I absolutely want to know what I’m getting in a player.

There is definitely room for the subjective when analyzing talent. But the fact of the matter is most fans don’t have the ability to do the subjective at the level that is required to make decisions.

The memory of that finding lingered, and when I saw Bautista had been DFA’d, it was like, of course, I knew that would happen. Because I’m Mr. Insight.

I glanced a few minutes ago at the page upon which I had performed my clutch calculations. Alas, an obvious error in math appeared. Turns out Bautista was 3nd only to Jones and Grilli, among relievers. 4th overall.

Oops.

We’re similar, Coleman, but we can be told apart. He’s the funny one.

What I had in mind for Mr. Veel was that he was going out with some Italian drinking buddy of his. But if you’re suggesting it could be Italian women instead… yeah, now I’m envious, too.

Any summarizing statistic turns a complex input into a simple output. The greater the variety of relevant and specific information you can put in, the more useful the stat is. That’s why OPS is far superior to batting average (will BA ever become obsolete? It ought to be, and yet I find myself always looking at it out of ingrained habit). That’s probably also why a stat I proposed back in the 70s, 2B/BB-2 (doubles per walk with less than 2 outs), never caught on.

I think that the “problem” with going nuts on the input for defensive metrics is that the small amount of subjectivity you can whittle away costs more effort than it’s worth. Trying to stamp out the subjectivity entirely is like trying to get to the horizon before the sun does.

We accept a great deal of “lost data” in our pitching and hitting stats. Success or failure here can be a matter not of feet but of inches or fractions of inches. The 0 for 4 in the box score lingers, and the fact that every at bat was a well-hit ball is forgotten by the end of the next game. A pitcher makes 4 bad pitches out of 80, and we’ll look at the game log and say he just didn’t have it that game, whereas he could have just as well gotten away with 4 bad pitches (and some hittable good ones) in an 80-pitch no hitter.

I think that the subjectivity of the official scorer and his errors should be ruled out. That’s good. But beyond that, I think you can get very good results by accepting a certain amount of subjectivity and not burying yourself in parameters. Any fan who watches baseball on a regular basis has a pretty good idea of what a playable ball is. I would expect real students of the game to have a refined sense of what is playable and what is extraordinary, and they wouldn’t have to deal in angles and ball speeds to convince me.

To me, the most useful approach would be to exclude or at least segregate the extraordinary, subjectively but knowledgeably. To the ordinary score, you could simply add the number of extraordinary outs the fielder created. A kind of HR or K figure for defense.

Here’s a question: Who positions the defense? How often is bad defense attributed to or attributable to bad positioning, either by direction or player error?

So this guy pretty much has failure written all over him…and yet still am I envious….

I can’t let the discussion of Cubs prospect Donald Veel die without some final comments.

In my opinion, he’s too tender for the big leagues. More often than not, you’ll find him out getting sauced with some Italian after a game. There’s just no polite way to put this. As a prospect, he’s dead meat.

If, to perform his job in the field, a SS is supposed to do X number of things well, and he does half of those well and half not very well, one school of thought would hold that the SS is, on balance, average. I would say that the good to great SS does all of those things well, and the difference between good and great is either just how well or the slight difference in failure rate in the highest leverage situations.

As yet, I fail to understand how piling on the variables and vectors and increasing the granularity of the analysis is better than a more general and more subjective appraisal of how well fielders field playable balls. Either way you end up with a simple score that is going to be interpreted in a simple way. I also find it more predictive to simply ascertain that I have a 2B who excels at making the routine play routinely than to know he performs better on ground balls hit 7 degrees to his right that left the bat at 96 MPH before hitting the ground at Sector 113 of the infield than he does on ground balls hit 5 degrees to his left that left the bat at 91 mph before hitting the ground at Sector 196 of the infield.

I’m not mocking the granular. It’s just that unless I’m a scout or a GM, it’s interesting only as esoterica. It’s cool to know that one player might be hitting .355 and another .278 on full count pitches put in play, but I’m not going to bring that out in a debate on the relative merits of the two guys.

I guess I’m satisfied that directionally it was a decent prediction, as they are clearly playing better. I think the starting pitching deserves a ton of credit for this rebound.

I will amend it to say they’ll be above .500 by the All-Star break, and within 5 games of first place. (They have 21 games until the break, so a 13-8 stretch is needed. Definitely possible.)

Sox lost, so it’s another opportunity to pick up a game on first place.