New York Times on Baseball

This past Sunday there were two interesting stories about baseball in The New York Times:  in the magazine was Bruce Schoenfeld's "Can the Emergence of a High-Tech Tool Bring Baseball's Statistical Revolution to Fielding" and in the sports section was Bill Pennington's "A Team's Cursed Century Warrants a Proven Savior."  The first article was about an attempt to analyze fielding, the second was about Theo Epstein's attempt to win a World Series with the Chicago Cubs.

To a certain extent these articles contradict each other.  Statcast, part of Major League Advanced Media, is attempting to analyze fielding by using a radar system combined with three high-definition cameras to record every play in baseball.  The biggest problem is that even a routine ground-ball to the shortstop produces the equivalent of 21,000 rows on a spreadsheet.  How to analyze all this data is the problem.  So far baseball statistics have focused on hitting -- which is quantifiable --and have not been particularly successful with fielding, using such dubious statistics as "range-factor."  Everyone agrees that preventing an opponent's run is as important as scoring your own but no one has figured out how to analyze individual fielding.

Meanwhile Theo Eptein, who engineered the 2004 Boston Red Sox championship, is now the general manager of the Chicago Cubs, which this year had the best record in baseball, thanks to the 22 members of the team that have gradually been acquired by Epstein.  Certainly Epstein is aware of what Billy Beane was able to do in Oakland (read Michael Lewis's Moneyball), though Oakland has not been to the World Series since 1989, but Epstein in Chicago has had the advantage of patience (the Cubs have not won the World Series since 1908) and a bigger budget.  And Epstein has learned that statistics do not tell you everything when you are dealing with human beings.  Epstein's scouts are required to ask possible prospects about three times they have faced adversity on the field and three times they have faced adversity off the field.  As one scout said, "we are scouting the person more than the player" and as Epstein has pointed out, "baseball is built on failure;" even the best players fail seven out of ten times.

As umpiring decisions are being second-guessed by machines I applaud Epstein for realizing that players are human and cannot be totally defined by their statistics, only one of the important elements in the success of an individual player and of a baseball team that plays a grueling season of 162 games.