tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2893512317902577458.post6924147766254189208..comments2024-01-06T02:22:33.000-05:00Comments on Camden Depot: Using Statcast to Project Isolated PowerJon Shepherdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03521809778977098687noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2893512317902577458.post-56893753808149174782017-02-16T08:48:31.134-05:002017-02-16T08:48:31.134-05:00I agree that we often reduce history down to "...I agree that we often reduce history down to "Great Men" and that the development of ideas and concepts are not like thunderclaps across silent spring meadows. In 100 years, the data science slant will likely be reduced to Bill James (as it even often is now) even though his vein was present before him and now has no direct influence now. The "advanced" data science field now is so far away from James and, honestly, he is someone whose contrarian ideas are now met similarly with eye rolls.<br /><br />I get that.<br /><br />However, I think it is difficult to separate what he popularized and set the tone for. I would argue though that given the slant is more influenced by the scientific method that James was more thoroughly erase than Chadwick. James is a ghost to advanced statistics while Chadwick's lineage is still present in far reduced terms.<br /><br />To say baseball card stats are traced back to Chadwick's application of the familiar is true. To say those stats survived challeneed is also true. The survival of those challenges, I think, does not detract from their genesis, which is more about the application of the familiar than about finding true measures of talent.<br /><br />In that way, it seems our interest is not exactly the same.Jon Shepherdhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03521809778977098687noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2893512317902577458.post-51380742897972750742017-02-16T06:46:11.067-05:002017-02-16T06:46:11.067-05:00You make a fair point. The power to write the fir...You make a fair point. The power to write the first draft is the power to set the terms of the final version, if only in outline. Baseball borrowed from cricket, via Chadwick, the understanding that its analytic stats would be averages taken from the raw stats. This is still true even with many advanced stats: ultimately a numerator and a denominator, with the discussion being what goes into those two slots. What I am reacting to is the notion that the traditional stats came about in a slapdash manner: Chadwick jots down a few notes during afternoon tea, and that is what we saw on the back of bubble gum cards when we were kids. This is unfair, untrue, and worst of all, uninteresting. <br /><br />Scoring was passionately debated. Since baseball reporters were also scorers, official or not, and since baseball reporters had column inches to fill even in February, we have the record of these debates. It is fascinating to watch their thinking evolve. <br /><br />By way of exanmple, is Earned Run Average about giving credit to batters or assessing blame for pitchers? We understand it today to be about pitchers, but that wasn't immediately obvious in the late 1880s, as the idea was taking shape. So there was outrage over including bases on balls in earned runs. If you think it is about crediting the batter, and you don't think working a walk is a batting skill, then this outrage makes sense. Chadwick had little to do with this debate. He was a peripheral player by this time. And cricket has even less to do with the debate. The relevant concepts simply don't apply to cricket.Richard Hershbergerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02635892502928435073noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2893512317902577458.post-64826500521209081532017-02-15T06:36:10.085-05:002017-02-15T06:36:10.085-05:00I guess I have trouble not seeing how his earlier ...I guess I have trouble not seeing how his earlier influence set up what came next. I certainly respect your work and recognize you have looked into this period far more intensely than I have. I guess I would look to Chadwick's importance to statistics as I would look to the originally published Knickerbocker rules. They did not dictate what happened next but for anything to happen next they needed good reason to deviate. Casting a primary model is, I think, incredibly influential. <br /><br />Again though I am aware of your work. And if a reader comes across this comment they should see you as a more expert voice on this and me as sitting in an informed peanut gallery.Jon Shepherdhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03521809778977098687noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2893512317902577458.post-64118049128004599282017-02-15T06:17:57.957-05:002017-02-15T06:17:57.957-05:00There is danger of mentally compressing the past. ...There is danger of mentally compressing the past. The Morris book is about the 1850s and '60s. The process of establishing what became the traditional stats started then, but didn't finish until the early 20th century. The conditions in which baseball was played in the 1880s was very different from those of the 1860s. Cricket was hugely influential on baseball in the 1850s, less so in the 1860s, and hardly at all in the 1880s. The tell is that the 1880s is when you start to see newspaper articles explaining cricket to their readers. It was still enough of a thing that the topic arose, but no so much of a thing that a writer could assume his readers were familiar with it.<br /><br />Another trap is to make the story about Henry Chadwick, who did indeed start out writing about cricket before moving to the more remunerative field of baseball. The thing about Chadwick is that he was around for half a century, writing the whole time since this was his primary source of income. His actual importance is a moving target. Chadwick was a central figure in the 1860s. In the 1870s he was on the sidelines, but still an influential voice. He would make use of his access to the press and show up at meetings where rule changes were being discussed with his proposed version neatly printed up. He would then drop broad hints about how convenient it would be to simply vote in this version verbatim. In particular, he pushed hard for a tenth man, to play at right shortstop. By the 1880s he was widely regarded as something of an old fogy, prone to evoking eye-rolling. Then he managed the neat trick of transitioning into "elder statesman" status: the elderly uncle who sits at the head of the table at family gatherings, but who has no say in anything important. A lot of received early baseball history comes from him in this period, and he routinely exaggerated his own importance. His Hall of Fame plaque is a creative work of fiction. (Spalding, by the way, did the same thing, putting himself at the center of events of the 1870s.) <br /><br />The upshot is that there is a tendency to conflate the story of early baseball stats and the story of Henry Chadwick, as if they were the same thing. This is substantially true in the 1860s and into the '70s, but not at all true by the 1880s onward.Richard Hershbergerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02635892502928435073noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2893512317902577458.post-90025626532251831912017-02-14T15:35:15.310-05:002017-02-14T15:35:15.310-05:00Yep, I wrote about it extensively in my reviews fo...Yep, I wrote about it extensively in my reviews for But Didn't We Have Fun? and The Sabermetric Revolution. There was certainly a process, but it was not a strenuous one or codified in any serious way. I would argue though that they were exactly what popped into the head to explain what happened quickly in a newspaper. It was heavily influenced by statistics used in cricket.Jon Shepherdhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03521809778977098687noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2893512317902577458.post-40397429164757464432017-02-14T14:43:18.623-05:002017-02-14T14:43:18.623-05:00"My youth was largely dictated by what someon..."My youth was largely dictated by what someone back in the late 1800s who knew more about cricket than baseball thought newspaper readers would want to know."<br /><br />Nope. That is the 1850s, when Batting Average started out as runs scored per game played. This makes perfect sense in cricket. Then there was a half century or so of discussion about what makes sense in baseball. Batting average settled fairly quickly as hits per at bat, but that includes a lot of hidden detail in the definitions of both "hit" and "at bat." In 1887, for example, they included bases on balls at hits. This was controversial, and only lasted one year. Then it was followed with over a century of "Look at those whacky 1887 batting averages! They sure didn't understand baseball back then!" Now, of course, we recognize this as On Base Percentage, and we recognize that it is a better measure than Batting Average. That 1887 idea doesn't seem so crazy, now. <br /><br />The traditional stats came from a process. The answers weren't always right, and they were constrained by the fact that the math was all done by hand. But they weren't just the first thought that popped into mind.Richard Hershbergerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02635892502928435073noreply@blogger.com