Buster Olney has an interesting blog post today regarding statistics and baseball (the relevant part is free). His thesis:
Summers belong mostly to the scouts. That is the time of year when they have their greatest influence, when they are the eyes and ears for their organization, when they see the day-to-day changes and adjustments, when they see that an arm angle has dropped or that a swing has been shortened.
…
But the winters, on the other hand, have become a domain of numbers. Scouting reports are valued, for sure, but in November and December and January, statistics have an even greater influence in player evaluations, because they are immovable points of reference. You can talk all you want about a kid’s leadership ability, but in a conference room in the dead of winter, what stares everybody in the face is the .312 on-base percentage. In the winter, more than at any time during the calendar year, you are what the numbers say you are.
Reflecting on that, I can see what he means. It’s not just front offices, though. It seems we as fans seem to focus more on a player’s aggregate output during the dormant winter months. This winter in particular we saw the introduction of another useful statistic, and a reminder of a more efficient way to judge pitcher strikeouts.
It makes sense. We have no games to judge in the winter. All we have is a ledger of what each player did during the season. Because those ledgers are so long, though, we tend to go with the aggregate. There’s nothing wrong with it, of course. It leads us to talk about generalities, which can lead to some false conclusions, but we’re still talking about objective data.
Yet when the season rolls around we’re not so apt to talk about aggregate statistics. For instance, Jason Giambi had a bad April, but once he started to heat up in May we focused on that rather than his stat totals. We talk more about the last game, or the last week of games, than we do about the season as a whole. Hence, scouting reports — that is, what we’ve seen — become more important.
This is pretty natural. I think it’s nice that we have a period where we’re talking about the here and now, and another time when we reflect on what happened. It only adds to the enjoyment of the game.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.