Moneyball - Michael Lewis [115]
Bill James also read Rob Neyer’s article. James wrote in, and said Voros McCracken’s theory, if true, was obviously important, but that he couldn’t believe it was true. He—and about three thousand other people—then went off to disprove it himself. He couldn’t do it, and the three thousand other guys couldn’t either. About the most they could suggest was that there was a slight tendency for knuckleballers to control hits per balls in play. Nine months later, of his mammoth Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, James laid out Voros McCracken’s argument, noted that Voros McCracken “is NekcarCcM Sorov spelled backwards,” then went on to make four points:
1. Like most things, McCracken’s argument can be taken too literally. A pitcher does have some input into the hits/ innings ratio behind him, other than that which is reflected in the home run and strikeout column.
2. With that qualification, I am quite certain that McCracken is correct.
3. This knowledge is significant, very useful.
4. I feel stupid for not having realized it 30 years ago.
One of the minor consequences of Voros McCracken’s analysis of pitching was to lead him to Chad Bradford, Triple-A pitcher for the Chicago White Sox. Voros had developed a statistic he could trust—what he called DIPS, for defense independent pitching statistic. It might also have been called LIPS, for luck independent pitching statistic, because the luck it stripped out of a pitcher’s bottom line had, at times, a more warping effect than defense on the perception of a pitcher’s true merits. At any rate, Chad Bradford’s Triple-A defense independent stats were even better than his astonishingly impressive defense dependent ones. (Chad pitched a total of 2022/3 innings in Triple-A, with an earned run average of 1.64.) And so Voros McCracken snapped up Bradford for his fantasy team, even though a player did a fantasy team no good unless he accumulated big league innings. “Basically,” said Voros, “I was waiting for someone to see what I’d seen in Bradford and put him to use.”
He waited nearly a year. Inadvertently, Voros McCracken had helped to explain why the White Sox thought of Chad Bradford as a “Triple-A guy.” There was a reason that, in judging young pitchers, the White Sox front office, like nearly every big league front office, preferred their own subjective opinion to minor league pitching statistics. Pitching statistics were flawed. Maybe not quite so deeply as hitting statistics but enough to encourage uncertainty. Baseball executives’ preference for their own opinions over hard data was, at least in part, due to a lifetime of experience of fishy data. They’d seen one too many guys with a low earned run average in Triple-A who flamed out in the big leagues. And when a guy looked as funny, and threw as slow, as Chad Bradford—well, you just knew he was doomed.
If one didn’t already know better, one might think that Voros McCracken’s article on baseballprospectus.com would be cause for celebration everywhere inside big league baseball. One knew better. Voros knew better. “The problem with major league baseball,” he said, “is that it’s a self-populating institution. Knowledge is institutionalized. The people involved with baseball who aren’t players are ex-players. In their defense, their structure is not set up along corporate lines. They aren’t equipped to evaluate their own systems. They don’t have the mechanism to let in the good and get rid of the bad. They either keep everything or get rid of everything, and they rarely do the latter.” He sympathized with baseball owners who didn’t know what to think, or even if they should think. “If you’re an owner and you never played, do you