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Should newspapers employ a statistical analysis person?

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by Dick Whitman, Oct 30, 2011.

  1. And those are the exact kind of stats a sabermetrically oriented front office wouldn't care about.

    I don't think papers need to hire statisticians. I think it would be plenty if baseball journalists stopped wearing their ignorance of advanced stats as some kind of badge of honor. How many other areas of journalism do reporters boast about their unwillingness to keep up on advancements or trends of their beat?
     
  2. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    What Mark describes as sabermetrics are not sabermetrics. It is the antithesis of sabermetrics.

    And shotglass, it's not about whether it's the reporter's "opinion" or not that sabermetrics are valuable. Front offices believe they are. Thus, in the context of the beat, they are valuable, as they are driving player valuation and thus trades, signings, drafts, etc., etc.

    Van Lingle - I recall once standing in a clubhouse and hearing one of my fellow scribes point to an Alan Schwarz article in BA and say, "Fucking faggot," in reference to Schwarz's mathematical approach.
     
  3. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    Do you guys really see sabermetrics being ignored by newspaper beat writers? Maybe Bay Area reporters are just more enlightened because of Billy or the tech industry out here or whatever, but I feel like this ground is covered fairly well when it applies -- not so much in the print product but in the beat writers' blogs and longer online versions. The Giants were one of the last teams to go with advanced metrics, and they still rely on them sparingly, but I feel like I've read a lot in the past few years about Edgar Renteria's UZR and the case for Lincecum getting the Cy with 15 wins. I mean, really, the fact that Lincecum and King Felix won -- almost unanimously, right? -- suggests that the new ways of looking at the info are taking root nationally. At the risk of waking Manky, I bet Jeter would have won an MVP or two for his intangibles if the voters weren't looking at B-R or Fangraphs.

    Looking back on the OP, then, I wonder if it's a fair representation of how beat writers do or don't cover the beat. As was said earlier in the thread, this might have just been the dumbed-down 1A primer, while over in the beat sphere they're detailing just what makes Alfonso Soriano so suck-o-rific. I will say I have very little familiarity with the beat writers in Chicago, though.
     
  4. By and large, the Chicago guys exhibit little understanding.
     
  5. Versatile

    Versatile Active Member

    Exactly. You have to know what the hell it is you're covering. Hiring a stats expert is absurd. Allowing beat writers to be willfully ignorant is fatally absurd.

    What's interesting is that I more commonly see NBA writers at newspapers reference advanced statistics and statistics-based scouting reports than I do MLB writers at newspapers. I think that might have something to do with the average age of NBA writers and readers, but the baseball stats are far more proven and more widespread among the general public.

    I can't believe there's a real baseball fan who thinks batting average is better than OPS as a measure of a hitter's ability. If there is, it's because the media hasn't done a good enough job informing the public. That is our duty, after all.

    None of this is to suggest that every discussion of baseball needs to be played out on spreadsheets and baseball-reference.com. But when you're writing about how Juan Pierre is an excellent leadoff hitter, you have a problem. And you will be mocked. It's not 1995 or even 2005. Get over it.
     
  6. Smasher_Sloan

    Smasher_Sloan Active Member

    For someone who appreciates the precision of advanced stats, you seem to be generalizing a lot about the tendencies of unnamed reporters on two separate pro beats at unnamed newspapers.
     
  7. Versatile

    Versatile Active Member

    That is a reasonable point. I read a lot, but you're right: I have no numbers to back up my statements. I apologize for those generalizations. I'm also not being paid to write that post, nor am I writing it in a reputable news source, nor do I purport to be an expert on the subject.

    I agree that, without thorough analysis, that second paragraph is unfair. There are probably more baseball writers than basketball writers who incorporate advanced statistics into both their writing and their views of the sport, but there are also more baseball writers, period.

    But how often are single-season hit totals referenced in baseball stories? And how often are single-season points totals referenced in basketball stories? At least basketball has the decency to use per-game averages as its most common reference point in statistics, even if those stats are often misleading as well. They're better than baseball's traditional counting numbers.

    We're still referencing errors. I don't even know where to start with that. I'm not going to call out the writer, but here's two sentences from a Gold Glove story: "Aybar had a .980 fielding percentage and 13 errors. He was part of 95 double plays, the most among American League shortstops."

    None of those stats actually means a player is good at fielding. Erick Aybar is good at fielding. He's not great, like Elvis Andrus or Brendan Ryan. But there are ways to assert that Aybar is good at fielding. Errors (way off), fielding percentage (slightly closer but really more of a sign of sure-handedness when a player can reach a ball) and double plays (which mean nothing at all) are not signs of those abilities. That's not to say that you can't provide those statistics, but provide more. "A statistical formula devised by Baseball Info Solutions credits Aybar with saving five runs more than an average shortstop on defense. Toronto's Brendan Ryan led the American League with 18 runs saved."

    In the past, traditional paid journalism was the primary method of delivering new information to the public. If a doctor at Harvard or an economist at Princeton published a study, they would alert the media. Now, they can control that. The public has access to people who used to tell us things so we could tell the public them. The middle man is worthless. As a result, it's essential that we learn our beats and subjects well enough that we can be experts on the subject, or we need to be experts at breaking down complicated subjects for the laymen. Baseball defense is a complicated subject, and we're doing no one favors by citing errors and double plays in breaking it down.
     
  8. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    What you're proposing tells nothing more than fielding percentage and errors does. All that citation would do is allow the website creators to jack off about their little formula getting some run in a mainstream publication; it doesn't say a thing about who's playing better. Defense is not a sabermetrically inclined subject, as Billy Beane found out when he tried to do Moneyball 2.0 with defensive stats.

    Just because someone came up with an addition to the alphabet soup doesn't automatically mean it's better than what existed before.
     
  9. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    Fielding reminds me of offensive line play.

    So tough to quantify, which makes it an absolute bitch for sports writers to write about. Definitely an area where sources in the scouting world are even more valuable than usual.

    I don't know enough to take a position on what Versatile suggested. But something like this would certainly work: "One scout said that Aybar had improved his footwork around second base noticeably this season, routinely turning double plays on sequences that would have been mere force outs in his prior seasons."
     
  10. RickStain

    RickStain Well-Known Member

    I definitely wouldn't try to put a number on it.

    "Defensive metrics put him as a slightly below average defender, and scouts agree," is plenty.
     
  11. BB Bobcat

    BB Bobcat Active Member

    I have talked to more than one MLB GM who says the currently available defensive metrics are not good.

    So lets not pick this particular day (Gold Glove announcements) to use as evidence that writers are ignorant about modern metrics.
     
  12. lcjjdnh

    lcjjdnh Well-Known Member

    Although sabermetricians may not have perfected defensive statistics, I'm not sure the As experience proves that in anyway. Moneyball is about exploiting inefficient markets using statistical analysis to find undervalued players, not players that possess high absolute statistics themselves. The point of Moneyball isn't that you'll always be great, but rather that you'll do better than you would in the counterfactual scenario where you didn't make optimal use of the money you had available. With the market becoming generally more efficient thanks to more widespread adoption of statistical techniques, one would expect the marginal return of using these techniques to drop. In addition, it's quite possible that even if we had the perfect defensive statistic, defense is simply less valuable than offense, so the impact of getting a better player on your roster doesn't account for as many wins. The As inability to replicate their earlier success thus tells us nothing about the value of defensive statistics more generally.
     
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