Topic: Freakonomics: Year of the Glove

[ILTOA]

http://freakonomicsradio.com/the-year-of-the-glove.html

KAI: We’ve got a rare treat today, I am at Yankee Stadium sitting next to Stephen Dubner. Dubner, introduce yourself. Say hello to the people.

DUBNER: Hello people. I’m Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics and I am going to bring some Freakonomics right here to Marketplace.

KAI: Ok, so here we are, and this is great, and I’m having a good time. But why are we here an hour and a half before the game. Why are we at batting practice?

DUBNER: Well, let me tell you, batting practice is one of the best times to see home runs being hit. Because there aren’t as many being hit in the games anymore. In fact, run scoring is down to where it was about 20 years ago. Any idea as to why that might be?

KAI: I don’t know -- pitching is better?

DUBNER: What would you say if I said steroids? Would you think, hunh, maybe with all these guys being busted for steroids the last few years, more steroids testing, has that affected the number of home runs being hit? So I asked my buddy Steve Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago and my coauthor on Freakonomics to look into the numbers, see what he could tell us

Steven Levitt 1 : “So, twice in the past decade I have really tried to find evidence that say steroids matter in baseball.  And both times I invested a lot of effort and ended up finding no evidence that steroids matter.”

DUBNER:
Levitt is a data detective. He’s caught cheating schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers, just by going through the statistics they left behind. In baseball he’s come up short.  But in the last few years, a string of home run studs have admitted to using banned substances. Congress has taken note. Testing has gotten tighter.  While Levitt hasn’t found the cheaters, there has been a big change in baseball: scoring has plunged. Statheads like Mitchel Lichtman say it’s a sign the steroids era is over.

Mitchel Lichtman: “People will say it’s the Year of the Pitcher. Or pitching is great, or better.”

DUBNER: This season has seen some extraordinary pitching: five no-hitters and two perfect games. But if you take a look beneath those numbers, you find something else is going on. Behind all those great pitchers are a bunch of unsung heroes: the fielders. Forget pitching, 2010 is the year of the glove.

Mitchel Lichtman: "There’s probably more of an emphasis in the post-steroid era on players that have speed and defense as primary attributes, rather than hitting, slugging, hitting home runs.”

DUBNER:  Every year since 2006, the average number of runs scored by major league teams has dropped. But if you isolate the pitching stats, you see that pitchers themselves aren’t any better than in years past. Fielders are the ones picking up the slack. The numbers show that fielders have gotten better at converting hits into outs. And this has created an opportunity.

Mitchel Lichtman: “One of the reasons that teams, some teams, are focusing on defense, and defensive evaluations using these advanced metrics is because overall it’s an undervalued commodity in baseball.”

DUBNER:
An “undervalued commodity.” With more steroid testing -- and penalties -- it could be that teams are going out of their way to avoid players who might be using. Or it could be, simply, that defensive players weren’t properly paid during the steroids era. Now teams have found a way to get more bang for their buck. And here’s what’s interesting: while run scoring is DOWN in the majors, it’s UP in the minors. It may be that teams are promoting their best defensive players to the majors faster than they used to.

Doug Glanville: “I’m certainly proud and happy to hear that the defense is getting recognized at this time. Certainly, maybe I would have had a different career if I was playing now.”

DUBNER: Doug Glanville is a former major league center fielder. He played 9 seasons with three teams, during the heart of the Steroid Era. He was a great fielder. In fact he ended his career on a streak of 293 consecutive games without an error. But he didn’t hit that many home runs. And that, Glanville says, hurt him during contract negotiations.  It was painfully obvious that, while defense wins games, offense pays the bills. Translation, fans want home runs. And team owners want fans. Sitting in his team’s dugout in San Diego, Padres’ manager Bud Black disagrees. He says his team retooled in the offseason to focus on defense -- and that’s a fan favorite, since it creates winning baseball.

Bud Black: “Fans love to see offense. they love to see the ball hit far. They love to see the ball go over the wall. But also I think fans love to see a home run being robbed by an outfielder. I think there are exciting plays on defense on the baseball diamond, I really do. And I think fans get a kick out of that as much as they do a home run.”

DUBNER: Whatever the case, everybody’s going to have to get used to games with lower scores. Which means that if you want to see a lot of home runs, you’d better show up at the ballpark a couple hours early -- for batting practice.

KAI: Alright, but Dubner, hang on like one more second...

DUBNER: Yeah? alright...

KAI: Here we are back at Yankee Stadium, batting practice, and I have to ask you the money question. Besides higher salaries for defensive players, where are we going with this?

DUBNER: Well, it’s a good lesson -- something that economists can teach us. Whenever you change a rule, whether it’s in baseball or banking, people are going to change their behavior in response to it. Some of the rules that have changed in baseball, especially those having to do with steroids, have produced a lot more good leather work -- good gloves, defense. I have a feeling that with the banking regs that have changed in the past year or so, that I’m going to be hearing a lot from you, in the next year, stories about how bankers’ behavior has changed. Bankers hiding their home runs, bankers bulking up on whatever sort of performance enhancing drug they can find.

KAI: Alright, that was Stephen Dubner, Marketplace’s Freakonomics correspondent. We have links to all the baseball statistics he used to decipher the mystery of the disappearing run on our sister website FreakonomicsRadio-dot-com. And the Freakonomics team will be back here, on Marketplace, in just a few weeks.

His work is consistent with other statisticians.  Moneyball strikes again!

[Slade]

I agree with the general sentiment of this article, but I have a few problems with how their conclusions were reached:

- They used Defensive Efficiency instead of UZR/150 or even Total Zone as their defensive basis. 
- They used xFIP as a reflective, not predictive tool.
- I think they mishandled BABIP as a strictly defensive metric instead of an amalgamation of luck/defense.
- They mention that "Major League Baseball teams are scoring an average of 4.4 runs per game, the lowest mark since 1992" without also mentioning the dilution of the league caused by expansion.
- There is no accounting for park effects in any of their calculations.

I think they did a good job in identifying a trend that, while obvious to anyone interested in the saber side of things, would be pretty surprising to casual fans.  With pointless PED testing and the proper valuing of OBP skills, the next logical "Moneyball' step had to be a shift toward cheaper, better defenders.

The baseball/banking analogy was spot-on, but they could have gone farther into what they felt the next market inefficiency will be.  Base running?  Cheap, highly specialized bullpen constructions?  A better system of catcher evaluations?  Something radical brought to light by Pitch f/x?