Posted in The Soapbox
5 comments
09/24 2010

Stop Making Sense: Baseball Advanced Stats Thru The iTunes Catalog Of Stars

Posted by Will Carroll.

For the past couple days, I’ve been involved in an argument discussion about stats in the context of awards. Drew Silva of NBC has taken the position that any writer should have to take a test proving he has a grasp on the advanced statistics. I won’t bore you with the details of the discussion – you can find it on Twitter – but it reminded me of iTunes.

Like many, I’m a bit OCD about rating my music. My library is maybe half rated and while the other half bugs me with its incompleteness, it would take … 19 days to listen to half of it. (38 days of music? That seems excessive.) The thing that helps me is that the ratings themselves aren’t that helpful.

For a time, I unlocked the ‘secret’ feature that allowed 1/2 star ratings. In the end, having those available just complicated things. What’s the difference between a 3 star song and a 4 star song? Adding a half in just didn’t add much information.

One of the things I’ve been doing is going back through the catalogs of some of my favorite artists and listening to them chronologically, trying to recapture what I was hearing then or in some cases, before I started listening. I’ve done it with Prince, Talking Heads, and Jay-Z. It’s an interesting exercise, but the stars — the stats — don’t tell much of a story.

“Fear of Music” is an amazing album, the one where the Talking Heads took “the leap” from an interesting punk/art meld and became a band that could, on one night in Los Angeles, be the greatest band in the world. (“Stop Making Sense”, captured by Jonathan Demme, proves that case.) The sounds and rhythms they put in, especially encased in the tensions of the time, were astounding when you remember it was an early album from 1980. It pre-dated Reagan! Listening to “Life During Wartime” makes much more sense when you think about Nightline coming into existence to give updates on the Iranian hostage crisis.

So after listening and giving my star ratings, that album, which would easily make my personal Top 10 of all-time: Three stars. Why? Simple averages. The five-stars on “Memories Can’t Wait” aren’t enough to outweigh seven of eleven songs being three stars. THREE stars is average, a good song, one that I wouldn’t skip when it comes on. There are no one- or two-star songs on the album, not one below-average track. The ratings mean absolutely nothing in collection.

Prince albums are worse, largely because of his output. There’s a lot of filler even on his best albums. (Granted, “filler” is a matter of personal taste. I’ve had some knockdown, dragout debates over side two of “1999.”)

Which is a long way to come back to baseball stats. Statheads seem to be obsessed with stats being considered in the award debates; the same award debates they’ve long derided. Felix Hernandez is going to end up a litmus test for stats, even after Zack Greinke won the award for the same reasons. I’m much more interested in a useful, descriptive, considered measure. WARP has been surpassed by WAR, but WAR can’t agree on methodology, making it very tough to sell to the ESPN crowd.

99% of baseball fans still don’t use OPS, let alone a more advanced measure. How about statheads take some baby steps, or better, take some lessons from Moneyball. Moneyball told a good story and brought some advanced measures to a wider audience. In the shadow of that book, statheads lacked a Michael Lewis to carry their message, and worse, didn’t understand why the book was popular. Until statheads stop worrying about decimal places, litmus tests, and passive-aggressive stands against the status quo, they’ll lose out to good stories, marketing, and simplicity.

Statheads need to “stop making sense” and start making strides. Until then, they’ll be like the indie rock they all seem to listen to. Talking Heads were never the most popular band in the world until they came up with a great video for “Burning Down The House.” Pavement never got that far. There’s a big divide between popular and influential, but if you can only be one, don’t be surprised when it takes a generation or more to see any change. We ain’t got time for that now.

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Posted on September 24, 2010 at 2:24PM

 

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  1. PJL
    09/24 2010

    Unlike baseball, where there are clear benefits to measurement (e.g., winning, managing a budget), arguably there are none to rating music for personal use. If you like it, you like it. I’m pretty obsessed with finding original album artwork and getting the year right for each song (year of release unless that is misleading…like previously unreleased 20 year old songs), but have never bothered with ratings or genre in iTunes — they are inherently arbitrary.

  2. Devon & His 1982 Topps blog
    09/24 2010

    Actually, I think OPS+ & ERA+ are easy to market stats that can be grasped by the average fan. Just show them a highlight of Albert Pujols slamming a home run on ESPN or MLBNetwork & mention his 169 OPS+ means he’s 69% better than the average player this season and they’ll eat that kind of thing up even if they don’t know how to calculate it yet. If they can grasp the difference between a .250 hitter and a .300 hitter (and most fans can), they should be able to grasp what 69% better than the average means. In fact, it’ll probably make some of them curious as to how you can figure that and more interested in the stats the game creates..

  3. The Sabermetric Project and the “Science of Words” | FanGraphs Baseball
    09/24 2010

    [...] really understand what it requires to make quantitative analysis palatable to the masses. He writes that 99% of baseball fans still don’t use OPS, let alone a more advanced measure. How about statheads [...]

  4. Jacob
    09/24 2010

    “Which is a long way to come back to baseball stats.”

    Will, that is extremely loose use of the word “way.”

    Also, you’ve mixed up assigning an album a rating, and using the aggregate song ratings as proxy for an album rating… in context of your player award conversations, that fact, your mistake, is the most interesting thing in the article.

  5. On the American League Cy Young Award debate and open-mindedness… | HardballTalk
    09/24 2010

    [...] who I respect and read often, suggested in a post on Press Coverage last week that stats like OPS and WAR bear little merit because they aren’t properly designed [...]