The growth of sabermetrics and the decline of the Royals

By Charles Winters

During my first visit to Kauffman Stadium in 1974 I remember seeing this on the scoreboard:

“Jim Wohlford is 5 for his last 16 (.313).”

What did this mean, what was it measuring?

I was seven years old. Still, I wondered what that meant. Already I knew that .313 was a good number for, what is that? Oh yeah, batting average. That year, Wohlford would finish with a .271 batting average which I now recall seemed good, but not great. This was during George Brett’s rookie campaign. By that night in August the fan concern over his early struggles with crossing the Mendoza line was over. He was hitting in the .270 range too. Brett would finish at .282 – that seemed very good for a rookie.

The stats I learned about in the first years at the ballpark were the basic ones: BA/HR/RBI for hitters, W-L/ERA for pitchers. By the time I was nine, I was looking for a grand number to coalesce offensive contribution in the same way that I had decided ERA coalesced pitching contributions. I wanted a runs created statistic. I was gifted with some sense of mathematics, but I could never quite understand how to bind all the numbers together.

After the Royals disastrous (seemed to me then) campaigns in 1981 and 1982 I drifted a bit away from baseball, because so much of what I heard seemed so silly. Take the stat at top: Jim Wohlford is 5 for his last 16. That didn’t mean anything to me. It didn’t provide context at all. Had he faced Frank Tanana or Nolan Ryan? Had he faced Gaylord Perry? Or had he faced a run of weak pitchers? He was a right handed batter; had he faced righties or lefties? Was the wind blowing in or was it blowing out? Were the hits all singles or was there some power in that mix? I didn’t know any of that, and the scoreboard, despite its monochromatic magnificence, told me zilch. It could just have been luck, couldn’t it?

In the late 70s I had been a subscriber to Baseball Digest. It had made up stats galore. Some guy would write an article about why you should add doubles to singles and then multiply that result by RBI’s to get the best low power RBI guy. I would have NO IDEA why that mattered. I craved a catch all stat.

One day in 1983, I met a man at the park. I had no idea it was Bill James. I was there with my parents. I was a very nerdy 15-year-old. I was commenting on the high ERAs and high ages of the starting rotation for a team that went what I thought was a horrible 79-83. The bearded guy behind me was scoring the game with a notation about which I knew nothing. He asked for my address at the end of the game against the Jays and I, to the horror of my parents, gave it to him – a complete stranger. A week later, the 1983 Baseball Abstract arrived, signed by Bill James. It had stats that sang!

The first was runs created. Now that was what I was talking about. How many runs a hitter contributes to his team – always something to think about. But Bill was taking it so much further: what was the context? A run in Wrigley Field meant less to team wins than one in the Oakland Coliseum.

Well, I hadn’t really given that a ton of thought, but it made sense. I read the entirety of the book in about three days. I devoured the charts. Some of the stuff, like the Favourite Toy, seemed silly – but at least fun – and I could always understand the thinking. He explained himself. And sometimes he would say – “I was wrong!” It was refreshing. It was new.

In the next few years I read Bill and then Pete Palmer’s the Hidden Game of Baseball. I still recommend that book – even with its errors. It is a seminal work in the field of statistical analysis of baseball. Palmer used something called Linear Weights to evaluate players, but suggested the use of a simple measure for casual fans: on base plus slugging (now called OPS).

The Royals then went from a disappointing team in 1982-1983 to a surprise world champion in 1985 (and no, even though I joked about an I-70 series in May of 1985, I did NOT think it was going to happen). Now I am a lifelong Royals fan with all the misery that comes with that phrase. For the first 10 years after 1985, the Royals were still good. But after the strike it has been miserable.

Meanwhile, the field of analysis has exploded from Bill James in Lawrence to the entire country. Despite Harold Reynolds and the anti-analysis rants that one can hear from time to time on MLB network (when Brian Kenney isn’t on), 29 teams have accepted advanced analysis as a tool to evaluate and make sense of their decisions. I think the Royals are getting closer to this decision in the age of analysis, but they still don’t seem to value walks (see George Kottaras decision), which has been the single largest source of failure for the last 25 years.

In the internet age where we have fan-graphs and baseball references which make it so easy to find advanced stats on everyone, what is there to see from the numbers? Well, plenty, still. But it now has gone into the realm of fielding and batted ball analysis. I know little about these fields because I have not made it my life’s work. But I can understand what they are trying to measure, at least. THAT is the critical element in any statistic.

Back to Wohlford. What was that scoreboard blurb measuring? It was an attempt at measuring his hotness/streakiness, right? Yes. How well did it do that? Turns out not very well. .313 in a 16 AB sample from a .271 hitter probably means nothing. Perhaps 15/16 might mean something, but not 5/16. The advanced stat guys will all tell you that they believe in regression anyway – which means that hotness is contraindicated (i.e. that the hot hand is always slightly more likely to become the cold hand, UNLESS there is an underlying ability to change which is very unlikely).

Always ask: what does this stat measure? What is the ability it suggests? Does this mean something? Could it be luck?