Baseball Thoughts, Day 2 begins with a WAY too long discussion of the five tools of baseball. And, of course, we'll update throughout the day.
Again, if you have questions, comments, post them here. I didn't get to many yesterday, I'll try to do better today.
There have indeed been a lot of great books written about great baseball players in recent years. No one has written a book about Stan Musial yet.
ReplyDeleteSomeone on the SI blog mentioned a Roger Angell piece called "Scout," which is indeed excellent. There are also a couple of really excellent books, "Dollar Sign on the Muscle" by Kevin Kerrane, and "Prophet of the Sandlots" by Mark Winegardner. Neither is a comprehensive history of scouting, but they're both on my short list of best baseball books.
ReplyDelete"Engel also made it clear that he had no use for stats: “I do not believe that minor league records mean much and hardly ever take them into consideration. I can tell by the way a player handles himself whether or not he is a good future prospect.”
ReplyDeleteThis makes me curious to know what Engel's track record was for finding viable major league talent, and how he compared to his contemporaries. And if his dismissal of minor league stats was common for the time (and what the reason might be- was recording-keeping poor? Was minor league performance a poor indicator of major league value? And so on).
"But “hitting for average” is not a tool. It’s not a talent that a player is born with. And, more to the point, I’m not sure the concept of “hitting for average” even MEANS anything."
ReplyDeletePos! This from a guy who wrote eleventy-thousand words on Ichiro?
Obviously it's a talent of some sort - call it the ability to make contact, basic hand-eye coordination, putting the ball in play consistently. The result may be out of one's control from swing to swing, but over time players do demonstrate a varied level of talent as expressed in their batting averages.
I've always wondered why 'hitting for average' is there, but 'good batting eye' (IE ability to tell a ball from a strike) is not.
ReplyDeletejoe, would you say that moving runners along the bases is a skill (bunting, productive outs, etc.)?
ReplyDelete"Smarts" should also be a tool. Thinking ahead, throwing to the right base, knowing the situation, etc. In other words, everything the Royals don't do.
ReplyDeleteAnd, of course, any time anyone mentions anything written about scouts, it makes me think of this:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.firejoemorgan.com/2006/08/best-ever.html
Joe, where does Doc Halladay stand currently as it relates to Hall of Fame consideration? What else does he need to do the rest of his career and it is realistic for him to tick all the boxes?
ReplyDeleteYou're 4 tools are nearly perfectly encompassed in four related stats:
ReplyDeleteBB%, K%, BABIP, ISO.
Look at a players career #;s in those, you'll get a fantastic idea of what he does.
"According to the story, young and raw players were called “Ivory”… and I have absolutely no idea why they are not still called that. Scouts as ivory hunters: So much more awesome than birddogs or national cross-checkers."
ReplyDeleteI have to say I'm very glad this is no longer a living baseball metaphor. The story of the hunting and extraction of ivory in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century is very, very ugly. Genocidal, actually. See Heart of Darkness.
With my local nine non-qualified for the playoffs, I've had time to ponder the big baseball thoughts that relate to more than my favorite squad. This always leads to thinking about the Hall of Fame. But rather than debate the merits of Player A vs. Inductee B., I happened upon a looming breakdown in the voting system in general. It is this; obviously a large portion of writers are unwilling to vote for the PED crowd, and as a result many apparently well-qualified players are (and more importantly, soon will be) building up on the ballot. It won't take long until there at least ten of these statistical monsters to bog down the ballot. Some voters (presumably far fewer than 75%) will keep voting for Bonds/Clemens/McGwire/etc. each year, siphoning votes away from other borderline candidates (Trammell, Raines, what have you), but only the no-doubter-squeaky-clean Greg Maddux types will have any chance at reaching 75%. It seems that many years will result in no new inductees, with reasonable candidates unable even to muster the few votes necessary to stay on the ballot. This has to be addressed in one way or another, doesn't it?
ReplyDeleteI found it interesting that Engel, speaking in 1929, used the word "prospect", used the phrase "the way a player handles himself", and referred to a short pitcher as a "shrimp". First, I wonder when the word prospect was first used in baseball circles, as before now I would have suspected that it wouldn't have appeared until well after 1929. Second, there are few baseball cliches that raise my hackles the way that the modern day variant of "handles himself well" does. How many times do we have to hear a player say that another player carries himself well? For once, I'd love to hear one say that a guy carries himself poorly (heck, I'd even settle for "doesn't carry himself well"). Third, it is something to see that scouts were prejudiced against short pitchers even back then, and that sentiment remains in effect to this day (this isn't a case where the thrower has to throw it over linemen to get the ball to the receiver).
ReplyDeleteBack to modern times ... With the presumed propagation of PITCHf/x (and perhaps also HITf/x and FIELDf/x) to minor league ballparks, I would expect scouting at the US professional levels to evolve accordingly into a more objective and quantitative realm. It seems unfeasible however that those technologies could ever be implemented at the amateur levels, save for perhaps college playoffs or all-star tournaments.
At the amateur level, I would expect the primary scouted tools/skills to be a mix of parameters that can be objectively quantified:
1. bat swing speed
2. power (batted ball travel distance on balls hit beyond infield)
3. contact rate (swing contact % for batters and for pitchers)
4. running speed
5. throwing arm strength (velocity)
6. throwing arm accuracy (percentage of strikes thrown or walk rate for pitchers, percentage of nonerroneous throws for fielders)
and those which would remain subjective in nature:
7. batting eye (in the absence of f/x data)
8. defensive coordination (hands + footwork + range)
9. temperment (competitiveness, heart, poise, character, etc.)
Let us resist the temptation to belittle David Eckstein, who is roster spot #25 on the All-Dave All-Stars (only All-Stars and Dave Bancroft need apply).
ReplyDelete12.5% of all the managers to ever be ejected from a postseason game were tossed today ... and Bobby Cox's game is just starting.
ReplyDeleteJoe,
ReplyDeleteTed Williams would not have hit .350 in the extra AB's, probably not .300 if he had swung at many pitches outside the strike zone. His power would have gone down too. For a few years now we have data showing how batters do when chasing pitches outside the zone vs. inside the zone. And, (not surprisingly), they do worse. Even Vlads impalement rates goes down. There is an important secondary effect also. If a batter chases a lot of pitches outside the zone he will get fewer strikes. For the last 9 years we have data that shows that Vlad has been thrown stikes on about 43% of pitches. The average batter saw about 52% in the zone. It's not that they should try for walks, but by not swinging at bad pitches they will get more good ones. This of course is what Teddy Ballgame preached for decades, and what Babe Ruth (and others) did before him.
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ReplyDeletehitting tee