FanHouse Bill James

It's always interesting to see how peers react when one of their own get clipped for steroids. Barry Bonds seemed to get more vilification from fans than from players (except for maybe Turk Wendell). You would think that among his own, Alex Rodriguez would get the same kind of support.

But not from Roy Oswalt. And forget asterisks. Forget about calling him "A-R*d". If Oswalt had his way, he would take all of Rodriguez's numbers and wipe them from the record book with a paper towel and some lemon-scented Pledge.

In the years when the BCS works more or less as well as can be expected, and the top two teams play each other for the national championship, the powers that be in college football like to pat themselves on the back for using computer rankings as part of the BCS formula. "See?" they say, "We're using the computers to make sure we have a fair, objective system."

And then in the years when the BCS doesn't work well, and college football fans are up in arms, the powers that be in college football like to blame the computer rankings in the BCS formula. "The poll voters got it right," they say, "But the computers messed everything up."

And so it goes, year after year, with the powers that be in college football using and misusing statistical analysis to suit their own needs. And now the most influential statistical analyst in the history of sports says he's fed up.

Our MLB editor provides weekly dispatches from major league games in Notes From the Clubhouse.

From afar, everything appears to be business as usual in Orange County. As of Thursday evening, only two teams in the majors have more wins than the Angels -- the Red Sox and Cubs, and only Chicago has a better winning percentage than Mike Scioscia's bunch.

Look closer, though, and the problems are readily apparent. The Halos have outscored their opponents by a mere 19 runs this season. Going by Bill James' formula for expected wins, the Angels should be 41-38, not 48-31. Oakland, which trailed Los Angeles by 4 1/2 games in the standings on Thursday night, has outscored its opponents by 67 runs.

While the Angels won't be forced to give back their wins by some crazed sabermetrician, their luck is likely to get worse over the remainder of the season, while the A's should get better. That could make things very tight in the AL West coming down the stretch.

Getting consistent production from the lineup has been a real problem for the Angels. L.A. is averaging 4.3 runs per game this season, well below the American League average of 4.6 runs per game. For the Angels' part, they're well aware of the offensive problems they have.

"There are some challenges we have that are very real and right in front of us, particularly when you talk about the offensive side and getting continuity," said Scioscia before Tuesday night's game in Washington.

MLB Essentials ranks our six favorite stories of the day.

1. Joe Posnanski: There have been a lot of articles written about Ken Griffey today; Joe's is the best.

2. Big League Stew: Catching up with the Mitchell Report All-Stars.

3. New York Times: Grading the best ballpark cuisine from coast to coast. (Bonus: Endless Simmer lists the best grub the NYT overlooked.)

4. Dugout Central: Does Bill James deserve a spot in the Hall of Fame?

5. Gem Mint Ten: Don't let anyone say you don't have the body of a professional athlete.

6. Surviving Grady: Sean Casey & Ric Flair = BFF. You just know Jonathan Papelbon has to be jealous.

The worst part of the Steroid Era in baseball is that we'll never be quite sure who was or wasn't on drugs during the years when testing was nonexistent. We all have our suspicions about players whose production and/or muscles exploded but they usually remain just that. Bill James, however, went a step further in his new book The Bill James Gold Mine 2008.

Cameron Martin of the fine baseball blog Bugs & Cranks was reading the section of the book devoted to Atypical Seasons which highlighted years that saw players over or underachieve in notable amounts. James found that two of the greatest home run under-producers played for the 1984 Minnesota Twins. Gary Gaetti only went yard five times that year while Kirby Puckett didn't hit a round-tripper all year, which led James to this conclusion.

"Suggesting the possibility that the Twins' two World Championships may have been aided by their team being among the first to discover...well, I'd better not go there. Nor will I point out that Gaetti was bald and had acne and Puckett died young."

Yes, James suggests, with no supporting evidence (and his physique as evidence to the contrary), that Puckett died at 45 because he used steroids. Is it unusual that he then hit 31 home runs in 1986 and went on to average 19 per 162 games over the rest of his career? Absolutely. Is the only possible answer that he was abusing performance enhancers? Not by a longshot and saying otherwise does a disservice to both him and James's reputation as an objective analyst of baseball. Only one of them's undeserved.

Advanced statistical analysis has made a huge impact on baseball, and it's making inroads in football and basketball as well. Soon enough, it's going to come to mixed martial arts.

There will be skeptics -- the MMA versions of the old-school baseball people who were sure that they knew more than Bill James and that Moneyball was a sham -- arguing that the sport is "fought in a cage, not in a spreadsheet."

But Rami Genauer, who runs the innovative FightMetric.com, thinks MMA is ready for advanced stats. (I agree.) His web site is billed as the first-ever comprehensive mixed martial arts evaluation system, and the work he's doing has the potential to change the way we view the sport.

In a wide-ranging Q&A, I posed some questions to Genauer, starting with why MMA needs advanced stats.

Last night FanHousers were debating if we'd want Jose Reyes or Hanley Ramirez as our shortstop. The vote went in Reyes's favor, though it was close, mostly because of defense. If you're going to talk about which one player you'd like to have, regardless of position, Ramirez ranks higher than Reyes.

But does he rank higher than Reyes's teammate David Wright? Not to Bill James, who named Wright as the player he'd pick to start a franchise. That rankled Mike Beradino of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

He accuses James of naming Wright because the Red Sox once traded Ramirez and then pulls out some bigger guns. Wright only has a better on-base percentage because he walks more, and as every writer knows that doesn't help at all, and isn't a better fielder. Beradino tears down the myth.

Defense? Wright won a Gold Glove last year, but only four third basemen exceeded his 21 errors. Ramirez won no fielding awards, but he made only three more errors than Wright while playing a more demanding position.

Actually Ramirez did win a fielding award. He was named Worst Defensive Shortstop by the Fielding Bible. We'll likely have a cure for cancer before we have a universally accepted metric for evaluating fielders but using errors is the equivalent of using leeches.

You can defend a choice for Ramirez as the player you'd most like to have. He's got a ridiculously high ceiling, he'll move positions and defense will limit his value less and just plain homerism. But errors? Sheesh.

(H/T BBTF)

Saber Bombs are MLB FanHouse's introduction to sabermetrics, those new and sometimes unwieldy metrics that are changing the way we think about baseball. Each post highlights a specific stat, player, team or media member either embodying that understanding, or missing the boat completely.

Among baseball fans, Bill James is either a pioneer of enlightened baseball thought or some nerd who enjoys math more than actually watching a game. It's that black and white, with staunch proponents on both sides of the "stats vs. scouts" debate often refusing to see shades of gray.

But if those people who completely disregard James' contributions to the game actually took the time to understand where he's coming from, they'd probably be surprised at how much he still respects and values the old school. From his (extremely-long-but-worth-the-time) Q&A with the Freakanomics blog:

Q: Generally, who should have a larger role in evaluating college and minor league players: scouts or stat guys?
A: Ninety-five percent scouts, five percent stats. The thing is that - with the exception of a very few players like Ryan Braun - college players are so far away from the major leagues that even the best of them will have to improve tremendously in order to survive as major league players - thus, the knowledge of who will improve is vastly more important than the knowledge of who is good. Stats can tell you who is good, but they're almost 100 percent useless when it comes to who will improve.

It's strange when a Tuesday morning brings about the confluence of the film Marathon Man and the father of baseball sabermetrics but perhaps that's why they call it March Madness. In the film, Laurence Olivier tortures Dustin Hoffman by performing dental work with no anesthesia while asking, over and over, "Is it safe?" He was asking about a plot to sell jewels stolen by Nazis in WWII but college basketball fans can relate. It's torture watching your team trying to close out a win and you're constantly trying to figure out if your lead is safe enough to carry the day.

Finally, thanks to Bill James, we have an answer to the question. (Warning - Math ahead)

• Take the number of points one team is ahead.
• Subtract three.
• Add a half-point if the team that is ahead has the ball, and subtract a half-point if the other team has the ball. (Numbers less than zero become zero.)
• Square that.
• If the result is greater than the number of seconds left in the game, the lead is safe.

Based on this formula, when LSU blew a 31-point lead to Kentucky in 1994, they did so with an unsafe lead. Problem is, James's editor at Slate found an example of a game when the formula failed to hold up. Duke led North Carolina by eight in 1974 and ended up losing the game in overtime. My limited math background tells me that if you can prove something untrue once, it's untrue even if it works the other 99 times out of 100.

Bill James may be the grandfather of baseball sabermetrics, but Rob Neyer has to be considered some kind of great uncle. James was well-established among hardcore baseball nerds before Neyer came along, but it was Neyer's column on ESPN.com that brought sabermetrics into the light and in front of a national audience. The Hardball Times recently caught up with Neyer for an interview, where he discusses how he got his start, including just how rough things were for him before finally finding his niche:

My freelance "career" lasted for 10 months, and I think I made something like $8,000. At best. Those were some lean months, during which I was occasionally reduced to buying food at gas stations with my mom's credit card. When I did that, I would drive 20 miles from town, to avoid running into somebody who knew me. None of my friends knew I was destitute, and a lot of my meals were made with pancake mix I swiped from my roommate (by the way, I owe a very belated thanks to John Cheffey).

Honestly, I hate to even think about what baseball reporting would look today had Neyer decided to pursue something that would have afforded him a better diet than gas station food and pancake mix. As befuddled as some mainstream writers are, no one can deny that both writers and front office execs are a bit more enlightened than they were 10 years ago, and Neyer is at least a small reason why.