Our fearless co-editor here at FBC, zgall1, assured me that Jonah Lehrer's backhand to sabermetrics on Grantland this week was not bad sports writing, per se. He was merely misguided, as if the errors in his ways were pointed out to him, Lehrer would nod along knowingly. zgall1 is rarely wrong and this time is no exception.
So, I'm wont to understand what bothered me so much about Lehrer's tug job to the "Moneyball was stupid" crowd and I've come up with this: Jonah Lehrer should know better! He writes for Wired and Scientific American Mind for chrissakes. His anti-skepticism skepticism carries a weight, because of his well-regarded reasonableness. When he tells us professional sports is somehow maturing away from quantifying its results and actions, we're supposed to listen.
Out of respect (and because Fangraphs has already taken him to task) I'm not going to go through it line-by-line but here's a few things you'll need to remember if you're going to attempt to build your sports teams solely around who's a good bro, dude.
Lehrer begins with an elaborate metaphor comparing car-buying satisfaction with, I suppose, team or player performance. The crux being that the quantifiable and most marketed aspects of auto engineering--horsepower and fuel economy--don't have much of a correlation with the owner's overall satisfaction. Therefore, whatever it is that makes up a successful team/player may not be contained in a package of statistics that are calculating an ever-increasing amount of data about what goes on during a baseball game.
But the analogy is figurative because the components do not match: a car buyer's satisfaction is inherently subjective, based on a feeling toward the experience of the car. Sports have an objective goal: to accumulate wins. This isn't to say that someday car manufacturers won't discover how to quantify ride quality, stability, dashboard layouts, and comfort to build a predictive model of owner satisfaction. But the fact that manufacturers don't, on outset, market these aspects of driving do not show that the objective goals of GM and of GMs are the same.
Okay, I lied. I'm going to have to pull a few pieces out:
Like a confused car shopper, [teams] are seeking out the safety of math, trying to make extremely complicated personnel decisions by fixating on statistics. Instead of accepting the inherent mystery of athletic talent — or at least taking those intangibles into account — they are pretending that the numbers explain everything. And so we end up with teams that are like the worst kind of car. They look good on paper — so much horsepower! — but they fail to satisfy.
Lehrer denies the antecedent here, claiming teams narrowly rely on stats, ignore the "inherent mystery of athletic talent" and then, ultimately, fail. All teams do this? What? How can anyone wrap their head around this? Unfortunately, Lehrer fails to offer even one example. Something like "The Red Sox signed high career OBP guys who lacked heart and hustle and bottomed out for years" would certainly not prove his point but might at least sandpaper up the straws being grasped at. He does give one positive example of Aaron Rowland and how his numbers were ignored at the Giant's peril. Right. I don't understand, Jonah.
But sabermetrics comes with an important drawback. Because it translates sports into a list of statistics, the tool can also lead coaches and executives to neglect those variables that can't be quantified. They become so obsessed with the power of base runs that they undervalue the importance of not being an asshole, or having playoff experience, or listening to the coach. Such variables are the sporting equivalent of a nice dashboard. They can't be quantified, but they still count.
I... I don't know what to say. This is the classic anti-stats argument and it always crumbles so quickly with almost no prodding. What are the non-asshole, coach-listening, playoff vets (presumably who don't get on base) supposed to do or be? Is the argument that every team needs to employ a nice guy to motivate the rest of the players to play better? I think that's bacon-fried hogwash but, hey, at least it's an argument. A nice dashboard counts in one's feeling about one's own car so maybe a nice teammate counts in one's feeling about one's favourite team? I'm trying, Jonah, I really am.
Lehrer then turns to J.J. Barea and the Dallas Mavericks, trying to tell us that, despite being a piss poor performer for the regular season and most of the playoffs (a shooter who can't make a shot) his few successful layups in the Finals constitute credit for their NBA Championship. It's the Robert Horry argument and, frankly, it sucks: "Because it doesn't matter what the numbers say. Barea won games." Advanced stat guys, especially the ones looking at efficiency differentials look to Tyson Chandler, Jason Kidd and Shawn Marion as the keys to the Mavs success (and Dirk Nowitzki but that's news to no one).
Coaches and fans use the numbers as an excuse to ignore everything else, which is why our obsession with sabermetrics can lead to such shortsighted personnel decisions. After all, there is no way to quantify the fierce attitude of a team that feels slighted, or the way even the best players can be undone by the burden of expectations, or how Kendrick Perkins meant more to the Celtics than his rebounding stats might suggest. But Nenad Krstic looks so good on paper!
But none of this happens, really, because of advanced stats. You know this, Jonah. Most professional coaches are about six blocks behind the curve on this stuff, most fans deride it as witchcraft. I don't know a lot about ferocity and burdens, but if those feelings make Joe Mauer slap a few dingers, guess what -- they'll get counted! Kendrick Perkins was an average centre who was replaced by a couple of terrible ones. And no one, no one, NO ONE has ever accused Nenad Krstic of looking good anywhere.
Lehrer finishes matter-of-factly:
These [ferocity, burdens, other feelings as needed] are the qualities that often determine wins and losses, and yet they can't be found on the back of a trading card or translated into a short list of clever equations. This is the paradox of sports statistics: What the math ends up teaching us that is that sports are not a math problem.
That's not a paradox -- it's just a guess.
No comments:
Post a Comment