What I've Learned So Far

[Yes, it's been nearly two years since I started in on this topic. But, hey, better late than never.]

In Part 1, we set out the basics for a comparison problem: who’s better, Mickey Mantle (maybe the best switch hitter ever) or Chipper Jones (maybe the best switch hitter today)? Part 2 addressed the problem of peak value (advantage: Mantle) versus career value (advantage: to be determined — though Jones has added to his stats a bit in the two seasons since I wrote the original installments).

Now we turn to the real core of the problem — how to judge two players in the context of different eras of baseball.

Look at the picture of Goose Goslin here. Goslin was a fine outfielder for the Washington Senators, and he was good for a long time. When he retired at age 37 in 1938, he had collected 2,735 hits, 1,483 runs, 1,609 RBIs, 500 doubles, and 4,325 total bases while batting .316 in 2,287 big-league games. Those numbers are outstanding in any era off the game.

But the baggy flannels remind us just how different the game was in Goslin’s day. Higher batting averages were common. (The entire American League averaged .300 in 1930.) Pitchers recorded far fewer strikeouts on average than they do today, but pitched complete games far more often. With the exception of a few Native Americans and light-skinned Latinos, the major leagues were the province of white men. Physical therapy and reconstructive surgery to heal injuries were rudimentary and haphazard at best. Few players lifted weights, and most of them needed off-season jobs to make ends meet. (Even in the 1960s, young Nolan Ryan pumped gas over the winter while he was a member of the Mets organization.)

To understand how numbers from then compare to numbers from today, we have to make the same kinds of adjustments that economists make when they recalculate nominal dollars as real dollars to account for inflation (or deflation) over time. If economists didn’t make these adjustments, prices or salaries from earlier eras would seem ridiculous when put alongside values from today. If we don’t make these adjustments for baseball, we’ll end up thinking that Ty Cobb and Rogers Hornsby — each of whom batted above .400 for a season three times — were incomparably better than today’s hitters, which is similarly ridiculous.

At this point, I’m going to not write several hundred or several thousand words talking about the evolution of park-adjusted, era-adjusted, and similar stats. I will just say that, if you look under the sections labeled “Player Value–Batting” and “Neutralized Batting” in any Baseball Reference player record, you’ll discover a whole new world of analysis. That analysis reflects many years of hard work by people who love baseball — and who have serious mathematical skills — as they have tried to figure out how to make fair comparisons between players of different eras.

Using Statistics as Blunt Instruments

In the old days, batting average was the ultimate measure of batters. If a guy was a lifetime .300 hitter, he was considered a good hitter. If he batted .310, he was considered to be that much better than a .300 hitter, Q.E.D.

Ah, but baseball isn’t so simple as that. Sure, if all I know about two players is their batting averages, then I’ll take the guy with the higher number — and hope that Mr. .310 isn’t a pure singles hitter while Mr. .300 is leading the American League in extra-base hits and walks (neither of which is measured by batting average). If all I know about two power hitters is how many RBIs they’ve each racked up over the past five years, of course I’ll pick the guy with the higher total — and hope that it isn’t a case of an above-average hitter looking better than a great one by virtue of the teammates who bat in front of him.

But we don’t live in that hypothetical information-starved world, and our analysis of baseball is just much, much better now. Our understanding of what hitters do that puts runs on the board is better. Our knowledge of how certain home parks artificially inflate or deflate hitters’ numbers is better. Our knowledge of how pitching and defense keep runs off the board is better. So it doesn’t work to stick with the blunt instruments that Grandpa used 70 years ago to compare Mel Ott to Goose Goslin.

Sticking with the old way would be like meeting a neurosurgeon, here in 2011, who’s not interested in these “newfangled” CAT and PET and MRI scans for diagnosing aneurysms. Just think about what your reaction would be if your doctor said, “X-rays and exploratory surgery were good enough when I started in medicine in 1960, and they’re good enough now.” You’d walk out immediately, because it would be insane to marry yourself to lesser tools just for the sake of . . . what, tradition? Habit? Obtuseness?

We’re better than that.

In Praise of Nuance

If you want to compare a bunch of hitters in the simplest way possible, start with these two statistics:

• On-Base Percentage — It has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that OBP is the stat that tracks most linearly to runs scored for a team, because everything that improves OBP gives your team another baserunner without costing it an out. Everything that detracts from OBP costs your team an out, shortening or ending your team’s turn at bat and therefore reducing its chances of scoring more runs. Related: the list of the top 100 players ever by career OBP is a decent starting point for making your shortlist of the best hitters ever (once you use historical context to eliminate the players who compiled big numbers in the crazy world of 1800s baseball).
• Slugging Average — This number expresses the average number of total bases that a hitter achieves per at-bat. So a .610 slugging average means that the hitter — and this would be a great one like Albert Pujols — averages 61% of a base for every at-bat. Singles help this number just like they help batting average, but doubles help twice as much, triples three times as much, and home runs four times as much.

If you’re comparing hitters from one era, you can go with the raw numbers — unless one or more of the men played his home games in a park that had a big effect, positive or negative, on these numbers. (This is a big deal, for instance, in considering the current Hall of Fame candidacy of Larry Walker, who piled up big numbers in the hitters’ haven of Coors Field in Denver.) We know beyond any doubt that some ballparks favor hitters and some favor pitchers, and in fact the analysis in this vein has gotten sophisticated enough that it’s easy to tell which fields, say, are neutral in terms of batting average but depress batters’ ability to collect doubles and triples.

If you’re comparing hitters across eras, you’re well-served to consider the broader environments they played in. As mentioned above, the American League as a whole compiled a .300 batting average in 1930. Yet in 1968, Carl Yastrzemski won the A.L. batting title by virtue of being the only man in the league to crack .300. That’s not because the American League forgot how to hit in the intervening 38 years, but because conditions radically favored hitters in 1930 and radically favored pitchers in 1968.

Ever More Context

It’s tempting to look for the single magic number that encapsulates the value of a player in a nutshell. But it’s dangerous. Even the best of the modern stats — VORP, WAR, Win Shares, etc. — have their drawbacks, despite trying to take into account players’ ballparks, eras, defensive positions, levels of defensive skill, baserunning abilities, and so on. (Again, I’ll save you several hundred words on why it means a good deal more to hit like Mickey Mantle when you’re playing superior defense in centerfield, as Mantle did, than it does to hit like Chipper Jones when you’re playing solid-but-unspectacular defense at third base, as Jones did. But it matters.) Yet these stats, at the very least, have the virtue that they try to account for context.

Baseball fans will never quote book, chapter, and verse on a player’s “park-adjusted Wins Above Replacement” like they do for batting titles, home runs, RBIs, and the like, which is fine by me since the older numbers are (a) simpler to remember, (b) totemic in some cases (Ted Williams’ .406, Babe Ruth’s 714), and (c) reflective of the game’s history. Just so long as we don’t kid ourselves that the old, raw numbers and the blunt-instrument thinking behind them — the X-rays from 1960 — are as good as the newer, sharper, contextualized modes of analysis. They aren’t. They can’t be.

It’s not the X-ray’s fault that it conveys less information about the aneurysm than the MRI does. But it’s true.

Mantle vs. Jones

Confession time: when I started this series of posts in 2009, I was smarting from a blunt-instrument verdict delivered by an acquaintance of mine — a big Braves fan — who hit me over the head with Jones’s batting average, waved away Mantle’s many other achievements, and told me that I couldn’t just assert Mantle’s superiority in the face of the numbers (like lifetime batting average) that proved that Chipper was better than The Mick. Part of the reason I let this final post languish for so long was that I wanted to let go of the idea of convincing this hard-bitten fan of the inescapable errors in that position. This was less about baseball analysis than it was about trying to pick my battles, and not trying to argue with someone’s whose mind was already closed to alternate interpretations.

I tried to approach the writing of the earlier posts — and this one — with an open mind. What I found verified the opinion shared by me and, I’m going to guess, well over 99% of serious baseball analysts: that Mantle was clearly superior to Jones in terms of peak value (see the previous posts for more on that). But I also discovered that Jones was a lot closer to Mantle than I thought in terms of career value. So I did learn something, even if my initial conclusion — that there’s no way Chipper’s as good as Mickey — still holds up.

What I’d like to convince you of now is that there’s room in baseball analysis for all kinds of numbers, including old favorites like batting average, RBIs, and even pitcher’s wins. They tell us what happened: Greenberg hit a double and drove in Gehringer from first. But the old favorites — love them though we do — simply don’t tell us as much about a player’s performance as the newer, more contextualized numbers do, especially across eras. They can’t.

~

(Photo of Goose Goslin from the Library of Congress via Bob Bobster, used under a Creative Commons license.)

Having a family has been very good for me (and I hope good for them too). It gave me the stability I needed to begin and pursue a career as a writer. People tend to romanticize the picture of a writer—they want it to be easy, something a genius can just knock off between debauches, because if it is, if it doesn’t require talent, discipline and a lifelong commitment, then maybe there’s a hope that they, too, someday can knock out their own great and stirring work. We have the devastating example before us of the overwhelming numbers of American writers destroyed by dope and booze—Tom Dardis’s The Thirsty Muse is a real eye-opener—and people tend to think that chemically altering one’s mind is the way to inspiration. Maybe it is. But for me it seems counterproductive. I have never written a sentence—or even thought of writing a sentence—without being in the clearest state of mind. This is my life’s work. This is what I’m meant to do, and why screw with it? I think the way to be a writer is to experience things, certainly, and be open to things, but at some point to become dedicated to the craft of writing and to create a stable environment for that writing to occur in. At least in my case that’s true. So having a family and leading a stable life is absolutely essential to any writing I’ve ever done. When I did my earliest writing, I led a pretty wild life, and the writing was fairly spotty. I would write occasionally. Now I write every day, seven days a week, all year long. And it is my life.

T. C. Boyle
The Art of Fiction No. 161
The Paris Review, Summer 2000

More little tales that fit in a single tweet.

Bereft of conversation topics, unsure about when to leave, he reminded himself of her name, then made her his famous pancakes.

~ ~ ~

He tweeted remorselessly, friended everyone, was mayor of everything, blogged relentlessly. Yet still couldn’t sleep at night.

~ ~ ~

She kept hoping that if she found the right song & played it loud enough, long enough, she would forget what he had said.

~ ~ ~

A friend suggested he try meditation. He didn’t like what he found there. She: “That’s the point.” He: “I can’t stand the point.”

~ ~ ~

The meeting of the Household Tickle Cmte. came to order. The junior members were delegated to tickle the (absent) Vice-Chairman.

~ ~ ~

She cocked an eyebrow at her dad, who was sermonizing about her mom. At age 12, she was already tired of playing divorce referee.

~ ~ ~

She had never properly learned the footwork or poses of his elaborate emotional Kabuki.

~ ~ ~

“With time comes perspective,” his mother had always said. For perspective on this damn thing, he figured he’d need 100 years.

~ ~ ~

He’d order anything fixed “country style.” He liked tacos “al pastor.” But never suspected he’d fall for a country-style woman.

~

Previously:

• Tiny Stories, part 3.
• Tiny Stories, part 2.
• Tiny Stories.

Image by JD Hancock.

My sister was not a big reader when we were growing up, but now she’s a book addict of the first order. How much so? She read 110 books in 2010, and now has the goal of reading 111 books in 2011. She’s even started recording her progress, with mini-reviews of each book she finishes, on a blog she calls Seriously Booked!

Once upon a time, I gulped down books by the bushel. But work duties and Twitter and a lot of other distractions have hampered my pace of reading for a long while now. In fact, I can trace the evolution of my book reading with some precision, thanks to a log of books read that I’ve been keeping for more than a dozen years. Here are the number of books I’ve read in each calendar year since I started keeping track:

• 1998: 63
• 1999: 71
• 2000: 58
• 2001: 27
• 2002: 104
• 2003: 45
• 2004: 32
• 2005: 32
• 2006: 30
• 2007: 19
• 2008: 30
• 2009: 11
• 2010: 11

As a writer who aspires to publish many books, you can imagine that those last few numbers hardly fill me with pride.

What am I doing about it? These things:

• Setting aside more time to read, especially at bedtime.
• Resolutely finishing books that I’ve left half-read for too long.
• Keeping track of the books I finish here. I expect to follow my sister’s lead by writing thumbnail reviews of each book as I finish it.
• Reading in more ways, for example by reading some books via Kindle for iPhone.
• Reading whole authors, for example by catching up on the books by Terry Pratchett, Michael Chabon, and John McPhee that I haven’t read.

You’ll know how well this project works by how many thumbnail reviews I publish here. Meanwhile, I’m already ahead of last year’s pace: I’ve finished two books since New Year’s Day, whereas last year I didn’t finish a book until the first week of February.

How much are you reading these days? Is it enough for you?

Photo by Johannes Gilger.

My temptation is always to open up more cans of worms than I can ever close again. I’m a great project starter, but not (yet) a great finisher. That’s changing, though.

The lesson I’m heeding: SUBTRACT.

Before I add a new book to the pile to read, I get rid of two others (let’s say by finishing one & just abandoning another). Before I write a new to-do list, I get rid of two old ones. Et cetera.

I’m sitting at the library as I write this. I checked out one book, having returned several. Before I started this post, I discarded two old drafts for posts that had been growing moldy. The applications for this are endless.

“Simplify, simplify!”

I have noticed over the years in my conversations with writers that for a writer, writing is a sort of absolute bottom line. “Are you writing?” If the answer is yes, then no matter what else is going on, your life — and all of life — is basically OK. You are who you are supposed to be, and your existence makes sense. If the answer is no, then you are not doing well, your relationships and basic well-being are in jeopardy, and the rest of the world is dark and problematic.

—Norman Fischer, “Why I Have to Write”

Photo by tnarik.

You know me: I’m always looking for a better way to direct my behaviors so that I can get more of what I want out of life.

An experiment: very short posts, written in one short sitting from my phone, that encapsulate the basic algorithms of well-directed behavior. Some of these will reiterate points I’ve made before — even many times before — on this blog. But so be it; life is always starting anew anyway.

So, Algorithm 1: One Thing at a Time

Aspects that I’m focusing on:
• Once a task is started, either take it to completion or spend 5 uninterrupted minutes on it.
• “One thing at a time” goes hand in hand with “only handle it once” whenever possible.
• We know — by hard neuroscience, not anybody’s opinion — that the human brain cannot multitask in the sense that the word is commonly used. So why act so dumb as to keep trying?
• Some people are naturally better than others at focusing. But focusing is also a skill that can be developed — and that development is well worth the effort.

What do you think? It worked for this post; how well does it generalize?

So far, I have to say I’m not thrilled with the WordPress app for the iPhone. Maybe there are features or nuances that I’m missing, but in general I don’t like how it handles editing drafts that I started on my laptop, and I can’t tell that it has any ability to handle pictures well.

So, this is just me kicking the tires. Carry on.

Nearly five years ago now, I used this very blog as a platform for sharing quite a few of my thoughts on job-hunting. I wrote up a series of three blog posts (One, Two, Three) covering these six “rules”:

• Rule #1. It’s not over until you win.
• Rule #2. Get help.
• Rule #3. Fight cynicism at every turn.
• Rule #4. Improve something.
• Rule #5. Build up your energy.
• Rule #6. Raise your hand.

If you’re looking for a job — or know someone who is — you might find these useful. I wrote the series (which, I now realize, is missing at least one further installment I had promised) because I had several friends who were looking for work. I wanted to share these thoughts with all of them at once. In the intervening years, I’ve had occasion to point out these posts to other friends who found themselves in need of a new gig — and now I offer them to you.

Give them a look, if you like, and feel free to leave comments on any of them. Or you could leave a comment here, telling me what advice you would add to mine, or what topics you’d like to see me cover in future posts.

While I’m at it, let me point out that all of these posts — and the one you’re reading now — are in the “Career” category, which might also be worth your perusal. Some of the posts there are about my own career, and many of them are not as advice-filled as the three big job-hunting posts. But you still might find something in them to help you along.

If you’re ready to launch into reading the three-part series, please click through to the first post, “It’s not over until you win.”

Cheers.

A while back I ran an appeal to friends and blog readers: let me know what you’re looking for from your next job, and I’ll add you to a little spreadsheet I maintain for just this purpose.

Let me make it clear: Unless you’re a dear friend, I can’t commit to actively looking for something for you (especially if I don’t know you well enough to give you a personal endorsement to a recruiter or a potential employer), but I will have your information handy for those times when information about job openings crosses my desk — which happens pretty frequently.

Here, verbatim from last year’s post on the subject, is what I need from you:

• Your name. This seems obvious, but I know plenty of people primarily by their Twitter handle, then by their first name, and sometimes not at all by their last name. [And then there's the whole issue of women who may use their married name socially and their maiden name professionally.] So go ahead and tell me your first and last name if it’s not obvious from your e-mail address or Twitter handle.
• Your Twitter handle, if you have one.
• Your e-mail address. If you leave a comment here, you have to fill in your e-mail address in the comment form, so no need to type it again in the comment itself.
• Your LinkedIn address. Mine, for example, is http://www.linkedin.com/in/tewalkerjr. (Don’t list one of the generic or ultra-long URLs that LinkedIn sometimes generates while you’re clicking around inside your account.) If you don’t have a LinkedIn account . . . you probably should, if you’re looking for a job.
• The geography of your job search. It doesn’t matter to me where you live now; I need to know where you’re willing to live if the right job takes you there. [Also helpful: the word "only" -- as in "Austin area only" -- if you know you're not willing to move for any job offer.]
• Your preferred field(s) of work. In just a few words, please. If and when I need the full-monty description, I can always check your LinkedIn profile for that, or just send you an e-mail.

One note that’s very much worth your attention: Last time, I got myself into trouble by not specifying that I need you to hand me all of this information, in pretty much this order. Even if your LinkedIn profile lists everything you want to do and be in your career . . . please give me a sentence or two about your preferred geography and fields of work anyway.

Last time, a couple of folks just sent me their LinkedIn URL or personal Web site URL and said “All of my information is there.” The problem with this is that I’m both (a) lazy and (b) almost always pressed for time. So when someone doesn’t hand me the information listed above on a plate, the chances that I won’t get around to digging through their LinkedIn profile to find that information increase, ahem, radically.

Short version: thrilled to help, but please make it as simple for me to help as possible.

Good?

I look forward to helping you if I can.