F.C. Lane, a professor at Boston University early in the 20th century, published an article in 1907 that, amazingly, strikingly resembles most publications a century later on the same subject.
It’s title – “Present System of Batting Records Grossly Misleading” – was the topic of conversation Tuesday when Alan Schwarz, baseball statistician and author of “The Numbers Game, Baseball’s Lifelong Fascination with Statistics”, a spoke to a room full of Fairfield math students and professors, often telling troubled baseball fans that widely held perceptions about baseball statistics are, as Lane wrote a century ago, grossly misleading.
So what, one might wonder, is the single most misleading assumption made by baseball fans? That batting average means everything? That there is such thing is a “clutch hitter”? That a guy can really be a better hitter when the weather is cold and the wind is blowing from right to left?
No. Those are all common bits of misinformation, but the single most widely misunderstood reality, he said, is that baseball’s fascination with statistics is a new thing.
“If you do the research that I did for the book, fans have always for 150 years tried to determine who are the best hitters in the cluth and who will be the best hitters in the cluth,” he said.
The very first baseball box score, he explained, was derived from cricket. It had two columns: runs and outs. Obviously, those statistics were insufficient. People needed to know, first of all, how many hits a player got. From that came RBI’s (invented in 1879 by a Buffalo newspaper attempting to show how players performed in the cluth), sacrifice flies (1907) and the formula for on base percentage, used by the famous Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey in the 1940’s.
Rickey, of course, is most famous for signing a young infielder from California named Jackie Robinson.
Robinson became the first black player in modern baseball, and the rest is history. But Rickey, most fans don’t know, was among the game’s most avid statisticians
“Brookyln, in the late 1940’s,” Schwarz said, “kept the statistic of batting average with runners in scoring position. They determined that Jackie Robinson was a pretty good hitter in the clutch, so they moved him to the No. 3 hole and he won the Most Valuable Player award the next season. I think we’ve learned that batting average with runners in scoring position is a pretty dubvious number, and it’s probably just luck.”
Batting average with runners in scoring position has become so widely spoken about that fans sitting in the stands at Fenway Park look up at the scoreboard to see the letters “RISP”, and know exactly what they stand for, and exactly what the statistic means.
The problem though, is exactly what Schawrz pointed out: batting average with “RISP”, compared to a player’s overall batting average, is luck. It’s also mostly luck when a .300 hitter hits .190 in April or .435 in August.
Most importantly perhaps, baseball broadcasters, who Schwarz said are “supposed to know what they’re talking about” often spout out misleading or even outright wrong information regarding the player’s chances of getting a hit.
He used the example of a .300 hitter who’s hitting just .220 while in the midst of a so-called “slump.” One broadcaster will almost certainly imply that the given hitter won’t get a hit because of the way he has been struggling. The second broadcaster will then certainly say that the player is “overdue”, thus implying he’s definitely going to get a hit.
Really though, the hitter has a 30 percent chance of getting a hit, because in his career, he gets a hit three times in every ten at-bats.
“You will be right a lot more than you’ll be wrong if you say that people are going to perform the way they usually perform,” he said, pointing out what sounds so simple but yet, for whatever reason, has escaped the minds of baseball fans since the game was invented.
Schwarz, whose book features a forward by Hall of Fame baseball writer Peter Gammons, said the media and fans often fail to distinguish between different realities.
There is, for example, such thing as “clutch hitting.” When a player hits a game-winning home run in the World Series, he has performed the act of “clutch hitting.” Ortiz, who hit a blistering .352 with runners in scoring position last year for the Red Sox, is a bad example, because what he did deviates incredly far from the norm in such situations. The key, he said, is that if he had to guess, he’d say that Ortiz will hit roughly .300 with runners in scoring position next year, because that’s roughly what his batting average has been over the past two seasons.
So when a man sitting in the back row of the classroom said that he’d want Ortiz at the plate in a clutch situation, Schwarz respnded by asking a rhetorical question that, if posted on the walls at every ballpark in America, could quickly silence ignorant fans ranting about grossly misleading statistics.
“Who would you want in a clutch situation,” he asked?: “Manny Ramirez, or Bucky Dent?”
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