Entries associated with the tag "Bill James":

All right, having looked at the Cubs through the statistical prism of The Bill James Gold Mine 2008, let's see what it says about the White Sox. First, the bullpen was awful last season. No surprise there. Excluding the closers -- and  Bobby Jenks was exceptional -- Sox relievers posted a 5.98 earned-run average. The only stunning fact is that there was a worse team in the American League: the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, with a 6.33 ERA. Just how badly that horrendous bullpen hurt the Sox is shown in another nifty stat: the Sox were ahead more often than not through each of the first four innings last year. (Specifically, through four innings, they were ahead 71 times, behind 64 times, and tied 27 times.) That's an amazing figure for a team that wound up 72-90. Of course, from the fifth inning on, when the middle relief typically entered the game, things got progressively worse. Here's hoping Scott Linebrink and Octavio Dotel are cures for what ailed the bullpen.

Yet the collapse of the Sox wasn't just the bullpen's fault. James points out that every Sox batter with more than 150 at-bats compiled an OPS (on-base plus slugging percentage, a key run-scoring indicator) below his career average. (The only exception was Rob Mackowiak, and when you figure in what he did after being dealt to the San Diego Padres, he too came in below his career average.) That's a team-wide batting slump. And with the Sox' reliance on the home run -- and lack of team speed -- they had a miserable 13-44 record in games they were held without a homer, a .228 winning percentage.

Unfortunately, general manager Kenny Williams didn't address this problem by bringing in a run-producing leadoff man -- unless you count Orlando Cabrera, who may not even hit leadoff. The good news there is that the Sox are due for a team-wide return to the norm in hitting. Still, the law of averages is not something a general manager should generally hang his hopes on.

It's great that last week the Baseball Writers Association of America finally woke up -- enough, anyway -- and voted Rich "Goose" Gossage into the Hall of Fame. Gossage was the most fearsome reliever of his time, with a rear-back-and-heave-it windup distinguished by an elegant little flick of the glove on his left hand toward home plate. (Jim Palmer had a similar small gesture, in the midst of a much more methodical delivery.) In addition to a blazing fastball, Gossage also developed a wicked slider. What's more, I'm old enough to remember when Gossage arrived in Chicago as a flame-throwing wunderkind after an incredible 18-win season at Class A Appleton, joining a staff that included Terry Forster and Bart Johnson. (Too bad the White Sox squandered those pitching resources.) Following Bruce Sutter's induction in 2006, Gossage's election displayed a growing appreciation for relievers within the BBWAA electorate.

Yet after that the writers remained almost clueless. Andre Dawson got a big boost and appears set for induction in the next two years, but finished behind Jim Rice. That's ridiculous, and reflects the usual New York-Boston favoritism on the part of the media. Dawson hit more homers, drove in more runs, and stole more than 250 more bases than Rice. True, he played five more seasons, but he was also a vastly superior fielder, with a feared throwing arm in right field, while Rice was a plodding if capable left fielder. (I recall Jerome Walton lobbing warmup tosses to the Hawk and receiving lasers in return.) In his 2001 Historical Baseball Abstract, Bill James ranked Rice 27th all-time among left fielders and called him "probably the most overrated player of the last 30 years," pointing out how he led the American League in grounding into double plays four straight years and had one of the highest GIDP rates in history. James ranked Dawson 19th all time among right fielders, and while he pooh-poohed his 1987 Most Valuable Player Award, I feel compelled to point out Dawson won it on sentiment resulting from the way he took a pay cut to a then-paltry $600,000 salary to join the Cubs that year during the owners' collusion era, and clinched the MVP with a homer in his last at-bat of the season at Wrigley Field -- a memory that still gives me goosebumps. Dawson was a better player than Rice, hands down, and deserves to go in first, but perhaps an even better player, Tim Raines, ranked in the top 100 players of all time by James (neither Dawson nor Rice made that cut), finished only a few votes ahead of Mark McGwire with less than 25 percent of the vote. (Three-quarters is required for induction.)

Joe Sheehan of Baseball Prospectus led the backlash against Rice and in favor of Dawson and Raines, but we'll see if it has any effect next year. As for Sun-Times columnist Rick Telander, who declined to take part in voting because he couldn't be certain none of the players was tainted by steroids, all I can say is that certainty under such circumstances is the obsession of tiny minds, and "ennui" is a weak excuse not to take part in something so important. At least he didn't mail in an unmarked ballot, like the handful of grandstanding writers trying to sabotage both deserving and undeserving candidates. Maybe Telander should give his ballot next year to someone more capable and deserving -- like me. I'd vote for Rickey Henderson (an absolute first-ballot Hall of Famer), Dawson, Raines, and Lee Smith, but not Rice, Bert Blyleven, or McGwire.

Tribune golf writer Ed Sherman wrote an interesting column last Friday--or at least a column with an interesting quote.

The piece was about how the United States Golf Association might soon outlaw new clubs with U-shape grooves in favor of the old V-shape. As I understand it, based on looking at a cross-section diagram, where the V-shape groove is as a diamond might cut it, a wedge, a U-shape groove is as a chisel might cut it, a trench. As one might imagine, the U-shape allows skillful players to put spin on the ball even when hitting out of the heavy grass of the rough, which has allowed the top pros to bomb away with their new big-head drivers with impunity.

Chicks might dig the long ball, but the USGA evidently does not, and that's where the quote comes in. "The skill of driving the ball accurately has become much less important in achieving success on Tour than it used to be," Sherman quoted USGA senior technical director Dick Rugge as saying. "Our analysis of statistical data measured by the PGA Tour since 1980 shows, historically, that driving accuracy was as comparably correlated to winning as putting. Beginning in the 1990s, however, driving accuracy became much less important. Today, the correlation between driving-accuracy rank and money rank on the PGA Tour is very low."

All right, enough golf. What's remarkable here is a top sports executive using statistical analysis to dictate how trends are going and how the sport needs to be tweaked to maintain its purity. Imagine if baseball had looked at the rising home-run statistics of the 90s and said, "Hey, we need to look into whether the balls--or the players--are juiced." Instead, baseball turned a blind eye to the entire phenomenon. If Bud Selig were running the PGA Tour, he'd say fans love the long ball and let's ignore whether technology is changing the game.

The ironic thing is this is yet another example of How Bill James Changed Our View of Baseball, the subject of a new book of essays edited by Gregory F. Augustine Pierce. James's statistical analysis has had immense influence throughout sports but is still widely considered voodoo in the traditional world of baseball, where only maverick executives like Billy Beane rely on it. Funny how what goes around comes around--and frequently goes out the other ear.