A Couple Things That Annoy Me Pt. 1

With the very aggressive offseason that the Sox have had so far, the wonderful world of sports journalism is all over every move. Of course, this means they are making some pretty stupid arguments and I am starting to get pretty annoyed. I will explain these in a more-than-one-part series I call "Things That Annoy Me."

1.) Julio Lugo vs. Alex Gonzalez

One of the most annoying arguments is that pertaining to one Alex Gonzalez. Gonzalez is poplarly known as perhaps the best defensive shortstop in Red Sox history. So people are not inclined to let him go, particularly for a player like Lugo who makes his fair share of errors. The basic line of thought was nicely summed up by Jackie McMullen during an appearance on NESN. She expressed regret at letting such a "special player" walk, "what happened to last years emphasis on defense," she lamented. There are so many things wrong with this position, but I will break it down into two basic arguments. Firstly, does anyone really think Alex Gonzalez is a better ballplayer than Julio Lugo? No. Well, that is to say that no one who has any idea what's going on thinks that. If you want to question the money they are giveing him, that's one thing, but there's no question that Lugo is a vastly superior player to Gonzalez. Lugo is probably not even that much worse defensively than Gonzalez, has he undeniably has better range. Gonzalez is very steady handed, and rarely makes errors, but Lugo will get to more balls. However, understaning that requires abstraction away from things immediately visible, which most people, particularly those in the business of writing about sports, seem to have a difficult time with.

The second thing I have a problem with here is: when and where did this 'emphasis on defense' happen? I must have missed that. Let's look it over. The Sox had a pretty bad outfield defense, if by pretty bad I mean very bad. McMullen is clearly thinking about the infield defense when making this statement, which admittedly was very good, but you have to consider how it got that way. Mike Lowell was perhaps the best defensive third baseman in the league last year, but he was an accident. Unwanted baggage in the Beckett deal. The Sox took him on because Beckett was good enough to justify it, not because they particularly wanted him. Sure his defense was part of the reason that the deal was deemed worthwhile, but they hardly went out and acquired a glove in that deal. Kevin Youkillis was another accident. Remeber how he was a third baseman, and no one really knew how well he would adjust? They picked up J.T Snow as a defensive replacement becasue they were so unsure. The defensive replacement at first, by the way, goes back to Mientkiewicz in the Nomar deal, and is a practice that arguably wastes a valuable bench spot. Anyway, getting back to my point: he was moved to first out of necessity, and the Sox were lucky that he was good there. Loretta was acquired much more for his bat than his glove, and Pedroia is a good bet to be better in the field than Loretta was.

And finally, we get to the object of Jackie's affection: Alex Gonzalez. Does anyone remember last offseason? Gonzalez was far from the Red Sox first choice at the position, they found thamselves with a hole there late in the offseason and had to plug it. Hence Gonzalez. He was not heralded at the time, and signed a short deal for reasonable money. Let me tell you a secret about why this is the case; Gonzalez is not a particularly remarkable ballplayer. He is decent but he is not a standout. His acquisition was not an intentional move towards defense, it was making the best of a market that, quite frankly, didn't have a whole hell of a lot out there.

So putting it all together, I see no intentional trend towards defense there at all. It just sort of worked out that way. That's not a bad thing, but the point is that acquiring Lugo over Gonzalez is not a change of strategy. It is a move to get a better shortstop, and in fact the best shortstop available this year.

Parity

MLB has talked a lot aout the supposed 'parity' of baseball in recent years, the go-to stat: 7 teams have won the world series in the last 7 years. At first glance, this is an impressive number; no other of the big 4 sports have matched that run of new title holders. However, baseball is different than other sports. It is more random, in any given day a worse team is more likely to win than in other sports. This is reflected in the gruelling 162 game schedule, twice what any other league plays and 10 times the number comprising a football season. the longer season works out random fluctuations and, in the end, does a pretty good job of picking the best team. The playoffs, however, are short. Anything can happen in a 5 or 7 game series. At the most, a team plays 19 playoff games (with a 11-8 record). This is not enough to work out an average. Noone is worried if thoeir team is in last place after 19 games, and noone is particularly excited if their team starts 11-8 (granted, there are many games to go, but if the first 19 games were a reliable predictor of the rest of the season, this dismissal would not be justified). So if we do not pick the best team based on the first 19 games, why should we base our choice on the last 19?

Now, even if we accept that the amount of turnover among the best teams in the league will tell us much about parity (a complete analysis of this issue would have to also include turnover amung the worst teams, and the difference in records between these extremes), we would be much better off looking at season record than playoff results. So, here are the top 5 teams by wins over the last 7 years (from ESPN.com):

2006 - (WS: STL)
NYY-97
NYM-97
MIN-96
DET-95
OAK-93

2005 (WS: CWS)
STL-100
CWS-99
NYY-95
BOS-95
ANA-95

2004 (WS: BOS)
STL-105
NYY-101
BOS-98
ATL-96
LAD-93

2003 (WS: FLA)
NYY-101
ATL-101
SFG-100
OAK-96
BOS-95

2002 (WS: ANA)
NYY-103
OAK-103
ATL-101
ARI-98
STL-97

2001 (WS: ARI)
SEA-116
OAK-102
NYY-95
HOU-93
STL-93

2000 (WS: NYY)
SFG-97
STL-95
ATL-95
CWS-95
NYM-94

(I wish Blogger had a better spreadsheet option)

I included the World Series winners each year to demonstrate my point about the randomness of the playoffs. Notice that not once in the last seven years has the World series winner been the winningest team in the league. In fact, in the last seven years, only twice has the WS champion even been in the top 5! Indeed, the playoffs are a very poor indicator of the best teams. Only 8 teams even make the playoffs. It is really remarkable that those 6th-8th teams are responsible for 5 of 7 titles - much worse at picking out the best teams than one would expect even from simple randomness. (What can or should be done about this is another issue entirely. Perhaps it would be best to change the format somehow - lengthen series? play a round-robin round? Even if these were viable options, nothing will be done since this would appear to reduce the parity, as shown below.)

Getting to the meat of the analysis, we can see that 6 different teams have occupied the 9 (ties included) possible spots as the winningest team in the game. This is not too bad, but looking at the top five totals, only 14 teams have occupied the 35 potential spots. The big winners are the Yanks with 6 appearances in the top 5, St. Louis with 5, Oakland and Atlanta with 4, and Boston with 3. These five teams alone count for 22 appearances, almost 2/3 of the possible spots. In a field of 30 teams, this does not seem to represent a great degree of parity to me.

It is kind of hard to know what this really means without the full analysis I mentioned above, and a complete comparison to the same results for the NFL, NBA and NHL, while also balancing for the number teams in the league (i.e. this analysis would appear to signify more 'parity' in a smaller league, as teams are more likely to appear in the top 5 by law of averages). This, of course, is more work than I am willing to do, as I am not paid for this. However, it can at least be said that the annual turnover among the best teams in the league is significantly less than the 7-in-7 championship story implies.