GAMES PEOPLE PLAY #9 - Baseball, Bill James & MONEYBALL

Описание: Song is 'The Mighty Rio Grande' by This Will Destroy You (2008).

All footage from MONEYBALL (2011).

"In the seventies and eighties, Bill James was a writer with a degree in English and economics, and after graduating found he wanted to think and write about nothing other than baseball statistics. Baseball has always been more statistical than any sport, even the oldest trading card will tell you that. But Bill James turned the numbers game on its head. Asking new questions in new ways that no one had ever thought of before. For one thing, he was very sceptical of the way fielding statistics had previously focused on ‘errors’, and how much it praised players who didn’t make them, and therefore favoured overly cautious players. In fact, because getting out was seen as so much worse than scoring a run was seen as good, the whole game was overtly cautious, for better or worse.

“What is an error?” James said. “It is without exception the only major statistic in sport which is a record of what an observer thinks should have been accomplished. It’s a moral judgement really, in the quasi-morality of the locker room. The fact of the error in baseball is that no play has been made, but the scorer thinks it should have. It is uniquely a record of opinions.”

Bill James’ wide scope of insight was a greater emphasis on how defensive a game baseball is. Three strikes you’re out; three outs & the innings ends. Not getting out is many times more important than getting runs. Getting on base is more important than getting home. Same with staying on base, making stealing bases almost always a too-risky crime in Bill James’ book. Bill James’ annual baseball books would go to sell exponentially more copies every year. Twenty-five years after publishing his first baseball abstract, Bill James was hired by the Boston Red Sox as a sabremetrics consultant. They were the first team to win the World Series based on this new statistically mathematical approach.

One example of these undervalued diamonds in the rough that this new Moneyball statistical approach uncovered, is pitcher Chad Bradford. Previously overlooked because of his awkward stance when throwing the ball, his method nevertheless worked. He is what is called a submarine or side arm pitcher, because he technically throws underarm or sideways, depending on how you look at it. Although neither term really does it justice, as no words can adequately describe his pitching style. In a similar way that Babe Ruth uses his whole body to swing, Bradford jack-knifes his body out sideways, like a jitterbug dancer swinging his partner wide. The arm swings around and underneath, the ball coming up at the batter from below. The way that he developed this pitching style is even stranger than fiction.

After his father suffered a stroke when Chad was five, it meant his dad always had to pitch underarm when playing catch in the yard. Bradford Junior picked up the habit and it stuck. And whenever the pressure of the mound got the best of Chad Bradford, his instincts had him swinging his hand closer and closer to the ground. And then one day, his pitching hand swung so low that his knuckles scraped the dirt, thereby giving the ball an unexpected spin that threw the batter out of the game. From that moment on, the loaded uncertainty that any upcoming pitch could be a spinning scraper, made him one the most successful pitchers in the game.

It’s interesting to think about how bizarre it is that good pitchers would become popular, or that good pitching wasn’t nerfed in the early development of baseball rules. Because pitching is essentially making things not happen. Fouls. Strike outs. Walks. The Moneyball era changed the way we look at baseball. How defensively strategic it had to be, like it was in its early days when rougher balls could not be hit as far, and it was a game of inches and stolen bases.

This new approach to recruiting unsung heroes who had fallen through the cracks, meant that the Oakland Athletics, one of the poorest teams in the league, won a record twenty consecutive games between August 13 and September 4, 2002. Keep in mind that baseball games are played almost every day, and so this monumental feat lasted just three weeks. Such a lengthy winning streak had not happened since World War 2, and remains unbroken in baseball’s American League to this day. Of course, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle applies to everything, even to statistics and baseball. Of course, everyone plays Moneyball now, and that fact changes everything. Stealing bases is back in, for one thing. More recently, the moment-by-moment analysis of baseball is taking over the long term statistical game, in the same way our live cricket coverage is becoming increasingly technological."