Jose Reyes, High-OBP Guy

The New York Mets are third in the National League in on-base percentage from their leadoff hitter. They trail Chicago, a mixture of Starlin Castro and Kosuke Fukudome, both of whom have kinda absurd BAbip numbers as leadoff hitters, and Pittsburgh, a combination of Andrew McCutchen and Jose Tabata. Meanwhile, they also lead the league in on-base percentage from their shortstop. Lead the league! In batting average by shortstop they trail only Chicago's Starlin Castro, whom Reyes has exactly as many hits as, and in slugging percentage by shortstop they trail only Colorado's Troy Tulowitzki. But Jose Reyes leads National League shortstops in on-base percentage. How about that?

Not Impressed

I just want to say that I've been reading cases on establishment of religion from the European Court of Human Rights as well as the U.S. Supreme Court from the past couple of years and boy am I not impressed. People will find just about any excuse they can to avoid actually enforcing the Establishment Clause, or its equivalents in the European Convention on Human Rights. Seriously, in one of the USSC cases the majority relied on the contention that tax expenditures are different from outright spending of taxpayer funds. It's like they knew they'd lose, so they wanted to invent a really silly reason not to hear the case. Boy. Justice Stevens' dissent taking apart one of their cases was fun, though.

Common

I just watched the interview where Jon Stewart and Bill O'Reilly argue about whether the rapper/poet known as Common ought to have been invited to the White House. Basically this debate strikes me as inane, insane, and silly, so I haven't bothered to write anything about it, but I was just struck by this thought hearing Bill'O's arguments. The crux of his argument seemed to be that President Obama should have known that to invite someone who had written lyrics or made statements or gestures that seem kind of controversial from a left-wing black radical perspective to the White House for a poetry jam would be controversial and get him, President Obama, a criticism he doesn't need. Never mind that right now I don't think Obama is really worried about his "oh no, people think I'm an anti-American Muslim radical" flank. O'Reilly's criticism of Obama is that he should have known this action would lead to criticism. Like the criticism O'Reilly was making. "You shouldn't have done that, because I am criticizing you for it and you should have known I would." It's just silly: if his only problem with it was that it would get Obama criticized, then maybe he could try, I don't know, not criticizing Obama. Then he wouldn't have a reason to criticize Obama for doing the thing that would get him criticized, because it wouldn't have gotten him criticized.

Oh wait, he's on FOX. I believe there's a clause in his contract saying that if he ever passes up a chance to criticize President Obama he gets fired.

Homegrown

Thole, Davis, Murphy, Reyes, Wright, Martinez, Pagan, Niewenhuis, Mejia, Harvey, Dickey, Niese, Gee, Familia. That's a team of eight starting position players, five starting pitchers, and one closer of whom one did not begin his professional career as a Met, and that one is a guy who's career experienced a distinct rebirth of a categorical nature when he joined the Mets last year. It's also a team that I might think would be pretty good in, say, 2013. I'm thinking of this after seeing Fernando Martinez absolutely crush a ball in a crucial pinch-hitting spot in today's Mets-Astros game, and therefore being reminded that he's pretty good, at least when healthy. I sort of wonder when's the last time a team has tried to construct itself this way, with essentially all homegrown players.

Now, perhaps the Mets will not follow this route. 2013's a long way away; who knows what'll happen to any of these guys between now and then. Right now Josh Thole isn't necessarily giving us reason to think we'd be thrilled with him as our catcher, and I think that'd got to be the best spot to throw in a big-name free agent. Maybe you don't like Murphy as a second baseman, though I think I really do, but the Mets have lots of other middle-infielder prospects, like Ruben Tejada and Wilmer Flores. So I'm sort of confused as to why people say that the Mets' farm system is just pathetic: it's sort of on the verge of producing an entire high-quality baseball team within a few years. The Mets can be quite good indeed in 2013 by doing very little. They don't need to do very much beyond that to get really good. Abandoning Jose Reyes to get "prospects" would just be kind of silly.

The Republican Field, May 13, 2011

Sort of pursuant to my previous post, I thought I'd take a look at the way the Republican field is shaping up, and see whether I'm really correct that there's no one who scares me in it. Basically, the theory works like this: sure, it doesn't look like there's anyone remotely scary out there, and all available Republicans who aren't Romney or Huckabee are polling in the forties against Obama, but anyone who becomes a major party nominee will become taken seriously, even if they haven't been taken seriously thusfar. Now, I'm ignoring Romney and Huckabee, and I'm also ignoring people like Herman Cain who are, let's face it, not serious candidates. So, are there any semi-plausible Republican nominees who would have the slightest chance of defeating Barack Obama?

If Huckabee Doesn't Run...

Apparently there's a rumor going around that Mike Huckabee will announce that he is not running for President tomorrow. Cool. This, in the same week that saw Mitt Romney's candidacy move past the "dead man walking" phase and toward the "I'm not dead yet!" phase, or something, with his simultaneous attempt to defend and distance himself from his signature achievement. So... remind me, who exactly are the Republicans going to nominate?

More on Strokes Gained - Putting

One thought I have about this new concept of Strokes Gained - Putting is that it's sort of a partial version of an idea I've had for a while. A year or two ago I had the idea of giving each shot you make in a round of golf a "grade" on the par scale. The idea is that par-level shots will get you a par on a given hole, while one birdie-level shot lowers your expected score on the hole by one, and a bogey-level shot raises your expected score by one. So, for instance, if you hit a solid drive down the middle of the fairway, followed by an iron to four feet, and then miss the putt and tap in for par, you went par-birdie-bogey-par. But there's a problem with that way of counting things, which is that it's not always clear where the difference from par should go. Suppose, on a short-to-mid-length par-4, your drive goes long and straight, leaving a short wedge into the green. Then you hit that wedge well, to ten feet, and then sink the putt for birdie. Or, conversely, on a par-3 you hit your tee shot into the fringe a dozen yards or more from the pin, and then a so-so chip shot to maybe seven feet, but then you miss the putt. Which shot in the first case deserves the birdie, and which in the second should take the blame for the bogey? It's hard to say; in both cases it was more of a team effort.

So my idea is to designate shots as having (potentially) non-integer values relative to par. The way this works in practice is to visualize a topographical map of sorts over a golf hole of expected average strokes to get into the hole from each position on the course. For a given shot, you take the expected stroke average from the point where that shot ends up and subtract from it the expected stroke average from the spot you hit it from, and then add one. So if you stand on the tee of a par-4 hole with a stroke average of 3.95, but then you hit a beautiful drive down the fairway to where you'd expect to take 2.73 shots from there to hole out, that shot was worth -0.22 strokes relative to par (obviously, negative numbers are good; you could flip that, if you wanted to, but why bother?). A whiff would be by definition +1.00 strokes, since you end up where you started. Holing out from a spot with X expected strokes would be -(X - 1) strokes relative to par.

Strokes Gained - Putting is basically the same idea, just for putting only. They start with an estimate of the chance that a given putt will be holed out, based as I understand it almost exclusively on the length of the putt. Then the idea is that, if there's a p chance you make the putt and you do make it, you gain (1 - p) strokes on the field, and if you miss it then you lose p strokes on the field. This is very similar to my idea, except slightly disregarding the possibility of three-putting. If there's a putt with a p chance of sinking it, then you have 2 - p expected strokes to hole out from that spot. If you hole out, then obviously that stroke was worth -(1 - p) strokes relative to par. If you miss it, assuming you go to a spot with certainty of holing out, then that stroke was worth -(-p) = +p strokes relative to par. It's the same thing, except with the minus signs flipped.

Ultimately this is the authoritative way to analyze the quality of golf shots. If you could create a perfect map of stroke expectancies from each spot on a golf course, you could compute things the way I've sketched out and then say that a player was x strokes under par on the year with his driving, y strokes over par with his irons, and z shots above or below par on putting. But that would be really, really hard to do effectively. In fact it's hard enough to do with putting. Anyone who plays the game of golf knows that there are lots of things aside from length that affect probability of making a putt; a fifteen-footer from slightly below the hole with two inches of right-to-left break is much easier than an eight-footer from well above the hole with a foot and a half of left-to-right break on it. But it's damn hard to quantify that: instead, they've just assumed that length is king, and everything else will average out in the long run. And they're probably not far from right about that. Moreover, they don't even account for the fact that, even if there is a 2% chance of holing out a putt from 70+ feet, the odds of three-putting are sufficiently high that you probably have more than 2.00 strokes left on average.

The point is that it's tough to make the map of stroke expectancies that I envision as the perfect way to judge a golf shot. It's hard enough when all you care about is what happens once you get onto the green. I like that they're trying, and I would be really interested to see if they ever expand this concept to more parts of the game.

Circle of Putting Equivalence

PGATour.com has unveiled their new putting statistic, catchily titled "strokes gained - putting." This is an attempt to describe which players have, uh, gained the most strokes compared to field average with their putting. So if you make a putt that they estimate the field would have made 80% of the time, you get +0.20 strokes gained from putting; if you miss a putt the field would make 40% of the time, that's -0.40. It's a perfectly reasonable way to approach the idea of creating a more comprehensive putting statistic; indeed, if done right it is the authoritative way to judge a good putting performance. But there's a problem I have with it, which is that it's very intangible. Theoretically there's no reason we couldn't do this for driving, or iron play, too: on a given hole, you can look at the difference between hitting the fairway and missing the fairway in stroke average, look at the field's fairways-hit percentage, and calculate a strokes-gained from driving accuracy. But we don't, because we like to be able to say, so-and-so hit 63% of fairways. It's all very well and good to say that someone gained 3 strokes from putting in their round, but it's very much a construct. Problem is, most of the simple putting stats are actually quite bad proxies for putting prowess; putts per GIR is heavily influenced by proximity to the hole, and putts per round is heavily influenced by GIR%. But I have an alternative fancy putting stat which, I think, is much more easy to feel on an intuitive level: the circle of putting equivalence.

The circle of putting equivalence is defined as follows: what is the smallest distance which, if a player had holed every putt from inside that distance and missed every putt from outside that distance, would have resulted in the same overall score? The idea is to find a distance which the player had the same number of missed putts that were shorter than that distance as holed putts that were longer than that distance; the "smallest" requirement is just to make it well-defined, because there's likely to be a gap based on what putts the player happened to have. Obviously longer is better. For instance, assume that a given player hit every putt they missed to a foot from the hole and made all those one-footers, and had the following eighteen lengths of first putt in their round: 3', 4', 5', 6', 8', 10', 15', 17', 19', 21', 25', 28', 32', 34', 42', 45', 52', 60'. Now suppose that, of these eighteen first putts, they sank the ones from three, four, six, eight, fifteen, and nineteen feet. Then their putting equivalence distance would be ten feet and one inch: they missed two putts shorter than this, the five- and the ten-footer, and made two putts that were longer than this, the fifteen- and nineteen-footers. This player took 30 putts on the round, and if they had made everything of 10 feet or shorter and missed everything longer than 10 feet they would have taken 30 putts.

The only difficulty is how to judge a three-putt from inside the circle: for instance, say that the ten-footer had been three-putted instead of two-putted. If that putt had been made, it would've saved two strokes; however, you get to the same place by counting one stroke saved from making that putt and another stroke saved by making the three-footer or whatever that was missed to create the three-putt. Arguably this is a slight change from the original definition, since we're looking at the made/missed equivalence instead of the "same score" equivalence, but I'm pretty sure it would ultimately get you to the same place since you need two putts holed outside of the line to balance out a three-putt from inside the line any which way. (If you hit from inside the line to outside the line and then miss that one, I'm not sure how that works out.)

This strikes me as a really good way to judge quality putting. It's also something that would be trivially easy to calculate using ShotLink data, but I doubt they'll ever do it. I'd be really curious to see the results, though, and especially to see the correlation with their new Strokes Gained - Putting stat.

Everything's a Decision

Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong direct us to an interview with Friedrich Hayek from 1977. They discuss the real economic parts of the interview, but the following struck me as an interesting bit of political philosophy. In response to the question, "why is there no social justice?" Hayek responds:

"Because justice refers to rules of individual conduct. And no rules of the conduct of individuals can have the effect that the good things of life are distributed in a particular manner. No state of affairs as such is just or unjust: it is only when we assume that somebody is responsible for having brought it about. Now, we do complain that God has been unjust when one family has suffered many deaths and another family has all of its children grow up safely. But we know we can't take that seriously. We don't mean that anybody has been unjust. In the same sense, a spontaneously working market, where prices act as guides to action, cannot take account of what people in any sense need or deserve, because it creates a distribution which nobody has designed, and something which has not been designed, a mere state of affairs as such, cannot be just or unjust. And the idea that things ought to be designed in a 'just' manner means, in effect, that we must abandon the market and turn to a planned economy in which somebody decides how much each ought to have, and that means, of course, that we can only have it at the price of the complete abolition of personal liberty."

This strikes me as almost the logical maximum of the conservative tendency to assume that the moral content of doing nothing is automatically nothing. You only risk doing wrong when you decide to do something in the first place. But this way of thinking about it is completely wrong.