Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs just wrote a very interesting post about the way Miguel Cabrera changes his approach with runners on base, and in particular the way he changed the way he changes his approach with runners on base in 2013. The basic observations are that Cabrera in general swings more with runners on; that historically this increased aggressiveness has applied both to pitches in the strike zone and to pitches out of the zone; and that in 2013, this stopped being the case, that is, he was more aggressive in swinging at strikes with runners on, but not in swinging at balls. That is to say, in 2013 he managed to combine his more aggressive approach with runners on base with an increased feel for the strike zone and plate discipline. He also seemed to increase his swing rate on pitches on the interior part of the plate in particular, which he is legendary for punishing like a fiend out of hell.
Not said in the article is one of the things I think is most interesting about this observation. Because what we have here is an observation that in what you might call RBI opportunities, Cabrera actually does change his approach, and in some ways that might make him somewhat more likely to drive runners in. Moreover, in 2013, he changed that change in his approach for the better, and indeed absolutely crushed the ball with runners on. He also drove in 137 runs, and until he got injured late in the season he was contending to drive in a run per game. Now, the official position of the sabermetric community is that RBIs are an essentially worthless metric of individual value, that they vary based almost entirely on the strength of the hitters in front of you, i.e. not based on how good you are. Of course a better player will have more RBIs, but among two players who have similar overall batting lines a difference in RBI totals will be a reflection of team strength, not player quality. "Clutch" hitting is more or less a statistical illusion. That's the thinking.
But is this true in a case like Cabrera? Swing rates are among the least noisy data in baseball; the sample sizes are huge compared to things like at bats or whatever, and there are just a lot less confounding factors like defense or whatever. And we see very clearly that Cabrera has a very different approach with runners on base. He is also very successful with runners on base, and was particularly so with runners on base. Result, he had 137 RBIs in 652 plate appearances. Baseball-References says that an average MLB player would've had 67 RBIs over a similar span. Now, certainly, Cabrera had more runners on than an average player would've, but not that much more. He had a little under 25% more runners on third, and a smaller figure for runners on first and second. Being a bit overly generous, then, we might attribute a 25% increase over an average figure to his team. That would get him to 84 RBIs. He got to 84 RBIs in his 82nd game of the season, after his 378rd plate appearance. Yeah.
Now, y'know, the remaining 53 RBIs above average expectation are probably mostly just attributable to the fact that he hit .348/.442/.636 last year, which is a lot better than average. His wRC+ was 192. (Note that that doesn't actually mean he was nearly twice as good as an average player, since a slash line of .000/.000/.000 isn't a wRC+ of 0, it's -100 (just ask Justin Verlander); a 192 wRC+ means he generated 46% more value than an average player.) But he hit .366/.483/.733 with runners on base, for a wRC+ of 222, and .397/.529/.782 with runners in scoring position. wRC+: 243. His BAbip didn't even increase that much in those situations, going from .358 with the bases empty to .352 with runners on and .386 with runners in scoring position. Everything we can observe about his performance last year, very much including the data on his approach at the plate, suggests that Miguel Cabrera significantly elevated his game in RBI situations last year. He was great with the bases empty; he was Bonds with runners on. (Okay, Bonds in a down year, but within Barry Bonds range, which is plenty.)
And maybe that means he should get some credit for all those runs he drove in. It's really easy to say that, almost always, the RBI number doesn't really give us any useful information. That's one of the first things sabermetrics ever said, and it remains one of the most important. But the field has gotten to the point where it does and should say much more subtle things, and one of those things might be that, for this one unbelievably-good-at-hitting-pitched-baseballs player, the general rule might not hold. And maybe, therefore, we're okay with his MVP award.*
*Although I would've been more okay with it if he hadn't essentially missed the last month or so of the season, at least in terms of production. Before he got hurt he was at least keeping up with Trout by context-neutral stuff like WAR.
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Sunday, February 23, 2014
Of Course (Some) Exclusion is a Positive Good
The same article I've been reading basically since I started this little outpouring of blog posts just got around to discussing the right to exclude, one of the central features of property. And it quoted Henry Smith, an eminent property scholar and one of the authors of my Property casebook, as saying that "no one except a fetishist would believe that exclusion is a positive good." I gotta say, I strongly disagree, which I know is a bit odd coming from my hard-left political vantage-point. But it comes in part from my own personal experience. I get an enormous amount of value out of having some space that is just properly my own, from which I can exclude the whole rest of the world. I value having a door I can close such that I am on the inside and the entire rest of the world is on the outside. And it's not exactly mysterious why I value that, I think. It's partly about privacy: within that space I can do whatever I want (as long as it doesn't send some signal outside the private space) and it's no one else's business. But it's partly because, if I can exclude all others, then I am at perfect liberty to arrange that space exactly the way I want to. I don't have to compromise. And that's good.
Now, this comes close to sounding like an efficiency argument, the argument that I think Mr. Smith would give as the main rationale for giving people the right to exclude: doing so will give each person the proper incentive to manage their own property well and to make it productive. But it's more than that, and in fact I think it's not even really related to that argument. It's not just that giving each person full control over some resource should motivate them to make it productive in objective terms. It's that it having some space that is properly your own as against all others allows you to create significant subjective value. You can have things exactly your way. And I should emphasize that this effect is quite limited: you only really need somewhere that you can make entirely your own. There's no direct positive good in letting one person exclude all others from a vast tract of land. But having somewhere that you can make truly your home means you always have somewhere to retreat to where you can be completely comfortable, where you know things are as you like them. It's a kind of security; it's easier to not mind it if you find the outside world unpleasant if you know you can leave the outside world and go somewhere that's just the way you like it.
Having one such place is of tremendous value; having a second such place, or having a place twice as big, is not so important. Last year, for instance, the only space I had that fit this description was my actual bedroom, and that was enough. I had somewhere I could go. Now, as it happens, my personal idiosyncrasies are such that I value being able to exclude all others from my kitchen nearly as much as from my bedroom, and one of my favorite things about having my own apartment this year is that I don't have to share my kitchen with any meat eaters. But the difference for me between living in a double room with a roommate, when I had no space that I could fully exclude the world from, and living in a single room or in an apartment with roommates, where I do have such a space, is tremendous. Exclusion in general may not be a positive good, not as to economic resources in general, but I think it is unquestionably a positive good for each person to have some little kernel of space over which they have an absolute right of exclusion. Having that kind of control is the only way to guarantee that there will be some little patch of the universe that is exactly customized to your tastes, and having such a patch of the universe is tremendously valuable.
Now, this comes close to sounding like an efficiency argument, the argument that I think Mr. Smith would give as the main rationale for giving people the right to exclude: doing so will give each person the proper incentive to manage their own property well and to make it productive. But it's more than that, and in fact I think it's not even really related to that argument. It's not just that giving each person full control over some resource should motivate them to make it productive in objective terms. It's that it having some space that is properly your own as against all others allows you to create significant subjective value. You can have things exactly your way. And I should emphasize that this effect is quite limited: you only really need somewhere that you can make entirely your own. There's no direct positive good in letting one person exclude all others from a vast tract of land. But having somewhere that you can make truly your home means you always have somewhere to retreat to where you can be completely comfortable, where you know things are as you like them. It's a kind of security; it's easier to not mind it if you find the outside world unpleasant if you know you can leave the outside world and go somewhere that's just the way you like it.
Having one such place is of tremendous value; having a second such place, or having a place twice as big, is not so important. Last year, for instance, the only space I had that fit this description was my actual bedroom, and that was enough. I had somewhere I could go. Now, as it happens, my personal idiosyncrasies are such that I value being able to exclude all others from my kitchen nearly as much as from my bedroom, and one of my favorite things about having my own apartment this year is that I don't have to share my kitchen with any meat eaters. But the difference for me between living in a double room with a roommate, when I had no space that I could fully exclude the world from, and living in a single room or in an apartment with roommates, where I do have such a space, is tremendous. Exclusion in general may not be a positive good, not as to economic resources in general, but I think it is unquestionably a positive good for each person to have some little kernel of space over which they have an absolute right of exclusion. Having that kind of control is the only way to guarantee that there will be some little patch of the universe that is exactly customized to your tastes, and having such a patch of the universe is tremendously valuable.
Sexiness and Empowerment: A Study in Contrast
This past Friday I went to see the movie Frozen. This post is inspired by that experience, so if you haven't seen the movie, don't read any further.
A Minor Act of Pedantry
The timing of this post is completely random, but I happened to see the phrase "economic efficiency" in a reading for class and, as it often does, it annoyed me. That word, "efficient," is effectively the economist's term of art for "good." All things good are efficient; all things efficient are good. The actual meaning of the word "efficient" in ordinary English speech is lost. That definition is specifically about the ratio of inputs to outputs: something is efficient which gets a lot for a little. A little work, perhaps; one works efficiently if you can do in only an hour what someone else might take a day to do, especially if they could be getting the work done a lot faster if only they went about it more, well, efficiently. (It is not inefficient, in other words, to just be a very slow reader, and therefore to take longer to read, but it is inefficient to be a fast reader who nonetheless takes forever to get some reading done because you keep checking Facebook or writing blog posts, i.e. what I'm doing right now.) Efficiency is in general a good thing, as long as the thing we're producing efficiently is a good thing and/or its costs are a bad thing. But it's not the only good thing. There are times when it matters not so much to be efficient as to be successful, even if it requires spending resources "wastefully." For instance, sabermetrically inclined baseball analysts focus a lot on "efficiency," the idea that one shouldn't commit too much payroll space to an unproductive player. But if you're a team that has a lot of money, and you have a lot of good, cheap players but a couple of holes on the roster, well, it might make sense to overspend, perhaps even quite a lot. Pocketing the money doesn't give you a better team. Efficiency maximizes the return for your resources, but if you have ample resources, sometimes you might as well just throw everything you have at the problem, even if that efficiency ratio suffers.
All of which is a prelude to me complaining that the way the word "efficiency" is used in economic and/or pseudo-economic political discourse conflates two very different things, one of which is efficiency and one of which isn't. The thing that actually is efficiency is the problem with which classical economics generally concerned itself: assuming a relatively fixed pool of resources, how can society get the most value from them? How, that is, can each resource be put to its respective best use? So, for instance, one might argue, as many modern liberals do, that because money, income, and wealth have relatively sharply declining marginal utilities, it increases aggregate welfare to transfer a dollar from a rich person to a poor person. That's an efficiency argument, really, though right-leaning economists are loath to admit as much: it is the argument that the same resource will be more productive, of human happiness at least, if put to one use instead of another.
The other thing is a very different thing, and that's how to increase the overall stock of resources. That is essentially the problem of growth, and in principle it's quite different from the problem of efficiency. Now, the two can be connected. For instance, a conservative answer to the above liberal argument about redistribution would be that rich people invest their money, which increases overall productivity going forward and therefore produces more total long-term benefits than just letting the poor person consume that dollar right now, even though that poor person would get more out of that dollar right now than the rich person would. That's essentially saying that one use of a certain resource is more productive than another use of that same resource because it will generate still more resources.
But, importantly, there are significant areas of non-overlap between growth and efficiency. Many efficiency questions just don't involve growth questions one way or another; for instance, magically transporting an umbrella from the umbrella stand of someone in a city experiencing sunny weather to the hand of someone in a rainy town who for some reason doesn't have an umbrella would put that umbrella to much better use. It would not increase society's stock of resources. Conversely, growth is often not about efficiency. People talk about the incentive structure of the tax code as being relatively more or less "efficient," but that doesn't seem like the right way to look at it. Those kinds of incentives can certainly influence how much work people decide to do, which affects the overall level of GDP. But they don't improve the ratio between the inputs and the outputs. They increase the inputs, and thus the outputs. (The question of whether work or leisure is actually a better use of that person's time, all things considered, is more like an efficiency question, but it usually gets ignored in these discussions; maximizing GDP is assumed to be the goal.) And when an economy is operating below potential, as ours currently is and has been for a while, we're sort of in the situation of the rich team with lots to spend and a few big holes that need filling. We've got resources that are being left idle, so even a not-very-efficient use of them will be better for growth than what we've got now.
In other words, there are a lot of things that increase total production. Some of those things are about efficiency, about getting more out of our inputs. Some of them are about growth, about getting more outputs by putting in more inputs. Some of them are about a mixture of the two. People usually use the word "efficient" to describe any policy which has a net-positive economic outcome, but that's just a pure linguistic contortion.
All of which is a prelude to me complaining that the way the word "efficiency" is used in economic and/or pseudo-economic political discourse conflates two very different things, one of which is efficiency and one of which isn't. The thing that actually is efficiency is the problem with which classical economics generally concerned itself: assuming a relatively fixed pool of resources, how can society get the most value from them? How, that is, can each resource be put to its respective best use? So, for instance, one might argue, as many modern liberals do, that because money, income, and wealth have relatively sharply declining marginal utilities, it increases aggregate welfare to transfer a dollar from a rich person to a poor person. That's an efficiency argument, really, though right-leaning economists are loath to admit as much: it is the argument that the same resource will be more productive, of human happiness at least, if put to one use instead of another.
The other thing is a very different thing, and that's how to increase the overall stock of resources. That is essentially the problem of growth, and in principle it's quite different from the problem of efficiency. Now, the two can be connected. For instance, a conservative answer to the above liberal argument about redistribution would be that rich people invest their money, which increases overall productivity going forward and therefore produces more total long-term benefits than just letting the poor person consume that dollar right now, even though that poor person would get more out of that dollar right now than the rich person would. That's essentially saying that one use of a certain resource is more productive than another use of that same resource because it will generate still more resources.
But, importantly, there are significant areas of non-overlap between growth and efficiency. Many efficiency questions just don't involve growth questions one way or another; for instance, magically transporting an umbrella from the umbrella stand of someone in a city experiencing sunny weather to the hand of someone in a rainy town who for some reason doesn't have an umbrella would put that umbrella to much better use. It would not increase society's stock of resources. Conversely, growth is often not about efficiency. People talk about the incentive structure of the tax code as being relatively more or less "efficient," but that doesn't seem like the right way to look at it. Those kinds of incentives can certainly influence how much work people decide to do, which affects the overall level of GDP. But they don't improve the ratio between the inputs and the outputs. They increase the inputs, and thus the outputs. (The question of whether work or leisure is actually a better use of that person's time, all things considered, is more like an efficiency question, but it usually gets ignored in these discussions; maximizing GDP is assumed to be the goal.) And when an economy is operating below potential, as ours currently is and has been for a while, we're sort of in the situation of the rich team with lots to spend and a few big holes that need filling. We've got resources that are being left idle, so even a not-very-efficient use of them will be better for growth than what we've got now.
In other words, there are a lot of things that increase total production. Some of those things are about efficiency, about getting more out of our inputs. Some of them are about growth, about getting more outputs by putting in more inputs. Some of them are about a mixture of the two. People usually use the word "efficient" to describe any policy which has a net-positive economic outcome, but that's just a pure linguistic contortion.
The Qualifying Offer System, Macbeth, and Religious Morality
The current collective bargaining agreement between Major League Baseball and the Players' Association ushered in a new era of compensation for teams that lose a top player to free agency: the qualifying offer. It used to be that the Elias Sports Bureau would simply rank some free agents as top players, either in the A tier or the B tier. A team signing a type A or a type B free agent would forfeit its top draft pick; the player's former team would get that pick, and for a type A free agent they'd also get a bonus compensation pick after the first round of the draft. Now, each team is allowed to make a "qualifying offer," defined as being around the 75th or 80th percentile of all MLB salaries or something (and in practice around $13 or $14 million dollars the first two years), to any or all of their departing free agents. If the player declines a qualifying offer, then any team that signs them (other than, of course, their original team) forfeits their top available, unprotected draft pick, and the offering team gets a compensation pick. The top ten picks are protected.
Two years in, this system has come in for a ton of criticism. In particular, teams have been willing to make qualifying offers to mid-range free agents such as Kyle Lohse, Nelson Cruz, Kendrys Morales, and Stephen Drew. Unlike an elite free agent, these players have trouble finding much of market if their buyers also have to surrender a top draft pick. We've seen these players waiting until spring training had already started to sign, and it's speculated that it won't be long before a qualifying offer player waits until mid-season, after the draft has taken place and the compensation issue is off the board, to sign. Currently, Morales, Drew, and Ervin Santana have yet to sign, with actual spring training baseball less than a week away.
Another line of criticism, however, has emerged from this season. Of the thirteen qualifying offer free agents this offseason, four have signed with the New York Yankees. (Carlos Beltran, Jacoby Ellsbury, Brian McCann, and Hiroki Kuroda, although he was a Yankee to begin with.) Two more have signed with the Baltimore Orioles (Ubaldo Jimenez and Brian McCann.) Of the four others who have signed, two signed with teams whose first-round picks were protected, Curtis Granderson to the Mets and Robinson Cano to the Mariners, and one, Mike Napoli, re-signed with his current team, the Red Sox. Only one team so far has signed exactly one qualifying offer free agent from another team and forfeited their first-round pick to do so, the Texas Rangers, signing Shin-Soo Choo.
What we see, in other words, is that already having signed one qualifying offer free agent makes signing the next one look a lot more appealing, because it's just your second-round pick you're surrendering. Trading your top one draft pick (and market salary) for one top free agent is a worse deal than trading your top two picks (and market salary) for two top free agents, because the draft picks have steeply declining value while the free agents do not.
Why do I mention this, and what does it have to do with Macbeth or religious morality? An excellent question. (In the unlikely event you haven't read Macbeth, read no more.)
Two years in, this system has come in for a ton of criticism. In particular, teams have been willing to make qualifying offers to mid-range free agents such as Kyle Lohse, Nelson Cruz, Kendrys Morales, and Stephen Drew. Unlike an elite free agent, these players have trouble finding much of market if their buyers also have to surrender a top draft pick. We've seen these players waiting until spring training had already started to sign, and it's speculated that it won't be long before a qualifying offer player waits until mid-season, after the draft has taken place and the compensation issue is off the board, to sign. Currently, Morales, Drew, and Ervin Santana have yet to sign, with actual spring training baseball less than a week away.
Another line of criticism, however, has emerged from this season. Of the thirteen qualifying offer free agents this offseason, four have signed with the New York Yankees. (Carlos Beltran, Jacoby Ellsbury, Brian McCann, and Hiroki Kuroda, although he was a Yankee to begin with.) Two more have signed with the Baltimore Orioles (Ubaldo Jimenez and Brian McCann.) Of the four others who have signed, two signed with teams whose first-round picks were protected, Curtis Granderson to the Mets and Robinson Cano to the Mariners, and one, Mike Napoli, re-signed with his current team, the Red Sox. Only one team so far has signed exactly one qualifying offer free agent from another team and forfeited their first-round pick to do so, the Texas Rangers, signing Shin-Soo Choo.
What we see, in other words, is that already having signed one qualifying offer free agent makes signing the next one look a lot more appealing, because it's just your second-round pick you're surrendering. Trading your top one draft pick (and market salary) for one top free agent is a worse deal than trading your top two picks (and market salary) for two top free agents, because the draft picks have steeply declining value while the free agents do not.
Why do I mention this, and what does it have to do with Macbeth or religious morality? An excellent question. (In the unlikely event you haven't read Macbeth, read no more.)
Baseball Is The Best Sport: Statistically Proved
(Disclaimer: only four sports are included, so at most I'm claiming that baseball is the best of the four. A game like golf, where you're not really counting up from zero and trying to get as high as possible, is really impossible to analyze using the technique of this post.)
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine noticed that a basketball team was losing by about sixty points. Well, okay, he appears to have misplaced the tens column by one; he said they were losing by 66 points, but it was actually 56 points. It was the Philadelphia 76ers, losing very badly to the Los Angeles Clippers, on February 9th. They ended up losing 123-78, a margin of a meager 45 points. He was shocked, though, that a professional basketball team could be losing by that kind of margin. (Note that this particular friend is really into sports, all sports actually, and is very knowledgeable about every sport, so his shock and disbelief is pretty meaningful.)
Responding to those comments, I began a statistical analysis of the relationship between average score and variance of score in the four major American team sports: baseball, football, basketball, and hockey. I completed that analysis a few minutes ago. (In between I was doing other things.) There are a number of interesting findings, but I shan't bury the lede: my initial intuition was very much correct that basketball scores vary a lot less in comparison to their average value than those of the other sports. Especially baseball. Baseball has the highest ratio of variance to average. Thus the title. You can see if you think I'm right.
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine noticed that a basketball team was losing by about sixty points. Well, okay, he appears to have misplaced the tens column by one; he said they were losing by 66 points, but it was actually 56 points. It was the Philadelphia 76ers, losing very badly to the Los Angeles Clippers, on February 9th. They ended up losing 123-78, a margin of a meager 45 points. He was shocked, though, that a professional basketball team could be losing by that kind of margin. (Note that this particular friend is really into sports, all sports actually, and is very knowledgeable about every sport, so his shock and disbelief is pretty meaningful.)
Responding to those comments, I began a statistical analysis of the relationship between average score and variance of score in the four major American team sports: baseball, football, basketball, and hockey. I completed that analysis a few minutes ago. (In between I was doing other things.) There are a number of interesting findings, but I shan't bury the lede: my initial intuition was very much correct that basketball scores vary a lot less in comparison to their average value than those of the other sports. Especially baseball. Baseball has the highest ratio of variance to average. Thus the title. You can see if you think I'm right.
Friday, February 14, 2014
How Doesn't the No Fly List Violate Due Process?
I happened to read a blog post by Kevin Drum just now about the no-fly list, the thing where the U.S. government gets to decide that so-and-so isn't allowed to fly on planes, at least not for flights that involve U.S. airports or something. This specific story is about a person who was put on the no-fly list completely by mistake. The government discovered that mistake. But it did not fix that mistake, for nine years. It kept the person on the no-fly list, and thereby effectively banned from the country (because the last flight they let her take was from San Francisco to Malaysia), for nine years, knowing that she was not a terrorist for almost all of that time. Yeah. U! S! A!
And I wonder, not for the first time, how the hell the no-fly list doesn't violate the Due Process Clause. There is, as I understand it, no way to challenge being placed on the no-fly list. You can't even bring a habeas motion, 'cause you're not imprisoned. Now, apparently the woman involved in this story did sue the government, and got herself removed from the no-fly list by court order. But due process is not a question of mistake. People are deprived of their right to air travel by the effectively arbitrary decision of some minor executive official, with no notice and no opportunity to be heard. That sounds like the epitome of a due process violation. The only possible argument to the contrary, it seems to me, would be that getting to fly on airplanes is not a "liberty" within the scope of the Due Process Clause. But I really doubt that argument would actually fly in court, especially since we've got this whole thing called "substantive due process" that reads the word "liberty" to include things like the right to use contraception. Is there a reason why no one's brought a suit alleging that the entire practice of the no-fly list is just flatly unconstitutional, mistake aside? And if not, well, someone should do that.
And I wonder, not for the first time, how the hell the no-fly list doesn't violate the Due Process Clause. There is, as I understand it, no way to challenge being placed on the no-fly list. You can't even bring a habeas motion, 'cause you're not imprisoned. Now, apparently the woman involved in this story did sue the government, and got herself removed from the no-fly list by court order. But due process is not a question of mistake. People are deprived of their right to air travel by the effectively arbitrary decision of some minor executive official, with no notice and no opportunity to be heard. That sounds like the epitome of a due process violation. The only possible argument to the contrary, it seems to me, would be that getting to fly on airplanes is not a "liberty" within the scope of the Due Process Clause. But I really doubt that argument would actually fly in court, especially since we've got this whole thing called "substantive due process" that reads the word "liberty" to include things like the right to use contraception. Is there a reason why no one's brought a suit alleging that the entire practice of the no-fly list is just flatly unconstitutional, mistake aside? And if not, well, someone should do that.
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