Baseball prospectus smoking crack

Could you get a feel for this by looking at the number of pitches he sees per plate appearance? Lots of guys go up there hacking and don't have a real good eye, so they only get 2 or 3 pitches per plate appearance.

--How much extra effort does he put in when trying to get to first base?

OK, you could always measure the amount of time it takes him to get from home to first. If it's not much better than average, then I'd say that it doesn't matter how much effort goes into it. I mean, I'm show as dog shit, but I run like someone lit my ass on fire down to first in my bullshit men's league games. It doesn't help me get there in less than 5 and a half seconds, but boy do I ever try hard.

--How much does he distract the pitcher when he's on base?

You could look at the batters' stats when he's on base vs. when he isn't on base. But that might neglect the effect of a pitcher pitching from the stretch vs. the windup, so you'd probably want to try to correlate against other guys on base instead of Eckstein, multiple guys on base, etc. That one seems pretty hard to isolate, actually.

--How do you measure the importance of 56 doubles by Garret Anderson?

This one's actually been studied and quantified by statisticians a whole lot. If you're willing to look at numbers across all teams for all of baseball history, there is a number for how many runs more a team will score with a man on second base 56 times vs. getting out 56 times. I don't know what kind of crystal ball would let you predict the actual distribution of those 56 plate appearances if it was someone else, or if he weren't getting older/breaking down a little, but there's numbers for that.

--What's up with Darin Erstad's blazing speed?

Is it blazing? I honestly don't know how fast he really is, but there are on base stats for him, and they aren't pretty. baseball-reference.com has it all in black and white, if you want to look. Actually, I think his blazing speed down the line is implicit in the batting average/on base percentage numbers for him. It's not the only thing that's in there, but if you'd like to claim that he's got wheels, I can point to those numbers and claim that even if he had them, it didn't help him out all that much, otherwise, he would have beaten out more grounders to the left side and stolen more bases (or been caught less: 170 SB vs. 51 CS = about 76%, which actually isn't bad at all).

--How much effort does he put into knocking the ball out of a catcher's hands?

Have you ever seen him do that? I haven't watched the man play all that much, but I do know that memorable events stick out in the mind much more readily than non-memorable events. (Remember when Torii Hunter misjudged Kotsay's liner in the Metrodome in the playoffs last year, and it went for an inside the park homer? Man, Torii Hunter must suck.)

What I'm getting at is that the number of times that Erstad has knocked the ball out of a catcher's hands is a countable event. Some enterprising young statistician could go back through all the game footage and count 'em up, and measure it against the number of times it didn't happen with Erstad and against the number of times it happened or didn't happen with the rest of the league. Granted, it's not a stat that you see listed in the box score or in the history books, but you could get a pretty good idea of how Erstad's performance in that area helped his team by counting it up.

 
--"The kinds of things that inevitably win ball games."

One of the things that my dad used to ask my little league team after the game was, "Is a run in the last inning more important than a run in the first inning?" Instinctually, a bunch of us little kids said that the run in the last inning is more important, but really, they're the same value. It might be more obvious in the last inning that if you don't score that run then the team will be worse off, i.e., lose the game, than in the first inning. But if you don't score the run in the first inning, that just means that you have to score it in the last instead.

So if you concentrate on all the little things that win ball games and neglect all the big things that win ball games, what have you gained?

I'll cherry pick from above: Suppose Erstad knocks the ball out of a catcher's glove 6 times in the regular season. That means that he scores on those 6 events when he otherwise would have been out. Take a shot in the dark and say that not only do the 6 runs count for him, but the Angels score an extra 4 runs because they have an extra out to play with each time he does it. Ten runs over the course of a season are probably worth about one and two thirds of a win. Call it 2 wins to make the math easier.

How often do two wins matter over the course of a season? It happens sometimes, but not too terribly often. But get this... if the Angels keep Erstad around and get his 10 extra runs for the season on those plays, and don't sign a guy who would have hit 10 more home runs than him (say, Gary Matthews Jr. 19 HR in 2006 vs. Erstad's 7 HR in 2005), then the difference is wiped out right there.

What I'm trying to get at is that even if you go through all the trouble of measuring the number of times Erstad knocks the ball out of a catchers hands, which I've already noted is a non-trivial task, I'll just show you a guy who hits 10 more homers in the season and tell you to get that guy instead, because it's a tried and true fact that homers actually help a team in a measurable way. All that work for naught!

I know that a bunch of you guys won't care that these things are quantifiable in the first place, because it's fun to say, "I think this guy is good, just because he plays the game the right way", or some other phrase like that. And it pays off like a mother fucker when one of those not very likely events happens (Erstad v. catcher, Figgins making an infielder screw up a rundown because he's hopping around, etc.), because then you get to say to your friends, "See? I told you that guy's awesome!", presumably while gesticulating madly at the TV. Or you get to write it in a newspaper column, or say it while behind the desk of Baseball Tonight while wearing a spiffy tailored suit with one testicle missing.

It's fucking boring to pore over OBP, slugging, ERA and strikeouts, but it sure is reliable.

Just for fun, check out Herb Washington. Charley Finley hired him in '74 to pinch run for him and steal bases. He was a former track star, after all. But he fucking sucked at playing baseball. He only stole 65% of his bases and got caught all the rest of the time. That's not good at all, quite a bit worse than Darin Erstad, even. So it's fun to look at raw ability such as speed batting power, etc., and try to correlate that into something meaningful, but if dude can't choose when to run and when not to run, or if he can't get good jumps off the pitcher, or if he can't lay off bad pitches and pops up and grounds out a lot of the time, than he's not exactly as good as was previously thought. How much a player helps his team is more strongly correlated with certain stats that we can measure and not very strongly correlated with, "Ooh, look at those biceps!"

Anyway, sorry to blather on for so long. I know a lot of you will not care in the least that this kind of stuff goes on in other circles, and I've personally witnessed the vitriol that is sprinkled on statisticians like so much confetti. But some of you might have found it interesting. Good luck this year, guys. (Too bad FSU didn't take yeswecan's bet again, that was fun last year.)