1) Truth matters
Alex Rodriguez is a liar. He was the leader of the 2015 and 2016 New York Yankees. The 2015 team faded late in the season. Why did this happen? Perhaps it just wasn’t their year.
The team had more or less the same roster the next year, and they got off to a terrific start. In their first five games of the season, the team averaged seven runs per game. Awesome, right? Here’s the problem. They followed that up with an abysmal offensive stretch. They scored just 39 runs in the next 17 games combined. And they were incapable of getting a hit with runners in scoring position. It was a historically bad stretch for the team in that sense (the YES Network literally started one of their broadcasts during this time saying “APB for RISP.” That’s how atrocious it was). It was so freaking weird. How could a team go from scoring seven runs a game to offensive anemia overnight?
Maybe the opposing teams scouted the Yankees that first week of the season super effectively, giving their pitchers top notch scouting reports on how best to attack the Yankees hitters – quadrants, pitch selections – you know, all the important stuff. Could be. Or maybe, it was something else. Maybe when Rodriguez returned at the start of the 2015 season following his year long suspension, a lie bubble formed within the team’s collective unconscious. That year, the Yankees wouldn’t shut up about how Rodriguez was “the best teammate ever,” how he was helping this player and that player with this and that – Didi Gregorious adjusting to life in pinstripes, Nathan Eovalidi’s pitching style, etc. Maybe when things were going well for the team during the 2015 season and early in 2016, the team was being animated by the idea that this was all true about Rodriguez. Maybe, when adversity struck early in 2016, the truth flooded in – that Rodriguez, far from being the “best teammate ever”, is a liar, who in all likelihood cheated his way to hundreds of millions.
Maybe. I don’t know. But did you see the sky during his “retirement” ceremony? Weird right?
Maybe the truth is that a team will never win a division title, let alone a world series title, if their leader possesses a character like Alex Rodriguez’s. Indeed, the 2014 and 2017 Brewers, led by another snake named Ryan Braun, suffered a similar fate as those Yankees teams did, fading (as they did in 2017) or downright collapsing (as they did in 2014) after leading the division for much of the season. Weird, too, that the San Francisco Giants never won a world series with Barry Bonds as their leader, but shortly after his retirement, they won three in the span of five years. Or that the day after Rodriguez left, Aaron Judge made his major league debut, and, without a cloud in the sky, hit a 500 foot home run in his first at bat. Funny, isn’t it?
Perhaps character is, at least, something that front offices should consider before they offer contracts to PED-linked players, especially if that player is to be in a leadership position on the team. Or before they honor or hire PED linked players from the past.
2) Chemistry matters
The Los Angeles Dodgers loved AJ Ellis. His teammates’s reaction after he was traded in late 2016 was intense. It was like there had been a death in the family. Ellis is a close friend of star pitcher Clayton Kershaw and was widely seen as a “clubhouse leader” on the team. You know, the kind of thing that makes all the smartest people titter and sneer with derision. One would not be surprised if Andrew Friedman, Farhan Zaidi and the rest of the geniuses, when contemplating the pros and cons of trading Ellis for Carlos Ruiz, laughed at the notion of the “chemistry fairy” coming back to haunt them. That idea certainly seemed preposterous when Carlos Ruiz was super awesome in the 2016 playoffs against the Nationals and Cubs. And it seemed even more fanciful when the Dodgers played at a historic pace through the first five months of the 2017 season. But those who thought the AJ Ellis story was over at this point forgot that when you throw a stone into a pond, there are ripples. His story didn’t end with the 2016 postseason, and it wasn’t over by September 2017 either.
The entire 2017 season was a giant test case regarding the question of whether chemistry matters. With the Dodgers having such a good season following the trade of such an integral part of their clubhouse/chemistry, it looked like the story of the season was “AJ Ellis and the Limits of Chemistry.” As it turned out, the story was “AJ Ellis and the Fundamental Importance of Chemistry.”
The Dodgers followed up their super awesome, super duper cool, “best season ever” through August with a historically, unprecedentedly bad September. What happened? How could a team that was playing so well all of a sudden lose 16 out of 17 games, having their 20 + game division lead cut in half overnight? Perhaps they just took their foot off the gas, taking it easy in September after going all out to build up such a great lead to that point in the season. Or perhaps the chemistry fairy returned to haunt Friedman and Zaidi after all.
Maybe the Dodgers players didn’t want to win a world series without AJ Ellis. More than that. Maybe they didn’t want Friedman and Zaidi to get credit for trading him away. If they had won the series last year without Ellis, then it would have been a giant endorsement of the trade. “See, we didn’t need him after all! The whole isn’t greater than the sum of its parts. We’re just a collection of individual players without any greater team purpose/identity/soul,” would have been the idea conveyed by the Dodgers if they had won the series last year. Sure, they had the talent on the team to win. But their team ceased to have a soul the second they traded away Ellis. Is anyone surprised that the team with no soul lost? I’m not.
Let me be clear: I am in no way, shape or form saying that the Dodgers threw the rest of the season. What I am saying is that, perhaps, there was an unconscious pull at the Dodgers players, an understanding at a deep level of what winning such a championship would signal. “AJ Ellis and the Limits of Chemistry.” Could they tell on some level that winning the world series last year would be, in essence, writing that story? Maybe at that level they were trying to tell a different story. “AJ Ellis and the Fundamental Importance of Chemistry.” Knowing deep down what winning without him would signal, things just didn’t feel right, and the team played like it in September.
It goes beyond that, though. Look at what else was happening in the league at the time. Ellis’s new team, the Miami Marlins, were surging in the standings. As unlikely as it was (at least according to the all knowing predictive models of the intelligentsia), if the Dodgers had blown the entire 20 game lead and collapsed into the wild card game, it was possible at the time that the Dodgers could be playing AJ Ellis’s new team. Possible even that AJ Ellis could deliver a game winning hit on that stage against his former team. Indeed, Ellis was on MLB Network joking about the possibility of the Dodgers and Marlins playing in October right around when the Dodgers collapse started. Maybe the Dodgers players wanted deep down to see that happen. Maybe they were unconsciously trying to will such a scenario into existence as they collapsed in September. Wouldn’t that have made Friedman and Zaidi look awful? Maybe on that level they wanted to see Friedman and Zaidi look bad more than they wanted to see Friedman and Zaidi get credit for the trade. Again, if the Dodgers had won the world series that year, the entire intelligentsia would have taken it as validation that chemistry is irrelevant. “So much for the chemistry fairy”, they would have said.
Eventually the Dodgers stabilized, and the Marlins were eliminated from playoff contention. So the super team rolled on. Everything was set up for them. Game 5 of the world series. Kershaw on the hill. 4-0 in the 4th inning. Game over, right? What was their win proabability at that point? According to Pecota or whatever? 99.5 %?
Maybe Kershaw just lost the strike zone because of the pressure of the postseason. Maybe his back acted up on him. I doubt highly that that was it . No. I bet that something wasn’t sitting right. Maybe, just maybe, it was that the “group of guys” on the team that Kershaw was lauding after game 5 of the NLCS didn’t include AJ Ellis? And so the chemistry fairy flew in and sprinkled her magic dust on Kershaw that night. The rest is history.
We’re new age here at SABR Skeptic. New age, I say.
If you still don’t believe me that chemistry matters, I’d recommend looking up what happened when the Indiana Pacers traded Danny Granger in 2014, when the Oakland Athletics traded Yoenis Cespedes in 2014, when the Milwaukee Bucks traded Brandon Knight in 2015, when the Oakland Athletics acquired Yoenis Cespedes in 2015 (we call that “stolen chemistry” here at SABR Skeptic), when the New York Rangers traded Derick Brassard in 2016 and then doubled down by trading Derek Stepan and waiving Dan Girardi a year later, when the Ottawa Senators traded for Michel Duchene in 2017 (that’s when they were supposed to finally get good, right geniuses?), and when the Pittsburgh Steelers phased out and then waived James Harrison this past year. Here’s a hint – it didn’t end well for any of those teams. Trifle with the chemistry fairy at your peril.
3) Leadership matters
Eric Hosmer is a leader. So is David Price. The conventional wisdom these days is that a team is built by having a lot of great players in the minor leagues and building a team from the ground up, as the Astros and Cubs did prior to their recent championships. Obviously, it’s good to have talented players on your team, but the stories of both teams’ recent success is far more complex – or, should I say, far simpler – than the conventional wisdom says.
Every team, in every sport, is anchored by leaders in key positions. Anthony Rizzo was the leader of the Cubs’s position players. Take him off the team, and despite the plethora of talent throughout the roster, will the team necessarily be as good? You can have all of the talented players you want, but you need a leader to serve as an anchor for them. Note – I’m not saying that taking Rizzo off the team would simply hurt them by depriving them of his “production” that couldn’t be made up for by a “replacement level” player. No. I’m saying that the team not having its leader could very well have catastrophic ripple effects throughout the team. Without him being there to protect the rest of the lineup, what would happen to the team? Is there another leader type on the team who could step in and fill that void? Perhaps. But whoever that is, he still wouldn’t be Anthony Rizzo. That kind of leadership is irreplaceable.
If Rizzo had, say, been injured at the start of the 2016 season, who knows what would have happened to the team. You can’t just assume that the other players on the team would have been able to put up the same numbers without Rizzo there to protect them. And you can’t assume they would have won nearly the same amount of games as well. They may not have even made the playoffs. They might not have even had a winning record. The ripple effects of not having your team leader can swing your win-loss record by a lot. And there isn’t a statistical model that exists that can show you this. There is, however, history. And what it teaches is clear.
The Oakland A’s had a leader. His name was Yoenis Cespedes. A mad man named Billy Beane traded him away. The team completely collapsed after that happened. That’s what happens when you remove a leader from a team.
3a) Veteran Leadership Matters
Did the Minnesota Twins go from a mid 80 win, nearly-made-the-playoffs team in 2015 to a 100 loss team in 2016 because Torri Hunter retired? While there may have been other factors involved, certainly it played a role.
Would the Yankees have gotten off to such an excellent start last year without Matt Holliday on the roster? Perhaps. Or perhaps without him the team would have been a .500 team on Memorial Day rather than a team that was 15 games over .500.
Would the Astros have won the World Series last year if Carlos Beltran hadn’t been on their roster from opening day? Certainly not.
3b) Coaching Matters
Perhaps the most important leadership position of all on any team is head coach, aka a manager in MLB.
A head coach does much more than just manage lineups, make pitching changes, etc. The coach sets the tone for the whole team. A coach’s job, in essence, is to create an atmosphere in which the players can thrive. If the coach is tense, then the players will be tense. If the coach is relaxed, then the players will be relaxed. It’s easier to perform if you’re relaxed than if you’re tense.
Countless times we have seen teams make coaching changes and undergo complete turnarounds. This has happened mid-season, like when the New York Knicks replaced Mike D’antoni with Mike Woodson in 2012, or when the Pittsburgh Penguins replaced Mike Johnston with Mike Sullivan in 2016, a move which propelled them all the way to the Stanley Cup. When the Arizona Diamondbacks replaced Chip Hale with Torey Luvello following the 2016 season, they won 24 more games the next year. How much of a role did the change play in that turnaround? How about when the Washington Nationals replaced Matt Williams with Dusty Baker between the 2015 and 2016 seasons. The turnaround was relatively modest – increasing from 83 wins in 2015 to 95 in 2016, but there’s no question that Dusty Baker got that team back on track after a disastrous 2015. This is just scratching the surface when it comes to these kind of coaching change inspired turnarounds. Clearly, coaching matters.
3c) Personality Type Matters
Something that seems to get lost a lot in sports analysis is the importance of personality type. In order for your team to thrive, it is crucial to have leader types, also known as alpha males, in leadership positions. What are these positions? In football, quarterback to be sure. Kicker perhaps as well. Baseball is more complicated. What are your leadership positions in baseball? Lineup/Position player anchor. Rotation anchor aka ace. Do you need both to be alpha? Probably not. Do you need at least one to be alpha? To be sure. Good luck winning without that. In basketball there is just one leadership position – the star player. And in hockey, you have two – the goalie and the team star (Ovechkin, for example). Like baseball, one being alpha is basically a necessary condition for winning (there are rare examples, driven by what we call here at SABR Skeptic an “X-Factor” … more on that later).
Scouting for personality type can be difficult, but with a long enough track record warning signs are usually abundant.
If you have a beta male in a leadership position, it is hard to win. It doesn’t matter how talented that beta male is. The team will struggle to win if there isn’t a natural leader in a leadership position. It would be preferable for your team to have a less talented alpha male than an uber talented beta male, to be sure. When you have a beta male in a leadership position, it’s hard for anyone involved in that system to thrive. People need to be in their proper roles in order to thrive. Does this mean that Matt Ryan, Matt Stafford and Philip Rivers should be out of the league entirely? Backup quarterbacks? Yes. It does. You can give Matt Ryan a contract extension if you’re the Atlanta Falcons, but be warned. You’ll be locking yourselves in to 10 years or more of mediocrity, just as the Detroit Lions did last offseason. The Chargers have been mediocre since they drafted Philip Rivers. Coaches have come and gone, as have the players around Rivers. At a certain point, the problem becomes obvious.
4) Hierarchy, Order and Structure Matters
A related point to “leadership matters” is that “hierarchy, order and structure” matters.
Luis Severino of the New York Yankees had an ERA of 8.30 as a starting pitcher early in 2016. He was so bad that he was sent down to AAA and then demoted to the bullpen for the rest of the season. Last season, Severino bounced back in a big way. His ERA was below 3.00, and he was widely heralded as one of the best pitchers in the league. While this was true for him from the perspective of his individual performance, this analysis totally failed to take into account the team hierarchy, order and structure in which he was a part of (in other words, it failed to take into account that baseball is a team game; see below). Severino was pitching in a rotation with two established leaders, also known as “aces,” CC Sabathia and Masahiro Tanaka. The rotation also featured an established major league level starter in Michael Pineda. In other words, he was protected. That is, the pressure on him was abated due to their presence in the rotation. Would Severino necessarily have been performing as well if those three starters had all been injured on opening day? Of course not. And when they were injured throughout the season, Severino’s performance suffered mightily. This didn’t stop the intelligentsia from labeling Severino the new Yankees “ace,” nor did this stop the Yankees from pitching Severino in the wild card game, a spot typically reserved for the team’s ace pitcher. It was a true “ace test” for Severino. How did he do? That’s what happens when a team’s hierarchy is confused.
How about Rick Porcello of the Red Sox last year without David Price there to protect him. It wasn’t a pretty picture. See, when Rick Porcello won the CY Young award in 2016, David Price was there the entire year, taking all the heat from the media, the fenway fans, etc. Porcello could just fly under the radar, chill, and do his thing. It worked out really well for him. His ERA was 3.15, and he won 22 games. The intelligentsia even gave him the Cy Young award. What an utter failure to understand team hierarchy, order and structure that was. Last year, without Price there to protect him, Porcello struggled badly. His ERA ballooned to 4.65 and he won a meager 11 games. Chris Sale, a poor leader with bad character was unable to provide the same kind of protection that a clear and unambiguous alpha male like David Price was. Look for him to bounce back in a big way this year with David Price back healthy, and look for Severino to struggle again, starting on opening day, ahead of Sabathia, Tanaka, and another established ace in Sonny Gray. Again, that’s a massive confusion of the team’s hierarchy.
Bullpens are another great way to illustrate this point. When the Miami Marlins traded for Fernando Rodney in 2016, they were trading for one of the best closers in the game. Rodney, an established closer, who had a minuscule 0.31 ERA to that point in the season with San Diego, was above Ramos in the hierarchy of major league relief pitchers. So naturally he should have been in the top position, closing games in the 9th inning, with Ramos pitching in the 8th. Instead, Don Mattingly chose to use him as a setup man for Ramos in the 8th inning, a confusion of the bullpen’s hierarchy. The results were disastrous for both of them, and for the team as a whole. A similar situation occurred with the Royals last year after trading for Brandon Maurer. The team was using Maurer in the 8th inning and Kelvin Herrera in the 9th inning. Neither one was very effective. The team as a whole was struggling as well. Perhaps flipping the two – putting Herrera into the 8th inning and Maurer into the 9th would have produced better results? And the Yankees witnessed a similar situation last year as well, with the struggles of Dellin Betances late in the season. Betances didn’t just happen to lose his control when the Yankees moved him from the 9th inning to the 8th inning. As one of the best relief pitchers in the game of baseball, Betances needs to be a closer in order to thrive. Again, people need to be in their proper roles in order to thrive. Dellin Betances is not a setup man.
5) Confidence matters
Indeed it does. What else matters? Momentum matters. So does pressure. Basic human psychology matters. These statements are so obviously true. It says everything about the conventional wisdom in sports today that one feels the need to defend them or to prove their validity. It is such common sense, it really shouldn’t need any explanation. But these statements are extremely controversial in this day and age, with the intelligentsia’s influence being what it is.
The interesting question is this: why does the intelligentsia deny that these things matter? That these intangibles have an impact on the game. Why are they so steadfast to deny this? What on earth is going on here?
Consulting the oracle – also known as Dr. Thomas Sowell – should prove useful. In his landmark book “Intellectuals and Society” Sowell talks about how intellectuals are motivated mainly by protecting their own interests. Is there any field where this can be seen more clearly today than with the sports intelligentsia, that is the SABRmetricians and the analytics aficionados? Think about it. If you have to take into account things like human psychology, confidence, momentum, pressure, etc. then the whole enterprise of statistics becomes greatly over complicated. Here is where you see that statistics are inherently limited. If there are no intangibles – as the SABRmetricians are so insistent on having us believe – then the statistics are FAR more valuable, aren’t they? When you take into account confidence, pressure, momentum, psychology, etc. – the intangibles, that is – the statistics could very well become worth less. Note that I’m not saying “worthless”, but that the statistics would then be literally worth less. That is, less money for the intellectuals. Less money, less power, less prestige. And make no mistake about it. The intelligentsia – the SABRmetricians and the like – are motivated by one thing and one thing alone – power. Dr. Sowell has a phrase about the “vulgar pride of intellectuals.” Paging Brian Kenny. Indeed, in Brian Kenny the vulgar pride of intellectuals has found its apotheosis.
6) Situation matters
No man steps in the same river twice.
Al Leiter once said on MLB Tonight, “there’s a flow to the game that the SABRmetricians just don’t understand.” He was spot on.
7) Team matters
It’s a team game. We say that a lot here at SABR Skeptic. It’s a simple concept, but it’s one that gets lost far too often these days.
Other points of Emphasis:
1) Some have said that Will beats Skill. The Truth is that Ill always beats Will and Skill combined.
2) Some are in the New School camp. Some are in the Old School camp. Here at SABR Skeptic we like to think of ourselves as Hogwarts.
3) There’s no such thing as luck, and the only numbers that matter are the final score and the team’s win-loss record.
4) “Inside baseball”, X’s and O’s, etc. may be relevant, but are never determinative. What is determinative? Intangibles, psychology, aka “the human element.” Is it 51-49? 80-20? Hard to say. Could it be closer to 99-1? Just look what happened when Alabama’s college basketball team was forced to finish a game earlier this year with just three players. Makes you think, doesn’t it?
5) Can you prove with absolute certainty, 100 % that psychology, intangibles, the human element, etc. play a role in the outcome of sporting events? What is the standard of proof in a court of law? Is it absolute certainty? Is it 100 %? Or is it proof beyond a reasonable doubt? Certainly, these are things that front office executives should at least be taking into account when making decisions. The burden needs to be shifted back onto the intelligentsia: why don’t you want us to take into account the human element? Why are you so resistant to the idea of intangibles? It’s time to put a stop to their shakedown.
6) Sports matters. At its best, it’s a giant metaphor. A giant metaphor for overcoming adversity and achieving great things. Let’s not let the intelligentsia ruin it.
SABR Skeptic 