“Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.” — William James (again)

Eric Tassone writes:

So, here’s a Bill James profile from late-ish 2014 that I’d missed until now. It’s baseball focused, which was nice — so many recent articles about him are non-baseball stuff. Here’s an extended excerpt of a part I found refreshing, though it’s probably just that my expectations have gotten pretty low of late w/r/t articles about him. What is going on in this passage? … an evolving maturity for him? … merely exchanging one set of biases for another?

Anyway, surprisingly I enjoyed the article. I hope you enjoy it too. Here’s an excerpt:

But [James] wonders if the generation of baseball fans he inspired have expanded their skepticism to the point where it has crowded out other things like wonder and tolerance and a healthy understanding of our own limited understanding.

Right now, Bill James thinks this sort of arrogance can be dangerous in the sabermetric community. There is more baseball data available now than ever before, and the data grows exponentially. “Understanding cannot keep up with the data,” he says. “It will take many years before we fully understand, say, some of the effects of PITCHf/x (which charts every pitch thrown). It’s important not to skip steps.”

He groans whenever he hears people discount leadership or team chemistry or heart because they cannot find such things in the data. He has done this himself in the past … and regrets it.

“I have to take my share of responsibility for promoting skepticism about things that I didn’t understand as well as I might have,” he says. “What I would say NOW is that skepticism should be directed at things that are actually untrue rather than things that are difficult to measure.

“Leadership is one player having an effect on his teammates. There is nothing about that that should invite skepticism. People have an effect on one another in every area of life. … We all affect another’s work. You just can’t really measure that in an individual-accounting framework.”

The young Bill James rather famously wrote that he could not find any evidence that certain types of players could consistently hit better in the clutch – he still has not found that evidence. But unlike his younger self, he will not dismiss the idea of clutch hitting. He has been a consultant for the Red Sox for more than a decade, and he has watched David Ortiz deliver so many big hits in so many big moments, and he finds himself unwilling to deny that Big Papi does have an ability in those situations others don’t have. He wrote an essay with this thought in mind, suggesting that just because we have not found the evidence is not a convincing argument that the evidence does not exist.

“I think I had limited understanding of these issues and wrote about them — little understanding and too-strong opinions,” he says. “And I think I damaged the discussion in some ways when I did this. … these sorts of effects (leadership and clutch-hitting and how players interact) CAN be studied. You just need to approach the question itself, rather than trying to back into it beginning with the answer.”

I responded: Interesting . . . but I wonder if part of this is that James is such an insider now that he’s buying into all the insider tropes.

Tassone replies:

Yep, exactly . . . especially since one is about his guy, Ortiz!

8 thoughts on ““Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.” — William James (again)

  1. So, maybe because we do not understand what is going on with Bill James we are entitled to be skeptical about the nature of any seeming change.
    Let’s withhold judgment, pay attention, and see what happens. Whatever is going on is not sufficiently important as to require us to make up our minds.

  2. I might be with Bill James here. My view is that understanding comes from reconciling what one learns from large-n statistical analysis with thickly observed case studies. If you are persuaded you see something in the cases that doesn’t show up in bigger data sets with standardized variables, your situation is not so different from what it would be if you saw something statistically but couldn’t see it in the cases. This is especially true if you think “understanding” means identifying the mechanisms that cause outcomes to occur.

    Of course, if I thought I saw something in the cases (David Ortiz) but, even after many attempts and with lots of data to work with, I couldn’t get any statistical confirmation, I’d be pretty skeptical of generalizing to other Papis.

  3. “The young Bill James rather famously wrote that he could not find any evidence that certain types of players could consistently hit better in the clutch – he still has not found that evidence.”

    But Bill James argued that Craig Biggio was strikingly bad in the clutch. Or at least he was bad in the playoffs:

    http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2008/02/the_epic_of_craig_biggio.html

    James theory was that Biggio tore up bad pitchers, but didn’t see many during the postseason.

    I don’t find it that implausible that David Ortiz might be a fat guy of huge talents who is too lazy to try hard all the time.

    • The sports stats argument against clutch performance (hitting, or pitching, or shooting in basketball, or quarterbacking…) has never been that players have or haven’t been clutch, but that you can’t know going forward whether or not someone will continue to be clutch. When James wrote that article, Biggio had been retired for months. It’s indisputable that he had a bad clutch record; it’s indisputable that Ortiz has a good clutch record. But someone would have to, right? The question of clutch as a skill is, can you point to a particular player right now and say this guy is going to do better than he usual does in the clutch going forward? James seems to think that maybe you can with Ortiz, but the general result across a bunch of players in a bunch of sports is that they’ll perform just as well as they do in non-clutch situations. Which is to say, there has been little support for the idea of special/different clutch performance.

      • But maybe there are players of mediocre talents who are hyper-competitive in nonclutch situations (e.g., Biggio) and players of supreme talents who are lazy in nonclutch situations (e.g., Ortiz)?

        Part of the problem is that we think that calling somebody a “clutch hitter” is praise for their moral character, but it’s really saying they are a screwoff who can’t be bothered to play up to his full potential except in big moments.

        • Well, clutch is relative. Lots of people consider Michael Jordan to be clutch, and he wasn’t exactly dogging it for the first three quarters. But it does have some of the ‘why not give 110% all the time?’ vibe.

          If you had two clutch players, one of which was talented but lazy and another who was less talented but more driven by big moments, I don’t think the numbers alone could differentiate them – they would both perform ok most of the time but better in the clutch (by definition). Perhaps you could point to other data, like James noting that Biggio had huge splits by pitcher quality – presumably a more talented player, all things being equal, would hit better against good pitchers. People may have already looked for this, I’m not super familiar with sabermetrics specifically.

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