I'm done, at least for this year

I feel liberated.  Image via WikipediaA little over a month ago I wrote an impulsive little post describing some of my internal struggles with being a baseball fan, and especially being a fan of a particular team.  Baseball is a game designed to break your heart.  It builds you up, gives you false hope, and then crushes you.  I mean, look at what the poor Pirates fans are dealing with right now with their 10-game losing streak.  The point of the post is that investing emotionally in a team is a tough thing to do, and is usually a thing that will end up causing one anguish.  But I pledged to keep trying.

The Reds have gone 10-12 since the All-Star break, with nearly a third of those victories coming in one series against the Giants.  They've lost series to the Mets (swept!), Astros, and Cubs over the past two weeks.  It's been a rough haul.  It's only a couple of games below .500 in that stretch, but it feels much worse.

I think the one that finally broke me was the Mets.  Part of it was that I was at a work conference that week, so I had the awesomeness of what's going on in my scientific field contrasting with the misery of fandom staring me in the face all week.  And part of it was that it was the Mets, who I still haven't forgiven for 1999.  And part of it, I think, is that it was just time.  The Reds have done nothing to discourage me of this since that Mets series, despite the fun sweep of the Giants that weekend.

As it is, the Reds are 9.5 games out of first place.  There are still two very good teams in front of them.  They are, for all intents and purposes, out of the race.

I still think they are better than they've shown.  I'm going to continue to root for them to get back to .500 by the season's end.  And I will continue to try to do my little series preview bits for Red Reporter whenever I can.  But at this point, I've decided that it no longer matters to me personally if they win or lose.  I'm pulling my emotions out of it.

Instead, I'm going to watch the players I like, and enjoy some of the new faces we'll see.  I'm looking forward to seeing Sappelt play (couldn't watch the game today, though I was glad to see he picked up a hit), and I can't wait to see Devin Mesoraco next month.  There's still a lot to look forward to with this team as they build for a run in 2012.

If you haven't quite given up hope yet--good for you.  Don't let me dissuade you from that.  I'll be back with you next year.

Why fandom?

One of the things that came up in the Reds Blogger Roundtable today was a grade for the Cincinnati Reds' fans.  Generally speaking, the bloggers were not particularly complementary of ourselves.  Too impatient, too much complaining, bitching... etc, etc, etc.

That's probably all true.  I'm not sure that other fanbases are all that different, but I've seen a tremendous about of griping and complaining this year.  I've run across people who use their twitter accounts to do nothing but rant about the team, and put down anyone expresses anything positive about the team.  It really makes one wonder why they even follow the team when it clearly causes them so much anguish.

That's a question I've been asking myself lately.  Following Wayne Krivsky's firing in 2008, I sort of stepped back from the Reds for a while.  I'm always going to be a fan; the team is basically family, and being a Reds fan is a part of my identity.  But it's definitely the case that I didn't pay nearly as much attention to them on a day to day basis during the 2008 and 2009 seasons.  I'm sure I checked the score every day, and watched the few games that came onto TV.  But I was spending at least as much time being a baseball fan as I was being a Reds fan.

Last year, it probably took until July before I really started to believe that this team might win.  That's when I started following every inning again.  And this year, I went all in with an mlb.tv package, which I have used to watch at least part of almost every game this season.

It's been a lot of fun.  But it's also been mind-bogglingly frustrating at times.  Maybe I don't scream quite as loud as some others, but when the Reds are losing it can put me in a pretty negative mood.  There are other things that I enjoy doing besides watching the Reds blow it...things that are pretty much guaranteed to make me happy and put me in a good mood.  So why do I bother?

I guess the answer is that the good times, when they happen, are just so incredibly good that they keep you around during the bad times.  It's sort of like an abusive relationship that way.  But when Jay Bruce hit that home run last September, I don't think I've felt that amazing since I saw Todd Benzinger jumping up and down after he caught the ball in 1990.  At least, not from a baseball game.  That's the kind of payout you're looking for when you emotionally invest in a team.  But when you do it, you also open yourself up to anguish when they utterly and completely fail.

As I write this, the Reds are now parked 4 games behind the Brewdinals.  I'm trying to gear myself up for the second half.  So I look at the numbers, and I see that the Reds' overall performance, as measured by run differential or their component statistics, is right there with those two teams.  And I know that a four-game deficit just isn't that much when there are still two and a half months of games left.  And that the Reds have some terrific depth from which they can deal to upgrade the team.  The Reds' losses have been painful lately...but a couple of big series, and they can be right back in this.

The question is, am I ready to go all in with this team in the second half?  I honestly don't know if I can.  But I'm going to try.

My conversation with Neal Huntington and Dan Fox

Ok, that's going a bit far. I was in a room with 50 other people for the Baseball Prospectus event at PNC Park, and they answered two of my questions during the Q&A (the first and last questions of the night!). Like a typical amateur blogger, I was completely unprepared--I brought a camera but not a notebook or recording device (and I didn't use the camera much), and didn't put much thought into composing my questions to be comprehensible (and thus they almost certainly weren't).

But here, at least in spirit, is a summary of the exchange. Please do not interpret any of these things as quotes...but I think, at least, they are not misrepresentations. If anything, I sounded less coherent, and Huntington sounded more coherent. If someone out there who attended can submit any modifications or additions, please do so. My goal is for this to be as accurate as it can be. Maybe there will be some audio on a BPRadio podcast later on where we can confirm some of this.

Me: I'm a big believer in scouting (at this point, Will Carroll made fun of me for being a Reds fan--it was funny). But how do you know that a scout is a good scout? I've asked this of other people and you hear "well, some of these guys have been doing this for a long time and know so much about the game." But what is your process for evaluating a scout to find out whether they really know what they are talking about, or whether they are full of it?

Huntington: It's a good question, and one that has been asked since the advent of scouting departments. It's always going to be subjective. But for me, the way you can identify a good scout is in how he breaks down a player. In my mind, there are probably two different kinds of scouts. The first one sees a player and within a minute decides he likes a player...and then proceeds to dig deeper and find support for that decision. To me, that's more the "old school" type of scout. My preference is for the other type, who will be very methodical in breaking down a player, piece by piece, and then at the end of the process will come to a decision that (motioning with hands) all of these things are adding up and therefore he likes the player.

Me (later, after some discussion of trades and prospect valuation): So how is it that you do break down a player? I mean, I write a blog, and we've gotten to a point that we can do a reasonably good player valuation in our basement (by this, I meant, that we have some objective numbers and methodologies to use when evaluating both MLBers and prospects, like seen here). But I'm wondering if you can talk about the process that you use to take all of your information and assign a number to your player, be it dollars, wins, or whatever unit you want to use. Clearly, you've made a lot of trades lately, and therefore must have this sort of thing down.

Huntington: I don't think we really do ever assign a "number" to a player. We have a lot of internal discussions about how we value a player, but it doesn't come down to a number to the point that there's a dollar figure put on a guy. At least not yet. Dan (Fox)'s information definitely comes into play with this, however, and often helps reign in some of our more outlandish positions.

Fox: Let me just add that something along the lines of what you describe is something we're working towards. But we're not there yet.

(Let me just say, I have absolutely no doubt that Fox, at least, is well aware of the sort of trade evaluations that people are doing in the amateur circuits. In fact, it is very clear from my conversations last night that he and others like him around baseball are constantly poaching the best ideas, methods, etc, that amateur researchers come up with and putting them to good use. My feeling is that they must still do something along the lines of what we do, but that they bring in a lot of other approaches as well to come to a decision on value. ... It's worth noting, however, that when SFiercex4 broke down the Pirates trades this season, he found that they received almost dead-on even value. So, either we're doing something that other teams are doing, or at least we're doing something that is an accurate way to predicting the decisions that teams will come to.)

Some other tidbits from the conversation:

* Huntington thinks that there has clearly been a big shift towards teams putting great value on their top prospects, more so than ever before in the history of baseball. He actually thinks that teams may be over-valuing prospects at this point. (I think they are probably being valued accurately, for the most part, but this is the first time this has happened in baseball history and so it is jarring).

* He also thinks that the competitive balance this year is disappointing. He continues to think that they can succeed, but it's going to be more of a challenge that it would have been 5 years ago. A salary cap would help, he thinks.

* Dan Fox stated that the ultimate goal in baseball analysis, data collection-wise, will be to have a complete digital record of a ballgame: tracking the ball and player position in real time. And we're almost there, as evidenced by the "GPS" software demo we all saw videos of earlier this summer. The question then will be how to mine it; that's where the next great advances in baseball statistics will come from. I hope the public will have access to those raw data...if nothing else, it's in baseball's best interest to let us do that research.

* The Pirates have a no-touch policy for the first six months a player is in the organization. After that time, they may try minor tweaks, but rarely will make huge changes to a player. There was lots of discussion of Tim Alderson in this regard.

----

As for me, it was a really fantastic evening. I got to meet and interact with a lot of folks that I've corresponded with and/or read over the years, including Dan Fox, Eric Seidman (chatted with him most of the game that followed the Q&A session--terrific guy), Will Carroll, Brian Cartwright, and, of course, the newly minted Pizza Cutter, Ph.D. Wonderful experience.

Furthermore, let me say that Neal Huntington is an incredibly impressive person. I'm sure most GM's are when you meet them--I remember Chad having a similar impression of Wayne Krivsky when they met for an interview early in Krivsky's tenure. But he seems like a very direct, no-nonsense person who had a very clear idea of how he felt was the best way to get his organization back on a winning path. It helps, I'm sure, that I agree with him. He talked a lot about the joint role of scouts vs. stats, and about making sure that the process is right, even if mistakes are occasionally made....something I've been talking about a fair bit of late. This kind of venue is precisely the sort of experience that could make a Pirates fan out of someone. I doubt I'll ever quit the Reds, but I sure like the Pirates front office.

I'll add some photos later on, though I didn't take photos of people--didn't want to be the Paparazzi.

Update: Here's Shawn Hoffman's recap of the event. For the record, Brian, I never ridiculed the Pirates' record. :)

If anyone else sees an event recap, please let me know--I'd like to link it.

More on judging deals at the time they are made

Fantastic interview with Chris Antonetti that talks a lot about how the Indians evaluated risk prior to inking Travis Hafner. It's very relevant to my last post about problems with post-hoc analyses. Here's an excerpt:

So then, you must feel perfectly good about that whole process.

Yeah. There are obviously different degrees of outcomes in any decision you make, and I think what we try to look through and look back on the process, and how complete and how effective the process was, irrespective of the outcome. You could have a very good process and still bad outcomes. I'm not saying that's necessarily the case in Travis' case - again, our expectation and our belief is that he's gonna come back and with his physical issues behind him will go back to being a very, very productive major league hitter.

Well ... come on, I think you could say that it has not worked out at least on the medical side the way you hoped it would.

Oh, certainly, so far, that's correct, yeah.

So then, would it be fair to say that, with the management team currently in place, if faced with the exact same set of circumstances again, you go ahead and sign that same contract?

With the information we had at that point? Yeah. Yep. I think that's fair to say.

So from the day you signed the contract until now, a season and a half later, realistically, the contract that that player could command on the market has gone down precipitously, and yet you would look back at that and say, "There's nothing about that experience that would make us change our process at all."

With the information we had at point, no. Yes, I would say that. I would say that's correct. We are comfortable with the process we had to arrive at that decision.

I also thought that this last bit was an interesting comment.

But you've concluded that the process was as good as you thought it was?

And as good as we could have done with the information we had at that point. I think you can get into bigger questions about team building, about committing significant dollars in a market our size to a player at that end of the defensive spectrum. That's a different strategic question than what we thought of the process arriving at the decision and the risk associated with signing Travis to a long-term deal.

Interesting point about market size & player type. I guess you can make the argument that a guy at the far right of the defensive spectrum (1B or DH) is riskier simply because all of his eggs are in one basket. A shortstop might decline offensively, but still provide defensive value. If a 1B/DH doesn't hit, they have no value. That said, offensive projections are more reliable than defensive projections, so that might counter things a bit. Neat idea, anyway.

FWIW, I still think the Reds need to buy out Votto ASAP while he can still be signed for a massively below-market contract. :)

Hat tip to Tango.

Why do we bother trying to judge trades as they happen?

There's a tendency in the media and among fans to evaluate trades after the fact. You wait a few years, see which teams win out, and then see which team got the most value.

On the other hand, many of us also like to try to judge a trade as it happens. Everyone does this, some using a qualitative approach and others using a quantitative approach (e.g. my analysis of the Rolen trade). Yet some would say that we shouldn't evaluate a trade until after the fact, as there's just too much uncertainty in trying to forecast the future--and what matters are results, right?

I certainly agree that there are big error bars around quantitative trade analyses. But I still think there's a lot of merit in trying to judge trades as they happen, because it helps us recognize quality moves by GM's--regardless of the eventual outcome. You can make what, by all information available, is a great trade at the time, only to have some bad luck (injuries, etc) derail it in a post-hoc analysis. I still think we should recognize that the GM made a smart move, even if it falls apart later.

Paul DePodesta wrote a great article about this that I've been meaning to link to for a long time. Here's an excerpt:

As tough as a good process/bad outcome combination is, nothing compares to the bottom left: bad process/good outcome. This is the wolf in sheep's clothing that allows for one-time success but almost always cripples any chance of sustained success - the player hitting on 17 and getting a four. Here's the rub: it's incredibly difficult to look in the mirror after a victory, any victory, and admit that you were lucky. If you fail to make that admission, however, the bad process will continue and the good outcome that occurred once will elude you in the future. Quite frankly, this is one of the things that makes Billy Beane as good as he is. He is quick to notice good luck embedded in a good outcome, and he refuses to pat himself on the back for it.