Remember the name Vince Gennaro. Actually, it’s an easy name to remember if you’re a fan of the Bruce Willis “Die Hard” series of films because Holly Gennaro is the Willis character’s ex-wife. The name came readily to mind the other day.
Vince Gennaro is not related to Holly or Bruce Willis. Actually, I didn’t ask Vince if he is related to Willis, but that really doesn’t matter. What matters is the breakthrough Vince Gennaro made in my metrics thinking.
As anybody who reads this column knows, I am not a fan of the new-fangled metrics that have infested baseball. “It’s well documented, Murray. That’s well documented,” Gennaro said when we spoke on the telephone last Thursday.
Gennaro was the third official of SABR (Society for American Baseball Research) whom I tried to contact last week when I set out to write this column about pitching victories and runs batted in. Both traditional statistics have been downgraded in the statistical community, and I wanted to find out why.
In the course of my quest, I found Gennaro, SABR’s president, who is a most amiable and reasonable fellow, and in turn I was introduced to a different statistic, one that is fan friendly – simple to compute, unlike many of the new metrics – and makes eminently more sense, in my opinion, than a lot of statistical stuff that is thrown at us today. It doesn’t have a name, as far as I know, which already makes it more palatable than most of the acronyms the statistical game has spawned.
“If you look at runs batted in as a percentage of r.b.i. opportunities I think it’s a much more meaningful stat,” Gennaro said. “If you’re on a team that just puts runner on base ahead of you, how many runners were on bases in scoring position and how many did you drive in? You’re going to get guys who knock in runs because they get opportunities and you’re going to get guys who get opportunities but don’t knock in runs.”
When I thought about the idea, it made sense. Batting average, after all, is based on the percentage of times a batter bats and gets hits. The same could be done for the number of times a batter bats with runner on base and the number of times he drives in runs.
However, since a batter can’t be expected to drive in a runner from first base every time he comes to bat with a runner at first, a more relevant picture could be drawn based on runners in scoring position. It seems to me such a percentage or average, if presented on a daily or weekly frequency, could gain currency in baseball or even daily publications.
Where can this nameless statistic be found, I asked Gennaro?
“It’s not something I see on statistical sites,” he said, “but I know M.L.B. teams are constantly looking at that statistic. I’ve had teams tell me, ‘This guy has 86 runs batted in going into September but he’s actually 12th or 15th in terms of converting r.b.i. opportunities into r.b.i.s because he’s had so many chances.’
“I’m surprised that I haven’t come across it as a stat on one of the statistical web sites, although perhaps I haven’t looked hard enough for it.”
I haven’t found it either, but the chart at the end of this column shows how it would work.
Will the r.b.i. disappear? It has been around officially for 97 years and very likely will be part of the game as long as it is played. It probably has a better chance of surviving than the “win” statistic for pitchers.
The use and the structure of the pitching staff have changed so drastically in the last several decades that it would not be surprising if wins were awarded differently in coming years.
Pitchers not only don’t finish what they start, but many don’t make it through five innings, which the rules require for a starter to get credit for a win. In some instances, credit for a win is left to the discretion of the official scorer, and as more and more use is made of relievers that fellow may be called on more often to declare the winner.
In the meantime, the metrics mob has questioned the status of starters in relation to wins and losses.
“I simply think we’ve added other pieces of information to assessing a pitcher when it comes to wins and losses,” Gennaro said. “I’m not in the camp, as some are, who says wins and losses are irrelevant. But they’re not painting the whole picture, or as much of the picture as we used to think they painted.”
Gennaro cited Felix Hernandez’s 2010 performance as the trigger point for the revised thinking about pitching performances. That year Hernandez won the American League Cy Young award with a 13-12 won-lost record, 2.27 earned run average and 237 strikeouts in 249 2/3 innings.
“That, to me, was a breakthrough year,” Gennaro said, “where a guy with a near .500 record showed that he was the best pitcher in the American League and I would certainly have agreed with that. I think we’re filling out the score sheet with a lot more stats than we used to and I think it diminishes the over-all importance of wins but it’s still meaningful and something you have to look at.”
What’s replacing wins?
“We have all the other stats,” Gennaro said. “We look at strikeouts more, strikeouts to walks ratio. Not that those are new stats, but those are things that are getting more attention. We try to measure runs pitchers given up independent of the defense. That is tough to do, but there are metrics out there that try to do that as well.
“I value things like innings pitched. I like the guy who delivers the innings and is a workhorse even if his record and his performance is down a tick. For instance, I couldn’t see giving Kershaw the award last year with 149 innings pitched.
“This is a debate that goes on in the analytic community. They say how much better does a guy have to be than the rest of the world. I just couldn’t justify it. I couldn’t justify Zach Britton, a guy who threw 65 innings. If you’re in the top 10 in e.r.a. each year, that’s maybe what a 20-game winner was 25 years ago when it was more common place.
“If a guy wins 20 games in multiple years in this era starting every fifth game, that’s going to be an elite pitcher. He’s not going to get 20 wins without great stats, but my point is you’re not going to get 20 wins without great stats, especially if you’re not pitching for a good team.”
I asked Gennaro if any other traditional statistics were losing impact.
“I think it’s reasonable to say a lot of people have moved away from pure batting average and I think they have moved toward on-base percentage.
“People believe walks are undervalued. I think that played a big part in Tim Raines getting into the Hall of Fame.”
Of course, it took the voters the maximum 10 years to embrace all of the walks Raines drew. Some of us still haven’t embraced them, but one more question for Gennaro. What does he think of WAR, which is probably the best known of the new metrics, even though few people have the slightest idea of how to compute it?
“Personally,” Gennaro said, “I’m not a huge fan of WAR. I think it grossly oversimplifies things. If somebody feels compelled to create one bottom-line stat, it’s not WAR. WAR gets a lot of credit. I don’t ignore it, but I don’t put too much stock in it.”
“WAR,” he added, “has lots of relevance if you’re going to spend $80 million on a contract; it offers value.”
Steve Hirdt has different views of the new metrics that others advocate. That’s because Hirdt is executive vice president of Elias Sports Bureau, which is the official statistician for M.L.B. and doesn’t engage in nouveau metrics.
I spoke with Hirdt specifically about pitching wins and r.b.i., asking him if he thought either was in decline.
“For those two in particular,” he said, “maybe it’s the currency I have built into my entire life, which is baseball statistics, but I would never discard anything as worthless. Sometimes anybody who has watched baseball knows the rules dictate that in the manner a pitcher is declared the winning pitcher may not seem fair.
“But over time I think the accumulation of wins does say something. If you had to say what better illustrates a great pitchers, wins or e.r.a., on balance I might say e.r.a., but I wouldn’t say the winning pitcher is without merit, especially if there is some intergenerational comparison being made. Back in the day that was regarded as the primary statistic.”
People, whether they be statisticians or just plain fans, can think what they want, Hirdt said.
“It doesn’t bother me that much,” he explained, “because I came to peace long ago with the fact that different folks gravitate to different ideas. That has happened in baseball as well. I just don’t like people saying ‘I don’t like your ideas. Only my ideas are right.’ I don’t like people on either side of the divide who express that opinion. I remember someone saying everyone is entitled to their ideas just not to their own set of facts.”
Whether or not he had this in mind, I have come across many members of the metrics mob who insist their way is the right way and others are wrong.
On the subject of r.b.i., Hirdt said, “I don’t see why r.b.i.’s are being devalued in the minds of some people. Yes, there have always been hitters who hit fourth. You wouldn’t expect a leadoff hitter to have as many r.b.i.’s. If a team is a poor scoring team you don’t expect any hitter to be a big r.b.i. guy.
“All of those things are understood. It’s not like they’re being discovered for the first time. Having said that, I’m used to dealing with the frailties that exist in each category. Maybe it’s easier for someone like me who’s dealt with it for years to come to grips with those frailties or know how to work around them than the more casual fan. I’m not criticizing anyone.”
Speaking generally about statistics old and new, Hirdt said, “Even if you were to create a new statistic, for argument’s sake, that were to more accurately reflect a player’s worth than a traditional statistic, even if that were true, the incremental increase would be small. Would it be worth re-educating an entire population? It’s not like the traditional statistics measure players according to their height or how good looking they are. It’s based on their performance.”
FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: A NEW RBI METRIC
This is not original with me, but it is a different way of determining r.b.i. leaders based on number of runners in scoring position a player drives in. The percentage in column highlighted in yellow determines the rankings. All statistics are from the 2016 season.
