In defending Jimmy Rollins’ MVP election Tuesday, Bill Conlin of the Philly Daily News took on “Baseball Abstract” guru Bill James re Rollins’ fielding on Comcast SportsNet’s “Daily News Live,” Tuesday, then expanded his argument in today’s paper.
Background: James is arguably the most important sportswriter ever (granted that’s not saying much, but who else has actually changed the way a sport is played?), and to me the most deserving Hall of Famer, players included, not currently in Cooperstown. He has been a huge influence on the way I write and think, and baseball would be better if more people could say that.
Conlin is also a sizable figure (no pun, for anyone who’s ever seen him) in my “formative years.” I was as big a Phillies fan as you could be 20-25 years ago, and Conlin, then the Daily News’ Phils’ beat writer, was our guy in the press box, the clubhouse, the airplane. He had space and time to pontificate (the Daily News was an afternoon paper then) and boy, did he use it. He’s on the short list of guys who made me want to be a sportswriter.
At his best Conlin is a brilliant eccentric. His worst is willful ignorance masquarading as inside-baseball savvy.
In 1975 James published a statistic he had developed which measured the number of plays a fielder made per game. He called it Range Factor.
Couldn’t have been simpler: Range Factor was chances (assists plus putouts) divided by games played. RF acknowledged and quantified an obvious, although then not widely understood, truth:
1. The difference between major-league players in how successfully they field balls they can get to is tiny (almost every big-league fielding percentage is between .950 and 1.000).
2. The difference between major-league players in the number of balls they can get to is frequently huge.
3. Understanding fielding without trying to measure how many balls fielders can get to is impossible.
Range Factor has been modified of late to divided by-defensive-inning instead of by-games-played. The new way is obviously more accurate on the margins (consider a late-inning defensive replacement who gets a game-played for only an inning or two). The by-inning data simply wasn’t available in 1975.
Conlin, and most observers, consider Rollins a Gold Glove shortstop, and that’s certainly what pushed him past Matt Holiday, a slugging leftfielder, in the MVP voting.
Range Factor has always considered Rollins average or a little above. It ranked him 15th among ML shortstops this season.
Conlin of course concluded from this that there’s something wrong with RF and with James, even suggesting (bad-jokingly, but still) that James’ electrocution wouldn’t be a bad idea.
On TV he described RF as chances “times something divided by something.” In the paper, he wrote that, “Apparently, James decided that a Range Factor based on successful chances times nine innings, divided by the number of defensive innings played is more important than the result - for example, a friggin’ out.”
This makes precisely the same sense as deriding batting average by calling it less “important than the result - for example, a friggin’ hit.”
On “Daily News Live,” Conlin smarmily (and ridiculously) suggested that it was no coincidence that RF ranked Red Sox 1B Kevin Youkilis best at his position this year, since James works as a consultant for the Sox.
That’s right, One-Chair, James made up a stat to make Kevin Youkilis look good, and he did it before Youkilis was born. Nothing gets by you, big fella.
(By the way, the Red Sox hired James four years ago - and have won two World Series since. The second-most James-influenced team, the Oakland A’s, is the most successful small-market club of the past decade. What a crackpot this guy is.)
Anyway, the simplest, 1975 version of RF (plays made divided by games) or the more complicated subsequent ones tell you the same thing about Rollins that every other serious fielding metric I’m aware of - Fielding Runs Above Average, Zone Rating, Plus/Minus - does year after year: Rollins is average or a little above, for his position, at the fielder’s job, which is turning balls hit into play into friggin’ outs.
Later in the piece in today’s paper, Conlin writes that many baseball people “exhorted [Rollins] during his minor league and early years to take more of a smallball approach.”
He doesn’t mention that Conlin himself was one of those people and that, as this MVP award proves, they were wrong.
I remember hearing Conlin on WIP, when Mike Schmidt retired, defending his claim that Schmidt was one of the top 10 players in baseball history by saying that Bill James agreed with him.
That actually isn’t quite true. James has Schmidt in the second 10, somewhere from 13th-to-18th by peak or career value. Regardless, it’s interesting that Conlin didn’t exactly want James electrocuted when he could use him to buttress an argument.
I wouldn’t have voted for Jimmy Rollins for MVP, but I don’t have a problem with him winning it.
Ignorance I have a big problem with. Especially willful ignorance by someone capable of much more.
