This isn’t totally a response to the storm John Sickels unleashed, nor is it a response to the also-not-a-response Jeff posted last week. It’s its own thing that I’ve been laboring over for about a week now, and I’m still not sure I have a point.

My position in the M’s blogosphere has always been one that felt slightly unusual, in that I’ve never specialized in a “hard science”. The USSM crew has Derek, who is a programmer, and Dave, who works in economics. Over at Lookout Landing, I know Jeff, Matthew, and Graham have all done work in the sciences or math[s], or frequently both. I’m the liberal arts guy. I study creative writing (this is not a sample) and English/Comparative Literature. Still, I feel obligated to point out now and then, out of whatever motivation, that my line of work is not lacking its own depth despite being a little more touchy-feely in the subject matter.

Here’s an example. I’m reading The Divine Comedy for a class right now. Each Canto is about four or five pages long. The pages are only thirty-five lines long or so, on average. After I transfer the end notes to the actual text, about twenty-five minutes have passed (longer with something denser like Purgatorio XXX). Reading and making my own commentary will take about ten to fifteen minutes on top of that. I am spending ten or more minutes on each page, and am no doubt capable of doing more. And we only read a third of the whole Comedy. There’s a class taught here that is a yearlong venture that goes over two Cantos per session and the instructor still wishes she has more time for Paradiso by the end.

Is it worthwhile? As anything else, that depends on each individual. I think it’s worthwhile, as I’m reading St. Augustine, to note that when he refers to “the swarm of unpurified notions flying about there”, he’s referencing a scene early on in The Aeneid where the Trojan refugees encounter a pack of harpies. What that signals to a reader familiar with these texts is not insignificant. That the death of Pallas and Aeneas’ response to it later in The Aeneid nods to both the earlier Patroklos/Achilles dichotomy and Emperor Augustus’ relationship to his nephew Marcellus is deserving of further exploration. When Achilles, raging about the battlefield in front of Ilium, goes through spear-fodder that happens to share names with major figures in Trojan history, it is hardly coincidental. And that’s just classical literature. I can, and have, spoken for hours about Wilfred Owen’s manipulation of rhyme and classical tropes, the psychology operating behind Jean Toomer’s vignettes, or Rilke’s subtle Buddhist influences, or how time and memory are at odds with one another in W.G. Sebald’s work. I’ve taught discussion sections about poetic metrics basically on my own.

Some physical science major just had their eyes glaze over reading that, I’m certain. That’s okay too, as I can get the same way in their field. This is not entirely representative of the whole, in the same way I wouldn’t berate science as a whole for a few chumps coming up with a study in which academics determine what emotion Mona Lisa is feeling as she smiles, and spending a few mill in the process. I can speak from my own background, and while I’ve been here, I’ve heard of prized students writing master’s theses on Kant’s apostrophe usage or the citation styles of obscure medieval theologians. Thus, when Sickels complains about having to study the weaving in the Netherlands in the 19th century as part of his work in a history PhD, I can sympathize. I have little interest in being the n-th person to try to go toe-to-toe with the Old Bard and firmly believe that after a certain point, academic pursuits risk turning into insular, self-congratulatory wankery, the likes of which nobody listens, and nobody should. It would be a waste of attention, to most of us at least, but someone is always out there to be interested in it.

Have we reached the point where baseball has been overscrutinized in such a way? I can see why some might think so because of the sheer number of research projects going on, attempting to give a tangible meaning and value to what we either infer or have managed to overlook to this point. It can be numbing at times. Jeff talked about clicking around and having hours go by and ultimately realizing that he still isn’t ready to shake the hands of some of these folks. And he has a far stronger scientific than I can boast, having not done calculations in anything more than fits since graduating from high school.

But this is the reality of our situation. The more intimately you become aware of your field, the more you realize how little you actually know about it. Or, to go back to the old trope, the wisest among us realize how limited our knowledge truly is. I can’t walk through stacks on campus without feeling like I’m going to suffocate. To be surrounded by thousands of years of human knowledge, parsed and reassembled, is daunting. To realize how quickly it accumulates is even more humbling.

Sickels, who I would like to point out is trying to do all the work BA does in prospecting as a one-man operation, is in a fairly unique position, and so am I. We can see the tides rising from a vantage point that’s unlikely to hear waves any time soon. We can opt out, if we so choose, because Pitch F/X is not coming to Pulaski or Kannapolis any time soon. We stick to methods or storylines that are familiar to us and go about our work in that manner, though the security of this feels as though it is continually diminishing.

However, to claim that we would somehow sap the life out of something by scrutinizing it a bit more, I think is a false positive. That I know Ryan Langerhans to be a middling player does not take the joy out of his walk-off home runs last season. I can hold those two thoughts in my head without my life becoming a shambles. My abrupt realization Wednesday afternoon that the German language could sound so very sweet when spoken by the very attractive brunette sitting across from me in the cafeteria was not diminished by the pervasive existential notion that we’re all just a bunch of meat robots stumbling about hoping to yield replacements before we die. Or, going back to my earlier example, you can read The Divine Comedy and appreciate it for its dense historical, political, and cultural framework, or you can enjoy it for its lyricism and imagination without even knowing what terza rima is. One does not exclude the other.

The issue at its core is one of perception. Some of those who are on the fringe of the analytical movement in baseball believe that by infringing on how we have understood the game in the past, we are also beginning to eat away at what allowed us to appreciate it. Instead of “enjoying a game”, we’re exhausting our hours in analysis only to get better approximations to things we hopefully had an some intuitive grasp on in the first place.

My answer to this is the same as you’ll find elsewhere from people I respect. The best way to go about looking at it is from as many perspectives as possible. By using more testing methods and either confirming a hypothesis to be true or denying with your results, you eventually come to a better understanding of the situation. Additionally, as these methods are proven to be acceptably accurate, they get integrated into the whole as part of the natural course of things, meaning the average, non-math genius doesn’t have to labor for hours to arrive at a conclusion they can back. I used to spend a day or so every off-season calculating Runs Created and RC/27 for minor leaguers on a TI-83 calculator. Now, you can get wOBA daily for every full-season minor leaguer, because a few guys were able to export the box score data to their databases and worked the programming magic from there. In both cases, you can accept the fact that the larger numbers in that case are better without knowing all the weights and processes involved in bringing those about.

It’s true that you can end up at some relative dead ends in analysis if you go about it the wrong way. We’ve all seen it happen. But the failures, or shortcomings, of a few analysts certainly shouldn’t make us abandon the venture entirely. I think it’s exciting, personally, that we’ve gone from valuing on-base percentage and slugging in the early part of the decade while punting glovework to seeing defense enter another renaissance as something we can really benefit from. What ends up being focused on or undervalued may be different at one time or another, but the overall trend is positive.

Suffice to say, I’m for it. I like to be able to figure things out to the point where what I’m doing is a bit more than just casting whatever bones I find into the fire and reading patterns where they split, which can be what predicting players based off of low minors stats is like. I was one of the first few to be going after Venezuelan stats, back in an era when you couldn’t really get Arizona League box scores from one week to the next. Back in the day, players wouldn’t even know they were drafted unless they were called by the teams themselves. Now we have about ten different outlets that can get you the full list of the ~1500 or so players picked each year. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but then again, I don’t feel myself to be competing with the giants of sabremetrics, any more than they seem to be intimidated by the efforts of someone in my position trying to figure out what does or doesn’t make a better minor league player. We’re both trying to get to a better understanding with the tools we have available to us.

If you’re going to build up your reputation on a certain kind of analysis in this field, you’re inevitably going to have to be able to put new statistics to use. This does not, however, destroy or diminish the sheer number of factors going into everything we see happening. You can choose instead to go at it from the traditional coaching perspective, getting to know the players strengths and weaknesses from watching how they approach their at-bats or fielding or by getting to know them as a person and what’s going on in their lives from one season to the next. Or you could go further in that direction and try to examine players from their relative backgrounds and the resources available to them. Or you could talk up the increasing parity of international and domestic players now that they have entertainer’s, and not seasonal worker’s visas, and figure out how much was lost by the delays in getting that in place. Or you could bring up the two Indian pitchers now with the Pirates, and what that will mean for the game in their homeland. Or you could debate the ethical implications in baseball’s development in Cambodia.

Or you could just kick back, pop open a cold one and work from there. It just depends on what your interests are, but it would be foolish to argue over which one of us is having a better time doing it.

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