Paul M said:I have to confess I am no longer intimately familiar with the day-to-day decisions of the Sox. Is Farrell known to have his favorites and less confidence in certain guys? Seems like some of the moves are not optimal from a pure empircal perspective and was wondering what the folks that have seen Farrell from Day One can offer. I realize neither Nava nor Gomes are true everyday players, but just don't get the Gomes thing. I'm sure it's possible I'm missing something but I am not a big fan of the speculative play at this stage.
Smas addressed the rotating everyone in aspect, but I thought it was worth adding that Nava is basically an everyday player now. Yes he's in platoons, but he's in like a couple of platoons (it's like 4-5 guys rotating through 3 positions in a way): he appeared in 134 regular season games with 536 PAs, behind only Pedroia (724), Ellsbury (636), Ortiz (600) and Napoli (578) and just more than Victorino (532). It's like platoon 2.0--interesting stuff.
PedroKsBambino said:
Thanks---had not seen their new (or maybe 'newer' just to me!) split data.
Looking at same, Gomes is also better against FB pitchers such as Verlander than Nava is; Nava basically gets better as GB become more prevalent.
The interplay of 'handedness' splits and these other pitcher splits (power vs finesse, gb/fb, etc) seems like the kind of thing teams would have done deep study on by this point. How much signal vs noise they find I have no idea given sample size and other issues, but a good reminder there's a lot of data out there and we can be pretty confident (imo) that Sox and Farrell have access to it, and also that Farrell is not necessarily going to share with us all of it.
That the team has super secret data that is not publicly available is a fact; they've made reference to this fact. Whether or not this data was a factor in some of the confusing personnel choices is a different question.
The v. power pitcher stuff is new to me and interesting. What is clear from things they've said and from currents in the "analytics community" is that people are looking for ways to think about how hitters/certain-types-of-swings do versus pitchers/certain-types-of-makeup and vice verse. The idea is that player v. player data is really, really small sample size and, as the sample gets bigger, it's over a larger period of time making it irrelevant, so the data could very well not just be probative but is just as likely to be misleading. What if's just randomness and the guy who looks crappy against pitcher X would be good given more shots, he just got unlucky? So the idea is if you can think in terms of "types" you can increase the sample size.
That's the theory anyway. I have no real sense of how well it works, or how they test their measures, and this is complicated by the fact that they aren't publicly available. But everyone once in awhile you'll hear Farrell talking about how he pinch hit a guy because he thought that the guy's swing plane would work well against the type of stuff the pitcher used. So that's out there. But we don't know when it's in play unless Farrell says so after the fact.
joe dokes said:
I realize that this might be the logical extension of what I said. And I dont intend it prevent what usually is enlightening discussion. The best I can say is that in these issues there's *always* some variable we don't know. I tend to start from the position that its large enough to tip the balance in favor of the manager's decision, but there are times (Villareal is the obvious example), that the existence of a large enough "unknown" is pretty improbable.
Here (and obviously YMMV), I see enough of both sides in the Gomes/Nava decsion that it doesn't counter-balance the benefit of the doubt that I give to Farrell.
Its funny about baseball, do intelligent football fans as commited to the Patriots as the posters here are to the Sox debate how Belichick maneuvers the 45-53rd roster spots?
MentalDisabldLst said:
Re: Gomes/Nava, fair enough. I do think it's a reasonably close call, especially if Nava is starting Game 4 without a doubt.
As to baseball vs football, first off, I think the ratio of "information fans have" to "information managers/insiders have" is much more in fans' favor for baseball relative to football. At-bats are discrete events with very measurable, countable outcomes. Football plays have myriad things going on and interrelationships that require an insider's careful study. Injuries both hidden and obvious make a much greater impact in a full-contact, violent sport than in "a 19th-century pastoral game". Secondly, the answer to your question is yes - you should check out the BBTL forum here, people will debate the last few groups of reserves (particularly around the time the preseason ends and the season's starting roster is initially set). BB making a mockery of Ross Ventrone's career a few years ago got quite a bit of attention. But thirdly, Bill Belichick has such an incredibly deep respect from every Patriots fan that if he does something that seems completely nonsensical, an overwhelming percentage of Pats fans will give him the benefit of the doubt (whereas the same might not be true for, say, Norv Turner), and will look for angles or possible justifications that make sense of Belichick's decision. Reason #1 helps him out there, too.
To add to what MDL said, definitely. There is a bit of a difference, though, in the acceptance that Belichick has a lot more idea what's going on and, as MDL indicates, baseball is more accessible than football which most of us enjoy but apprehend some small fraction of what is actually going on. Once you filter the ongoing stupid fight over whether or not people blindly trust Belichick, to take a page from ShelterDog's stated approach, we start with the assumption that while Belichick is not infallible, there is reason to believe that he has at least what he believes to be a strong football reason for what he does. Those who take that approach turn it into a neat kind of research puzzle--like, we can't figure out why Blount is on the team/gets carries, but instead of just complaining, it's kinda fun to try to figure it out.
One other thing to add to what MDL said: I wonder if the increased use of proprietary stats may alienate baseball fans in much greater ways than the more limited use of SABR has alienated some already. It's one thing to use more complicated statistics that annoy some people. But baseball is an ostensibly very accessible game and much of its popularity may be owed to discussions like this manager's thread. The more we learn that the manager is using stuff that we have no access to, and we may not even know how they are looking at players conceptually--stuff much more advanced than lefty v. righty--I wonder if the game might become more estranged from fans, or vice versa.
RedOctober3829 said:Salty is starting not Ross.
I've been waiting all day for this, ever since I noticed that the article said he would be open to starting Ross but never said he was starting Ross, and the hypothetical evolved into a fact on the board.