Who Actually Won the Moneyball Revolution?

Hagios

New Member
Dec 15, 2007
672
Good article on slate.com, not new to anyone here but still worth reading just to see how arrogant the sabermetrics community used to be.

When thinking back on mistakes he’s made, Neyer recalls a long-ago postseason game in which “Tim McCarver was raving about pitch framing and how important it is.” McCarver, who caught in the major leagues for 21 seasons before becoming an announcer, talked at great length about how a catcher could receive the ball in such a way—catching the ball in front of his body, making sure not to jerk his glove—as to influence an umpire’s ball and strike calls. Neyer says he “wrote a typically arrogant column mocking the notion that major-league umpires could be fooled by a catcher,” citing his own experience as an unfoolable Little League ump. (This column, it seems, got lost in some long-ago ESPN.com redesign.) Neyer wasn’t alone in pooh-poohing McCarver’s hobbyhorse. In 1999, Baseball Prospectus’ Keith Woolner did a convincing-seeming study showing that catchers had no influence whatsoever on a pitcher’s performance.
http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/the_next_20/2016/09/fire_joe_morgan_and_the_moneyball_revolution.html
 

Hagios

New Member
Dec 15, 2007
672
In sum: overestimating umpires intelligence was a big mistake.
... and now the the sabermetric community is much more humble. There's also the matter of underestimating the importance of defense, which the article also gets into (the Adam Dunn debate). Moreover, I don't think pitch framing is a matter of umpires being dumb. I suspect it's a consequence of the viewing angles such that even if you think your compensating for the movement of the catchers mitt, you aren't fully compensating. Sort of like a modified Hofstadter's Law. Call it McCarver's Law: a catcher moving their mitt makes a pitch look more like a ball, even after accounting for McCarver's Law.