MLB: Five Myths Busted By Brian Kenny’s New Book
Brian Kenny has spent 30 years as a sports journalist, serving as a SportsCenter anchor and host of Baseball Tonight on ESPN and now hosting shows across MLB Network’s programming. Being so immersed in baseball has led Kenny to some interesting insights into today’s game, and he’s put them all in one place for the world to read. But be warned, he pulls no punches when it comes to some of MLB’s most cherished stats and players.
Right off the bat, Brian Kenny lets his reader know that his book Ahead of the Curve is not for the closed-minded baseball fan. In the preface to the book, Kenny jumps right into what will be his overarching theme: the way the game of baseball is played, and the way we’ve always been taught to think and talk about it, is inherently flawed.
“So we have something happening right in front of us,” he writes. “Something we think about and discuss on a daily basis at least six months a year. An industry where strategy and information are vital. And yet for nearly a century, no one ever bothered to think about it deeply enough to give themselves an incredible competitive advantage, even when presented with the information.”
Throughout the pages of Ahead of the Curve, Kenny brings to light a plethora of ways in which teams, managers, players, and the people that write about the game are stuck in an era of baseball that passed by quite some time ago. Accepted thought is criticized at every turn, records and achievements believed to be gold standards of excellence are torn down, and baseball media is taken to task for failing in keeping up with the times. So many of the truths every baseball fan holds sacred are cast in a new light.
What emerges is a new prism through which to analyze Major League Baseball, one steeped in advanced statistics, an avalanche of new data, and strategies and methods of playing the game that possess the potential to have old-school baseball men grumbling or rolling over in their graves. Insightful and well-researched, Kenny’s book is the culmination of a movement that was birthed in the late-1970s with Bill James, hit adolescence in the early-2000s with the Moneyball A’s, and has now sprung into adulthood in front offices and baseball media across the industry.
What follows are five myths that Ahead of the Curve takes head on, exposing the archaic value put on cherished stats and strategies, the way the game is written about and analyzed, and how the future of MLB may look sooner rather than later.
Next: Batting champs?
Myth #1: Batting average is an indication of a great hitter.
Sabermetric writers like James have known for decades, and Moneyball brought it to light to mass audiences about five years ago, that the statistic that has carried perhaps more weight than any other in establishing the success or lack thereof of a hitter is inherently flawed. Batting average, as opposed to on-base percentage, slugging percentage, or any of a number of other advanced stats, was, is, and seemingly always will be the first number that pops up in any conversation about a hitter.
“In batting average, a single is as good as a home run, and walks don’t exist,” Kenny writes in the chapter entitled, “The Tyranny of the Batting Average. “Yet the very first stat cited in most baseball conversations for 120 years— was the batting average.”
While every organization in MLB pretty much no longer puts the emphasis on batting average, and even most fans understand that it is only a piece of the puzzle, Kenny is correct in observing the reverence still paid to what is a flawed stat. It is telling that mere days ago during the pregame ceremonies of the All-Star Game, MLB announced the newly-renamed awards for each league’s batting champion, an award that for all intents and purposes honors something meaningless.
OPS+, one of many examples, is an advanced statistic that adjusts a hitter’s OPS (on-base plus slugging) for certain external factors, like effects of the ballparks he’s hitting in, and puts it on an easy to understand scale with 100 being league average. This takes into account walks, extra-base hits, and whether a player did it at Coors Field or Kauffman Stadium, and paints a much more complete picture of the hitter’s success.
As Kenny shows, since 1960 no more than 2 percent of the “batting champions” in any decade actually led the league in OPS+ in the same year they led the league in batting average. Thus, the “best hitter,” as recognized by MLB, was more often not the best hitter at all.
Of course, the author points out that batting average used to mean something, back in the dead ball era when baseball was a station-to-station game predicated on slapping the ball, bunting, and baserunning. But in the modern game, with so many advanced metrics that better measure the effectiveness of a hitter, why is so much emphasis still put on his average?
Next: Small ball beatdown.
Myth #2: Bunting a runner into scoring position is a solid play.
One of the images Kenny goes back to again and again in Ahead of the Curve is that of The Herd. The accepted thinking about how the game has been and should be played, and the difficulty that arises when an organization or manager deviates from that thinking.
“To adopt new methods is not just to stray from the pack, but to mock the herd itself. The herd – large, powerful, belligerent – has ways to deal with rogue operatives,” he writes. “Reverential of its tradition, the baseball culture eyes innovation even more wearily.”
The examples Kenny gives is that of the time-honored tradition of the sacrifice bunt. Every fan knows what this looks like: leadoff man gets aboard and the next batter lays a bunt down the third base line, allowing him to advance to scoring position. Simple and acceptable baseball strategy to this day? Yes. Actually effective? Not so much.
As the book lays out, the run expectancy for a team that utilizes a sacrifice bunt to move a runner from first to second actually decreases, based upon stats from 1993-2010.
“With a man on first and no outs, you will, on average, score 0.94 runs,” Kenny writes. “Move that man over on a bunt? You now, on average, will score 0.72 runs. So let’s be clear: Even with a successful bunt, you score fewer runs.”
He goes on to point out that, in addition to run expectancy decreasing, so to do the odds of scoring at all. With a man on first and no outs, a team will score just over 44 percent of the time, while a team with a man on second and one out will score just under 42 percent of the time. It may not seem significant, but ballgames are won or lost on fractions and at the margins.
The reason the sacrifice bunt still exists, according to Kenny, is that a manager can shift blame more easily by following the herd. If the runner who moved to second on a bunt does not score, the blame falls onto the two players who failed to bring him plateward, not the skipper. The fact that it actually hinders the objective of the team – to win games – is barely an afterthought.
Of course, some concessions may need to be made in the National League, where pitchers step into the batter’s box and a bunt (unless it’s MadBum) may be the best option.
Next: Kill the win.
Myth #3: A starting pitcher’s win/loss record is a good indicator of talent.
In the Twitterverse, Kenny is pretty widely known for his #KillTheWin hashtag, and much like batting average, this idea flies in the face of accepted baseball orthodoxy to the point of blasphemy. How else will anyone know who the best pitchers in the game are if their win-loss records aren’t front and center?
Again like the batting average, Kenny goes back to the dead ball era to explain a time when pitching wins were actually a somewhat useful statistic, as starters generally finished their games and bullpens were a place for aging arms and unproven rookies. While in the 19th and early 20th Centuries this measure may have been indicative of a pitcher’s prowess, the game has long since left that time behind.
In today’s game, though, starting pitchers complete roughly 2 percent of their games, and the average length of a starting outing has fallen to just 5.2 innings, or barely enough to qualify for a win. Bullpen specialization, pitch counts, and arm injuries have destroyed the archetype of the Walter Johnson-esque inning-eating hurler.
With the lighter workload, starting pitchers are now even more at the mercy of external factors than ever before. A pitcher’s chance for earning a win has always depended not only upon his own performance, but on the performance of his offense, his defense, the opposition’s pitcher, the opposition’s offense, and the opposition’s defense. Now it is also dependent on the bullpen.
“Individual statistics exist to isolate performance in a team game,” Kenny writes. [The win] is, in fact, an anachronism, a survivor from the nineteenth century that was out of date by the time the live ball was in play.”
Next: Bullpenning.
Myth #4: The closer is the closer, and he’s here for the save.
Kenny’s analysis doesn’t just limit itself to starting pitchers, either. Ahead of the Curve also takes dead aim at the bullpen, the management of relief pitchers, and the almighty save statistic. With most teams carrying seven, eight, or even nine relievers on their rosters, usage of those arms is an area where a huge competitive advantage is available, though very rarely used.
“Today’s relief aces are treated like rare exotic flowers, to be taken out only in certain conditions,” he writes. “They work the ninth only, preferably with nobody on base, and they top out at 70 innings for the season.”
The point the book makes several times, is that the game is always on the line. The most pivotal point in a game may not come in the ninth inning, it could come in the sixth or the seventh. Refusing to use the best arm a team has in the bullpen just because it’s not the ninth inning means the game may be lost before the “closer” even has a chance.
The idea of the closer is actually relatively new, beginning roughly around the time Dennis Eckersley was coming into late-inning situations for the Oakland A’s in the late-1980s. Prior to that, managers actually utilized their best bullpen arms in what Kenny calls the “Fireman” role. These are the Goose Gossage, Sparky Lyle, Mike Marshall types who would be brought into games as the situation, not the inning, dictated, and often threw more than 100 innings in a season.
In the book, Kenny gives numerous examples of the ways bullpens have been utilized and are utilized today to make his point, beginning with Eric Gagne and the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 2004 NLDS against the St. Louis Cardinals (not optimal), and then jumping to Jim Konstanty of the 1950 Whiz Kids Philadelphia Phillies (optimal). The idea is that saving your best relief pitcher for a chance that may not materialize is a pretty inefficient way to use him.
Next: Destroying the gray ink gods.
Myth #5: The old ways of writing about baseball are still around because they work.
While a good deal of Ahead of the Curve deals with tactical decision-making, roster composition, and the emerging influx of sabermetric minds into front offices and the battles that are being fought between executives and field staff, Kenny is perhaps at his most incisive when taking the battle to his own backyard: sportswriters.
With the proliferation of internet sites both cataloging baseball statistics (Baseball Reference, FanGraphs, StatCast, among others) and analyzing the game (Call To The Pen, is one terrific example, as are many others), the days of the old newspaper beat reporter controlling the flow of information about MLB and influencing the way fans think about the game is over. Baseball analysis has become an industry in and of itself.
Yet, there are those that write about the game for a living, and who do things like vote for the Hall of Fame, MVP awards, and Cy Young awards, who have seemingly paid no attention. Think about how many times you’ve watched a baseball game on television or read an article in Sports Illustrated in which the analyst or author not only ignored advanced metrics, but showed open hostility to them. As if OPS+ or FIP may cause the unraveling of the entire sport!
“Sportswriters through the century have purposefully confused statistical relevance with statistical minutiae for a laugh,” Kenny writes. “There is a lot of statistical flotsam out there. It’s the job of the professional sports observer/analyst to know the difference, and offer what is actually meaningful for the reader. It is easier, though, to mock, make up a false stat, and go have dinner.”
That particular quote was in response to a piece written by Mitch Albom during the AL MVP debate of 2012 in which triple crown-winning Miguel Cabrera edged out Mike Trout. Albom, in responding to arguments that Trout had the better overall season despite Miggy’s triple crown, wrote “The number of triples hit while wearing a certain-colored underwear is probably being measured as we speak.”
As someone who does write about baseball for public consumption, the theme of caring enough to understand these new ways of analyzing the game and taking the time to think beyond the hard-boiled status quo that’s been fed to most of us since we could first hold a bat is one that will stay with me. Ahead of the Curve isn’t always comfortable reading material for someone who has been a fan since childhood, but it has great value if the reader is willing to suspend preconceived notions of what the game is supposed to be.
Next: MLB To Investigate David Ortiz For Tampering?
Or as Kenny writes in the book’s Epilogue, “For most fans, guys who loved baseball and were forced to watch from a distance, the sabermetricians proved that we can see much more when we take a wider view. We have outlived the snickers and dismissals to see baseball – and most other sports – swept up in an analytics revolution.”