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The past few days have seen no less than a million arguments from baseball fans, ex-players, and talking heads on the role of analytics in the sport. All of this was sparked by the decision by Kevin Cash to remove his starter, Blake Snell, in the 6th inning of game 6 of the World Series. Given that we all already have strong opinions on everything as is, this decision specifically sent everyone into a mad frenzy.
What were we mad about? Analytics! The bastard had ruined the aesthetic of our game and directly led to the fall of Rome Rays losing in the World Series. Never mind that analytics got them to the World Series in the first place, or that they lost to a team that is also analytically-driven, or that their offense could only score one run against the Dodgers’ myriad of pitchers in game 6. But I digress.
This leads me to a crucial question; what does the term “analytics” mean?
Anyone?
“Analytics” has become sort of a “woo-woo” buzzword among fans and figure heads when it comes to the game of baseball. It describes a sort of magical new-age thinking that can be hard to pin down but is absolutely understood by all who watch the game. Some of this stems from the fact that we don’t know the majority of what teams are looking at because those secrets remain locked behind closed doors. Instead, a lot of what we now understand as “analytics” stems from people like Bill James and Billy Beane through the quite famous story of “Moneyball”.
“Analytics” became synonymous with a sort of “different” decision-making. One that ignores traditional baseball logic.
While this understanding is partially correct, some of this basis is misguided. "Analytics" in its most basic form is quite simple. For starters, utilizing a platoon would count as analytics. Bringing in a left-handed reliever to face a left-handed batter would also count as analytics. Hell, as long as the lineup wasn’t set by pulling names out of a hat, then analytics played a role in that as well. All of these are choices that managers have been making since the dawn of the game but still fall under the umbrella of “analytics” just like using a hitter’s batted-ball profile in order to shift the defense against him. The only difference is the level of complexity.
At the end of the day, analytics is just numbers and data. This data is then seen and interpreted by someone else who then makes a decision. At no point does any analytic choice pass through without any human engagement. Cash had to make the conscious decision to pull Snell. Even if a team decides to only go with the optimal strategy through analytics (which in itself, “optimal” is impossible to define), that decision was still consciously made by a human. Sort of like “if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice”.
Analytics is simply a tool available to anyone who wants to utilize it.
Let’s get back to Cash and Snell. Immediately, taking Snell out became an analytic choice in our mind due to teams now being more aware than ever of the fact that starters tend to do worse the 3rd time through the batting order. This was also the reason Cash deferred to during the post-game presser. And yes, this is mostly true. As much as old pitchers and baseball dads like to complain about it, it’s a fact that most starting pitchers perform at a worse level when they face batters for the 3rd time in a game.
(Here are two Fangraphs pages. The first consists of the stats of SP going through the order the first two times from 2011-2020 and the second has the same qualifiers but for the third time through the order.)
The key word there is “most”. You shouldn’t apply a blanket concept to your players like that. Any decision to pull Snell has to be made with his personal splits in mind. Now, 2020 was a small sample but Snell actually performed a bit better the 3rd time through the order compared to the 2nd time (.379 wOBA allowed vs .407). Both numbers are awful, however.
Career numbers paint a different story. Snell has allowed a wOBA of .263 when going through a lineup for the first time, a wOBA .309 when going through that same lineup a second time, and a wOBA of .321 when greeting those hitters for a third time. (For context, Ian Desmond’s career wOBA is .321.)
Immediately, there becomes an apparent problem. What numbers do you look at? Cash knows Snell’s historic numbers as well as his recent ones. Which do you put more weight into and how much weight do you put into it? How does Snell’s recent injury history play into it? None of these questions even touch on the specific players Snell was set to face or how his replacement would fare against them as well or how rested his bullpen was or, well, I think you get the point now.
This was also a hot topic among Twins fans during the playoffs. Rocco Baldelli pulled both Kenta Maeda and José Berríos after 5 innings each during their respective starts. Some saw this as “over-managing” (and in the case of Berríos, I agree).
The point of this isn’t to actually prove whether or not Cash’s or Baldelli’s decisions were “analytical” or not because, well, all decisions in baseball are and always have been analytical. The only difference is that we have different numbers to look at. Putting your big bopper who rakes in RBIs is technically an analytical decision as much as it makes me want to squirm. The manager used data that he had available to make a decision that he thought was best for the team.
Keep in mind as well that analytics are never perfect. No system of decision making is. The point of utilizing advanced methods of interpreting information is to improve your odds. If your odds of making a “good” decision go from 55 to 60 percent, then analytics have succeeded. But even that leads to a significant amount of scenarios where failure occurs. That’s normal. It happens in any event where someone must make a decision with random variables.
All I want to do is try and steer the conversation in the correct direction. We shouldn’t be talking about whether analytics failed Cash and the Rays but instead whether Cash made appropriate decisions based on the information he had. It appears that the answer is “no” but we can never truly know as the situation only played out once. If Nick Anderson induces a double play and the Rays go on to win, then I doubt the conversation is as aggressive.
But who knows? These types of discussions are what drive baseball thought and will be what continues to push the metagame of this beautiful sport.
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