Art Martone Vs. Dusty



Great column today from the Providence Journal's Art Martone, reminding us of some other classic Dusty Baker quotes from earlier in the week, along with Art's views on the matter.

"An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents. . . . What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the idea from the beginning."

The 2004 edition of Baseball Prospectus opens its essay on the Kansas City Royals with this quote from Max Planck , a Nobel-prize winning German physicist of the late 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries. When Cubs fans many years hence look back at this past week, they'll do well to remember the words of old Max.

Because in present-day Chicago, no one's winning over and converting the Cubs to any new-fangled theories about how to score runs. They feel . . . well, let them describe how they feel.

"It's called hitting, and it ain't called walking," Cubs manager Dusty Baker told the Chicago Daily Herald last Wednesday when conversation turned to the team's lack of walks during the exhibition season. "Do you ever see [lists of] the top 10 walking? You see top 10 batting average. A lot of those top 10 [hitters] do walk. But the name of the game is to hit."

This flies in the face of modern analysis, which says the name of the game is not to hit (or to walk, for that matter), but to get on base . . . and that hitters who aren't selective enough aren't as valuable as those who are. But Baker wasn't through.

"I think walks are overrated unless you can run," he continued. "If you get a walk and put the pitcher in the stretch, that helps. But the guy who walks and can't run, most of the time they're clogging up the bases for somebody who can run."

Which begs the question: What if the guy who can run can't get on base? But to continue . . .

"Who's been the champion the last seven, eight years?" he asked rhetorically, referring to the Yankees. "Have you ever heard the Yankees talk about on-base percentage and walks?"

This is one step too far.

Bad example, Dusty. Real bad example. The offensive portion of the Yankees' recent run of success has been built on the backs of patient, selective hitters. They've led the American League in walks six times in the last 10 years, and you can argue that it's the Yanks -- and not Billy Beane 's A's, who are the sabermetric community's poster boys for progressive thinking -- who've done the most to change industry attitudes about working the count and drawing walks, and about how that helps score runs.

Not Baker's, though. Or the Cubs'.

"Walks help," Baker conceded. "But you ain't going to walk across the plate. You're going to hit across the plate. That's the school I come from."

"We're probably more of the old, pure, go-by-our-scouts, go-by-our-coaches, go-by-our-manager's-gut feeling [school] and try to make the right decision," says Chicago general manager Jim Hendry.

It's important to remember as you read all this that a) Baker is one of the winningest -- and most respected -- managers of modern times and b) the Cubs, like the Red Sox, were five outs away from the World Series last year. There may be lots of quantifiable evidence that walks aren't overrated, and that going by your gut feeling leads to disasters like the eighth inning of the seventh game of the 2003 ALCS, but nothing is as black-and-white as some in the analytical community believe. You can still be successful -- though how successful is a matter for debate -- without subscribing to the tenets of the statistical revolution.

Thing is, more and more teams are subscribing to those tenets. "We're almost reaching the point where the teams that stand out now are the teams that are behind the curve [regarding progressive thinking], not the teams that are ahead of the curve," Red Sox adviser Bill James said in an online interview last week.

The Cubs certainly stand out, then.

And when those to come wonder why, they'll do well to think of Max Planck.

Posted: Sun - March 14, 2004 at 08:42 PM      

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