The Futility Infielder

Like most baseball fans, I love baseball books, an affair that began around the time my grandfather started salvaging boxes of dog-eared paperbacks from flea markets in Walla Walla, Washington on my behalf. At age nine, I was reading Roger Angell's erudite essays in The Summer Game and parsing the more complicated swear words of Ball Four, no doubt dreaming of a day some 25 years in the future when I could combine the best (or worst) of both worlds into daily ramblings on some not-yet-invented information superhighway. I probably read every baseball book in my elementary school library twice over, if not more. Who knew Ron Santo was so interesting, or that the bio of him which I read three times was penned by former major league pitcher-turned-author Jim Brosnan (who wrote The Long Season, one of the more acclaimed baseball books I've actually never gotten around to)?

I've got a 500-square foot Manhattan apartment bursting to the seams with baseball books, and a lovely wife who patiently puts up with the stacks that accumulate next to my desk when I'm working on a project. A storage space a few blocks away holds the overflow -- not to mention the household items displaced by said books. And it's not just new books of course; Internet sites such as eBay, ABEbooks and Half.com have made tracking down used and sometimes out-of-print books a snap. Here in the East Village, it takes every ounce of my being to resist the siren call of The Strand, a used bookstore that claims no less than 18 miles of books (the awning is 10 miles behind in its tally). Hell, sometimes books even find me on the streets, as did a dog-eared copy of John Helyar's classic, The Lords of the Realm back in February. A trip up to Alex Belth's Riverside abode last fall led me to drop $45 on an oversized book collecting miniature reproductions of 35 years of complete sets of Topps baseball cards. It's like that.

One of the nicer perks of keeping this site is that every so often, somebody with a new book to hawk offers to send me a free copy. The downside is that I don't always get to read these things very quickly, especially in a season that's seen me get married, buy the Extra Inings cable package, take on a weekly column, and pore over every word of the books two of my good friends have put out. So apologies to a small handful of authors for the relatively Robin Ventura-like speed I've had in getting to their books. I'm still working my way through that pile. Which brings me to today's installment of the Futility Infielder Book Rodeo.

Steve Lombardi of NetShrine and the Yankees-oriented Was Watching blog has self-published a book called The Baseball Same Game: Finding Comparable Players from the National Pastime. Spurred by endless hours in front of the Sabermetric Baseball Encyclopedia, Lombardi has found over 60 pairs of players with roughly similar career stats in a small handful of important categories. For hitters, those categories are Games, Plate Appearances, Runs Created Above Average (the main currency of the SBE), Offensive Winning Percentage, OPS vs. League, and Runs Created per Game vs. League. For pitchers, the categories are Innings Pitched, Runs Saved Above Average, ERA vs. League, K/BB vs. League, BB/9 vs. League, and K/9 vs. League.

With these metrics, Lombardi comes up with some fairly random-seeming pairings; Roy Campanella and Sixto Lezcano lead off, and juxtapositions like Mike Scioscia and Derek Bell, Thurman Munson and Terry Puhl, or Barry Larkin and Jim Rice abound. If these duos have you scratching your head, well, you're not alone. Lombardi's earnest comparisons, which each provide two or three pages on the two players' careers, make no allowance for defensive position, nor for the shape of a player's offensive contribution (nor for even the shape of the player -- take the burly Scioscia and the skinny Bell, please).

Not all of his pairings are that strange. Will Clark and Duke Snider make for a nice matchup of championship-caliber sluggers, while Honus Wagner and Willie Mays is a comparison of two of the game's all-time greats. But the lack of a positional match is still a problem, even as the author's main point is to focus on sets of players who have similarly valuable total offensive contributions.

While Lombardi tosses terms like Runs Created and Offensive Winning Percentage around frequently, he runs into trouble early on. In the lengthy introduction to his methods, he makes absolutely no mention of Bill James, who created those metrics -- even when dragging out the formula for Runs Created! -- though he does spend considerable space playing up Lee Sinins' creations for the SBE such as RCAA and RSAA. Elsewhere he's not clear as to whether his "vs. League" stats are ratios (A/B) or differences (A - B). That's a crucial, basic distinction worth making, and Lombardi's failure to do so is a serious strike against this undertaking (FYI, the answer appears to be the latter). Also not clear is whether any of these metrics has park adjustments built in. Given my other reservations, I'm not sure I want to know the answer.

At the same time, Lombardi has found it necessary to include the official rule book definition of innings, as in innings pitched, and it's worth noting that throughout the book, every one of his statistical categories under investigation is italicized throughout, which is rather grating. I'm just not really sure who the author takes his audience for; if you're going to toss a lot of numbers at a stat-savvy crowd, you ought to be quite clear as to where they're come from, and if you're going to do something as basic as define an inning, your respect for your audience's baseball acumen is called into question.

For all of my reservations about Lombardi's methodology, I have to admit I've enjoyed browsing through the comparisons, even if it's to rubberneck at the strange bedfellows of each chapter. Take the pairing of two contemporaries who were in fact teammates for awhile in the '70s with the Atlanta Braves, Ralph Garr and Davey Johnson. Garr, "The Roadrunner" as he was called, was a speedster with little power or patience but a great ability to utilize his primary asset (.306/.339/.416 for his career), while future manager Johnson (.261/.340/.404) was a slow second baseman with great plate discipline and some pop (his 43 homer-season in 1973 was the Brady Anderson fluke of its day, but he did reach double digits four other times).

Lombardi's point isn't that the two players were analogous, but that the relative value of their offensive contributions was similar. Turning away from his metrics and towards some independently derived ones, that premise holds up. Garr's career OPS+ was 107, and his Equivalent Average was .270, Johnson's OPS+ was 111, his EqA .278. Of course, Lombardi's point avoids the fact that Garr was a subpar outfielder (-56 Fielding Runs Above Average according to Baseball Prospectus' defensive metrics, and a Rate2 of 96 in leftfield) and Johnson an above-average second baseman (35 FRAA, and a Rate2 of 103). Your mileage may vary as to whether you find such comparisons enlightening.

I wish I could say that I liked The Baseball Same Game more than I do. Obviously, a good deal of effort went into this project; very few people write baseball books that aren't labors of love. But I wish Lombardi had taken a big more care at the outset to clarify his methodology, and that his comparisons made allowance for defense, at least via a positional adjustment. The Baseball Same Game isn't without its charms, but its got its warts as well.