The Pirates, Intangibles, And Style Points For Losing

so simple, but so effective in getting everyone on the same page.

While it’s a cozy notion that character and cohesion are real assets, the bottom line is that talent comes first. There are plenty of examples of successful teams that didn’t get along at all—the ’78 Yankees, for instance, with Munson and Jackson.

This sort of reminds me of Casey Stengel’s statement that the key to being a successful manager is to keep the five guys who hate you away from the 15 who are undecided.

I agree with Mr. E, however, that it’s neat to get this depth of insight into NH’s thought processes.

usually (but not always) manifests itself in a sports environment when one leads by example. How one prepares, how one handles success (and failure) and adversity (not necessarily the same as failure), all are characteristics that go into making a good leader. It is much more difficult to display those traits on a regular basis when one is not an everyday player.

It is difficult to quantify leadership, but not that difficult to recognize it from within. From some articles we’ve seen this offseason, it appears that Neil Walker may be seen by management as being one of the leaders on the team.

What concerns me a little is that NH was pointing out a “method to the madness” in the free agent signings. While Barmes and Barajas will likely be on the field enough to possibly be leaders, using McGehee and McLouth as examples of possible leaders is somewhat more difficult to understand, because they do not appear to be full time players. If Nate McLouth was a good leader earlier in his career, would the Pirates have been so quick to trade him after an “All Star” season? Instead, the Pirates traded McLouth and left Brandon Moss, Delwyn Young, and Nyjer Morgan (and then Lastings Milledge) to help break in Cutch.

and it is their individual and collective action that produces statistics, not the other way around. Emphasizing statistics, in addition to a tendency to use them to predict results, seems to lead also to neglect of the human element highlighted by Charlie above.

A player’s success is determined by his performance in the game, against his competition; and whether in the opinion of his management, he’s earned a shot. The team’s success seems to me to be determined by more than aggregate statistics, including how much they like, trust and understand each other. Talk about intangibles!

My first game ever at PNC was the first game of the Padres series. Recall if you will, we were on a seven game losing streak at the time.
We took a 2-0 lead with no one out in the first. Pedro up. 4-6-3 DP
Third inning 3-3 man on first. Pedro up 4-63 DP (then Ryan homes we go up 4-3).
Bottom of the 4th. Karstens gives up a granny to Headley 9-4 Pads. Bases loaded. Pedro up 4-6-3 DP.

When Pedro got up in the first inning, he didn’t want to be there. His body language was terrible. He was tense and not ready. It was worse in the 3rd and in the 4th he looked almost resigned to ground into a DP with the bases loaded.

I knew in the first inning of this series that this team was done. They had no confidence.
I think the Pressley injury, the Braves series and the home run Veras gave up on that Sunday in Philly absolutely ripped the soul and spirit out of this team.

Stats are an excellent way to measure players, but from time to time the human element rears it’s head. Sometimes it’s positive. XPaul scored winning runs in a couple of games on his moxey and boldness, but for the most part the Pirates body language is terrible and this is so contagious.

I think we lose 10 games a year (if not more) between our ears

If the guy has a bad attitude and isn’t playing as hard as he could, his stat line will be worse than what it potentially could be. if he had a better attitude. I view that as part of the player itself, and I think it shows up in the stat line. You know what you are getting with these players to a certain extent, as historical attitude attributes will be reflected in the historical stat lines. Obviously there is room for development just as there are with physical skills, but I think both of them show up in the stat line. If a player wants to spend extra time in the cage or in the film room that will show up in the stat line, and its part of the players output.

In my opinion, stats are more relevant for players that are developed and have a history of at least 3 full major league seasons. Unfortunately for the Pirates, they aren’t ever going to be able to build the foundation of their team with veterans. They must look at the intangibles of young players more than the large market teams with $100+ payrolls. Stats are still important, but our situation dictates attempting to find players with upside and that could require looking at intangibles.

intangibles are hard or impossible to measure because so much of them occurs outside of public view. it’s easy to measure a player’s K rate because because he does it in full view of us. it’s hard to measure the effect of coaching on that rate because because we’re not privy to the process or the alternatives. there’s no stat to measure how well prepared a pitcher is to face hitters or whether another method of preparation could have worked better because we don’t generally know the plan and preparation and certainly don’t know for certain how an alternative would have worked out.

most research has shown that managers have little effect over the outcome of games, but these measures have relied solely on his on-field decisions. clint hurdle doesn’t generally do much during games besides put on the bunt (and DOES he ever), manage the lineup and yell at umpires. he doesn’t necessarily get paid millions to do this. his salary is earned in the preparation for the game, selection of starting players and the personal and professional management of his players.

to repeat my earlier point, these can’t be easily quantified because we don’t have access to most this process and simply can’t know if some extra coaching, drills or strategy led andrew mccutchen to get the game winning hit or would have if done differently. thing is, the general stat view is that the valuation of this play, good or bad, is assigned entirely to mccutchen. is he the only contributing factor to the outcome? i would say he certainly earned the majority of it, but preparation has to play SOME role. say hurdle told cutch that the pitcher he’s facing tends to throw his slider down and away when he’s ahead in the count. if this turns out to be true, down 2-1 cutch shortens up and takes it the other way for an RBI double down the line. cutch gets a 2B and an RBI. bucsdugout goes wild and his picture is on top of the recap the next day. yes it’s his physical ability that actually brought the bat to the ball, but the mental knowledge of where to look for the pitch and the practice reps of shortening up to take the ball the other way played a role as well. the exact amount of that is subject to debate by those much smarter than me, but i would say it is certainly there, just that it’s near impossible if not outright impossible to measure without, say, being omniscient. so we don’t, and conclude it doesn’t exist.

via xkcd.

that I can’t imagine being a part of a discussion like this five years ago, with so many interesting POVs.

As far as intangibles go, I’ll just note this:

When the Great Scorer comes
to write against your name
He writes, not that you won or lost,
but how you played the game.

The Great Scorer believes in intangibles, so me, too. Why take chances?

because this all made me think of one of Bill James, and what he once wrote about Sparky Anderson and Enos Cabell, and in five seconds I found it using Google. Maybe this is where this whole debate first crystallized (from the 1983 Baseball Abstract)::

When Enos Cabell was hot early in the year, you’d ask Sparky Anderson about him and Sparky would say “Enos Cabell is a we ballplayer. You don’t hear Enos Cabell saying ‘I did this’ and ‘I did that.’” I think that’s what drives me nuts about Sparky Anderson, that he’s so full of brown stuff that it just doesn’t seem like he has any words left over for a basic, fundamental understanding of the game. I want to look at a player on the basis of what, specifically, he can and cannot do to help you win a baseball game, but Sparky’s so full of “winners” and “discipline” and “we ballplayers” and self-consciously asinine theories about baseball that he seems to have no concept of how it is, mechanically, that baseball games are won and lost. I mean, I would never say that it was not important to have a team with a good attitude, but Christ, Sparky, there are millions of people in this country who have good attitudes, but there are only about 200 who can play a major-league brand of baseball, so which are you going to take? Sparky is so focused on all that attitude stuff that he looks at an Enos Cabell and he doesn’t even see that the man can’t play baseball. This we ballplayer, Sparky, can’t play first, can’t play third, can’t hit, can’t run and can’t throw. So who cares what his attitude is?

Not only is talent a huge part of the game, but concentration is as well. It just makes sense from a human standpoint that we concentrate more when things matter, even going back to Little League, or a 9th grade math test.

Losing can deter focus. In addition, I think it’s also under-stated how home situations can affect player performance. It’s easy to say “You’re a professional, go about your business”, but that’s incredibly hard. I know at my small-time corporate job, when things at home weren’t good, it was incredibly hard to do my job and my performance absolutely suffered.

and a good general manager builds a team which can give the pieces to the manager to fit together as a team. I think sabermetrics as a tool is very interesting but some purveyours miss the point that managers in baseball and at the office or the factory have to handle many people with varying degrees of skill and many different shades of personalities. Baseball is a game where confidence and comfort play an important role, many times a managers job is to identify what his players can do well and give them the best opportunities to succeed in those roles. Billy Martin was excellent at finding players who could exceed in particular roles. Dick Williams also was very good in that regard. That’s also why intagibles and ability to manage people can make a big difference. Was billy Martin 100 wins smarter than his counterparts over the course of his career tactically, as Bill James opined in an old Baseball prospectus with a metric that measured how a manager did versus the talent he was given? dick Williams? I would say they were smarter in how they managed their people and how they utilized their talent.