The Hidden Game of Baseball: What Makes Teams Win

Long time readers will know that one focus of my blog has been on research of how teams win.  A long-time classic sabermetric book, The Hidden Game of Baseball, by John Thorn and Pete Palmer, had been out of publishing, like, forever, until recently having another printing with a new Foreword and Preface added, and I just got my copy the other day.  I am going to go over the chapter on what makes teams win in this post.

ogc thoughts

I enjoyed skimming the book, lots of very interesting analysis.  I recommend this book to anybody interested in sabermetrics.  However, I wonder whether these holds up today, the analysis was done before all the extended playoff series we have today.  Back then, they were still in the two division winners playing to get into the World Series.  Still, let's look at some of them, I am only going to go over the ones which could apply to the Giants, and see what we can use of it.

Winning on the Road

The first conclusion in this chapter is that it don't really matter as much what a team does at home, in relation to getting into the playoffs.  Of course, you have to win, but most playoff teams win at home.  The dividing factor is how well teams win on the road, the ones that can win there generally do well in getting into the playoffs.

I was going to cover the last seven seasons (roughly around when offense went down significantly) for the MLB, but in gathering just the NL data, I think it shows that this is still true:  between the three divisions over the past seven seasons, the division leader in road wins finished first 16 times out of 21, roughly 80% of the time.  Out of the five times the leader didn't win, all the division winners were the team with the second most wins, and three of those five times, were only second by one game, or basically a toss-up between first and second in road wins as far as I'm concerned, if the season lasted another week, they could have swapped places.  And of the two remaining division winners, one was two games back, the other six games back.  This conclusion is clearly still true.

Plus, it just makes sense.  Obviously, to win a division, you can't really be losing that much on the road.  That would just mean you have to win that much more at home.  But most good teams do well at home, so we are talking an epically good season while doing very poorly on the road, a dichotomy that don't normally happen in any sport, generally talent will prove out.

Focus on Your Core Competency

This is not what the book says, but it fits in with this key business strategy rule.  What the book says is that to win, a teams should focus on hitting or pitching, but not on a balance between the two.  Out of 166 pennant winners, 110 of them were first in either pitching or batting, and out of those 110, 55 finished 4th or worse in the other category.

Though that does mean only a third actually fit this category of focusing on a strength in one area.  But, overall, the point I'm getting is that two-thirds were first in a category, and it didn't matter what they were in the other category in 66% of the cases, as in those cases, they won the pennant.  That's no guarantee but is certainly pretty good odds.

This is the rule that I'm surprised more people don't discuss in sabermetric circles.  This is also the rule that fits the Giants under Sabean mostly to a T, with the focus first on offense during the Bonds years, then the focus on pitching and fielding afterward.  As I've been saying for years now, if sabers actually applied their findings to the Giants, they will find that the Giants actually is following many of the rules.

This also fits in with recent theories on business strategy.  Geoffrey Moore, of Crossing the Chasm fame, wrote about focusing on the core of the team, and outsource everything else, which he called "hygiene", and there were other theories that had the same concept.  I wrote about this over ten years ago about the Giants focusing on pitching, pitching, and more pitching, based on their draft patterns, which even in this John Barr era, still leans towards pitching overall, with more pitchers drafted than hitters.

Can't be Cost Efficient and Have a Great Club

Most business theories of strategy note that successful organizations tend to focus on excellence in one area of their business. Most theories revolves around being the low cost provider or on a niche specialization. In particular, Tracy and Wiersma noted three generic competitive strategies:  operational excellence (cost leadership), customer intimacy (focusing on individual customer needs), and product leadership (bringing superior products to market).

In baseball, I think the three narrows down to two, due to sports' unique business.  All three relates strongly to winning, particularly customer intimacy, as every fan wants to win.  So it narrows down to winning with operational excellence (being cost efficient) or winning with product leadership.  As this study concluded, product leadership led to pennant winners 66% of the time.

And that is where a lot of sabers go wrong.  Strategically, a business cannot achieve excellence in multiple areas, you need to focus your operations on the core competencies that you want to focus on.  Do you want to win by being the most cost efficient (i.e. every deal you do aligns with $/WAR standards for that season) or by designing a team great in a key area, either offense (hitting) or defense (pitching and fielding).  Because, in a resource constrained economic system, you can't be excellent in all areas, you need to focus or your operations will not achieve excellence in any area.

The Giants get a lot of complaints from people about how they spend their money, but that is what they are not realizing, the Giants are going for product leadership, not cost efficiency.   Sure, they probably could save a few bucks by not signing all their Core Four relievers at big marketplace salaries and going with some of the young pitchers, or guys they pick up off the waiver wire.  But if they fail to find an adequate replacement, then they will lose that season without an effective bullpen.  Hence why they sign those relievers, they could be cost-efficient about it, but that introduces a level of risk into the baseball operations, whereas they know that these pitchers are good and can deliver good performances.

And we have two great examples of the two areas of specialization here in the SF Bay Area.  The A's have to be cost efficient because their revenue stream is lacking, and they are famous for picking up hitters who deliver.  The Giants have chosen to be good in pitching.  And both teams have generally been winners under Beane and Sabean.

Pitching Better Than Hitting for Championships

So which way is better?  Or are they the same?  As I've discussed on this blog (and highlight in my business plan), two different studies (BP and FG) using different methodologies studied how teams go deep into the playoffs and win championships.  Both found that defense is what allows teams to go deep into the playoffs and win championships.  Both found that hitting was not a significant factor in leading teams to win.

As discussed in the strategic terms above, what this means is that ideally, teams should focus on defense (pitching and fielding) as a core competency while treating hitting as a hygiene business process.  In resource constrained scenarios, you need to focus your precious resources on developing a differentiating competitive advantage.  Thorn and Palmer found that focusing on hitting or pitching is the way most teams have won pennants in the past, not by trying to find a balance.

And that just makes sense:  to win, you need to be good at something, balancing things out just makes you mediocre.  As the studies show, you not only can get into the playoffs with pitching, but also go deep into the playoffs by focusing on pitching.  And as my study of PQS shows, it is pitching that has the most control over the outcomes of games, because the more pitchers you have who can throw PQS DOM starts, the more DOM starts you can expect during the playoffs, and the more likely you are to win those games.

And as my business plan noted about pitching, there are numerous benefits to focusing on pitching.  Most of all, there is huge flexibility with pitching, where the cream rises to the top.  If you have a great pitcher but then develop a greater pitcher, you just improved your rotation.  If you have a great firstbaseman, but find another firstbaseman, eventually you have to trade one, as the Giants did with Orlando Cepeda, keeping McCovey, and the Rangers did with Hafner and A-Gon, keeping Teixeira.   So if you find a good pitcher, he can fill one of 12 different roster spots, a good hitter at best can fill maybe 2 or 3.  And once you can fill up a rotation, then spill over into the bullpen, with whatever quality of pitching you got.

This flexibility allows a team to more rapidly refill their roster with homegrown players.  And homegrown players are cheaper, which helps you keep the star pitchers on the team.  

In addition, focusing on defense as your core competency results in the ability to win 90 games without having a good offense.  In fact, you can have an offense that is much below average.  And that means that you don't have to invest as much in good hitters once you get a core (like Posey, Pence, Belt).  And, again, you can fill in with cheaper players in the lineup, since you are not aiming for even an average offense.

And so it has been that the Giants have been following another of the findings of sabermetrics and being a good example of it, and yet is greatly denigrated by most sabers.  They have focused on great pitching, good fielding, and good enough offense (but with a core set of players like Posey, Pence, Belt, Crawford, and it is looking like Panik and Duffy might join the group).  But sabers treat them as if they are idiots, still!

However, Sabean has the best revenge, for as Affeldt noted in his funny commercial for this season, he's like any other person, he puts his rings on, one finger at a time.