Sabremetrics 101 - No, Really!

I consider myself a student of baseball, but I can't really say I understand all that much about Sabremetrics. Sure, I know that's what the book "Moneyball" was all about and that in the movie version, Jonah Hill's fictional-Yale-educated-sidekick helped support Brad Pitt's real-life-Stanford-educated Billy Beane in his effort to construct a 103-win Oakland A's team in 2002 based on some funky stats...and well, that's what Sabremetrics is, the use of mathematical tools to analyze baseball.

Trick Play Call-to-Arms! Know your balks...

Trick plays in baseball can be a thing of beauty or “bush league,”  beautiful to the perpetrators, bush league to the guys who were fooled. The old hidden-ball-trick is genius in its simplicity and fair enough because there shouldn't be any sympathy for anyone not keeping an eye on the ball, but when the misdirection becomes overly theatrical, its fair to say a line's been crossed.  I've seen some surprisingly well rehearsed gadgets at the high school level here in San Diego, like the fake

"A" is NOT for Abner. The Doubleday Doubletake...

In my last post, I giant slalomed through the gates of rule book logic to debunk the old saying that “the tie goes to the runner.”  Although we know the rule book is a living breathing thing which keeps evolving, like with last year's change outlawing the old third-to-first spaghetti move, when you look at the proverbial forest through the trees, the rules make sense most of the time - much of which goes back to the original Kickerbocker Rules of the mid-nineteenth century.  As we salivate in anticipation of spring training games so we can again focus on the action, I thought it would be a good time to take a look back and tell you about another surprising myth about baseball.

“Tie Goes to the Runner” Myth - Like Santa, it does and doesn't exist!

Who hasn’t heard someone yell “tie goes to the runner” after a close play at first? Of course that plea is just another example of a fan grasping at the nearest cliché to rationalize a favorable outcome for his or her team, the offense. It’s a complex discussion to talk about all the factors that influence the call when it’s so close to the naked eye it can go either way, but what of baseball’s rule book? Since I’m in a debunking mood, let’s see what the rules say about TGTTR.

Before I start dissecting words, we need to remind ourselves of some of baseball’s inalienable truths.