DIPS showed us we are all dipsh**s
How a 1999 baseball insight revealed human cognitive blindness
You don’t have to like or understand baseball to enjoy this essay. Please keep reading.
During the 1978 baseball season, New York Yankee pitcher Ron Guidry was a strikeout machine. My step-father was a Yankee fan and I, being an impressionable 12-year-old, was too. Guidry dominated the news as the south-paw blew through batters to win 11 games by June. On June 17th, the day he won the 12th game of his 25 victories that season, he struck out 18 batters, a Yankee record that still stands. America was amazed… for a few minutes, it seemed to me.
As I remember it, his achievement was overshadowed by a No-hitter pitched by Tom Seaver the previous day. But I was not impressed by Seaver. Ignorant child that I was, I thought a “no-hitter” meant that no batters made contact with the ball. But many batters did, in fact, hit some of his pitches. Batters hit 15 grounders and nine fly balls. They just didn’t get on base. Seaver also walked three batters who were later left stranded. He only threw three strikeouts. Yet Seaver was a hero.
I asked my step-dad why this “no-hitter” was so celebrated when batters were smacking his pitches all over the park and only the skill of his outfield and infield teammates saved the day. Step-dad had no real answer other than: His pitching caused the batters to make mistakes.
Ok, even if that is so (and it AIN’T), Seaver’s team had been made up of eight guys like me, all 15 grounders would have passed through their legs and the nine fly-balls would have bounced off their noses. That is 24 possible hits.
I also learned that week that a Major League No-hitter is really a game whereby no batter gets on base with his own effort. Walks don’t count, even though walks are 100% the pitcher’s fault. In theory, a pitcher could throw 27 pitches over nine innings, each batter smacking baseballs to the center field wall only to be caught inches from a being home runs and still earn a no-hitter. Did the pitcher’s throwing prowess CAUSE those baseballs to fall just short of the wall?
That was the thinking, yes, that a pitcher’s prowess could affect how a ball moved after it was hit.* In my 12-year-old mind, that seemed impossible. But then I forgot about it and worshiped Nolan Ryan like a good boy.
But one kid couldn’t let it go. He wasn’t a kid at all, actually, but a baseball scholar and fantasy league champion. His name was Voros McCracken and he changed baseball statistics forever in 1999. More importantly, he revealed how cognitively blind human beings are and remain. He didn’t mean to do that. He just wanted to evaluate pitchers better.
To understand what he did, I must elaborate further. There are very few no-hitters each year. Some years have none. However, the role of the defense is the same for regular games, not just No-hitters. Pitching performance at the time was measured by the Earned Run Average (ERA, a sacred cow about to be hamburger). The math is simple: 9 x earned runs (those not caused by errors) / innings pitched. For example, a pitcher throws thirty innings and the other teams score 15 runs while he is pitching:
(9 x15)/30 = 4.5 ERA.
But what if the defense is terrible and the base runners are fast? What if the ballpark is big, or small, or wet that day? A good pitcher could have a bad ERA. Conversely, good defense would disguise a bad pitcher who may have an excellent ERA. McCracken thought it was time someone tried to analyze this problem.
What he came up with was DIPS: Defense Independent Pitching Statistics. McCracken removed the help the infielders and outfielders gave the pitcher from his new metrics. The result was a more accurate way to evaluate pitchers and discover their true talent. How he did it and the details, is beside the point.
THE POINT: It remains astonishing that for 100 years, athletes, managers, coaches, owners, executives, journalists and fans all pondered baseball statistics yet never recognized what total horse-hockey the ERA (and the No-hitter) was as a metric. If anyone did understand the problem, they spent no brain power challenging it. There were millions of dollars at stake and still no one fixed it, not even Bill James himself, the Godfather of SABRmetrics. Everyone had incentive to evaluate pitching better, yet they did not.
This does not mean Voros McCracken is a super genius; he was just curious and driven. McCracken is on record saying his effort was mere inquiry, a starting point and not an ending. His humility on the matter is well documented. Which is remarkable given how much sour grape juice was poured on him for slaughtering the ERA cow.
Clip below: DIPS is but one metric among the SABRmetrics, made famous by the book and movie, Moneyball.
Indeed, humans are not very happy when such work like McCracken’s reveal error or fraud or raging egotism. For example, the many scientists who published in the 1970s-80s papers supporting Ancel Keys’ “low fat” diet are still among us today and unrepentant despite a 40-year obesity/inflammatory epidemic. Many of them, as did Keys, defamed British scientist, John Yudkin, who published Pure, White, and Deadly, a book that blamed sugar for the 1960’s surge in heart disease, which contradicted Keys’ low-fat theory. Keys was later found to have modified and deleted data from his own studies to get the answers he wanted. His influence led to the infamous anti-fat/anti-cholesterol era which demonized meat, eggs, avocados and nuts as unhealthy. His work was not challenged for decades. Very few of Keys’ supporters in industry and academe have admitted their role in what will someday be regarded as the deadliest scientific fraud in history.
However, shouldn’t WE, as citizens, have been skeptical of Keys? Shouldn’t we have been slower to blame saturated fat for our ills knowing that refined sugar does not exist in nature while saturated fats does? Why didn’t we notice the increase in our sugar intake correlated better with disease and obesity than did fat intake? Some did, like John Yudkin and Robert Atkins. But most Americans were too eager to believe the USDA’s food pyramid was the answer to good health. It “just works somehow” until it doesn’t.
As a kid, perplexed by the No-hitter problem, I asked step-dad to explain and he gave me a very ancient, human answer: I don’t know, it just works.
So I moved on. But what if Step-dad had paused and said, “I don’t know, but you have a point. I have often wondered that myself. Let’s think about it…?” Could I have discovered DIPS before Voros?
Probably not. But the inquiry alone would have been worthwhile. Inquiry is the super-power of human beings with which we battle the asininity of our nature. Inquiry is not the property of scientists, experts or politicians, it was given to all by His providence. We cannot depend on future McCrackens, inspired by esoteric interests, to arise now and then. We, as free men and women, hoplites defending the polis, must train for inquiry and practice the skill. The Bible and the Western Canon are the first sources of this dendritic power.
For a better understanding of human cognitive blindness and decision making, read The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis. I also recommend William Briggs’ Everything You Know is Wrong. Voros McCracken has cited, How We Know What Isn’t So by Thomas Gilovich as an influence. McCracken still updates DIPS now and then and remains active.
Vale, milites Christi.
* Knuckle balls are an exception. Knuckle balls, which are balls thrown with no spin, travel erratically and, if hit, do not travel far because they have no spin stabilization.
While it's true I may not have had to understand baseball to appreciate the *argument* here, I did kind of have to understand baseball to be able to imagine the scenarios you painted. . . . sadly, I don't understand baseball. But the idea of cognitive blindness--that I do understand. I remember my (obese) cousin obsessively snacking on jelly beans in the 1980s--because "no fat" (even though they were basically little balls of sugar). She later died of a heart attack.
And while it of course makes sense that we, as rational beings, should notice these inconsistencies between theory and what's in front of our faces, sadly most people just go with what the experts tell them (ergo, the past 3 years). It's just human nature, and the way most people, even good people, behave. Good for you for questioning, even as a kid.