The Old School Comes Around
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

For thousands of years, great philosophers like Rene Descartes, David Hume, and Casey Stengel have debated what appears to be a very simple question, but it’s actually quite complex: How the heck do we know anything? Do we come equipped with certain basic ideas, or are we born empty, and everything we know is learned only through our experiences? Can you really know what a circle is until you’ve seen a square? Can you really appreciate Alex Rodriguez until you’ve seen Enrique Wilson?
Darned if we know; we’re just dumb sportswriters, and such things are beyond us. Yet it is a certainty that everything we know about a player’ s quality is based on comparing him to other players. If you don’t have a comparison, you don’t really know what you’re talking about. Say the Yankees’ schedule only had one other team on it, the Cleveland Indians, and they play 162 games. Every day you see Grady Sizemore play center field. The Yankees play any of their current center fielders. Sizemore hits .288 BA/.343 OBA/.471 SLG and pops about 20 home runs. New York’s motley crew hits .244/.301/.351 with 10 home runs. Naturally, you conclude that Grady Sizemore is the best center fielder in the major leagues. This impression lasts until you see Andruw Jones, Jim Edmonds, Johnny Damon, and Ken Griffey Jr.
Earlier this week, a Baseball Prospectus colleague of mine was excoriated in print by an old-school sportswriter for writing that Sandy Koufax was not the greatest pitcher of all time. The Prospectus scribe’s reasoning on this score was not inordinately complicated: Koufax pitched in a time and at a place that was highly conducive to pitchers doing well. He had a large strike zone, a high mound, and a big ballpark. He towered above that league, but not to the same degree that, say, Roger Clemens towers above his. Clemens has to contend with disadvantages that Koufax did not, like a shrinking strike zone, a lower pitcher’s mound, smaller ballparks, and the designated hitter.
This is counterintuitive, because Koufax’s seasons look so much better on the surface. Koufax’s last season, 1966, was probably his best. He posted a 1.73 ERA. In Clemens’s best season – it might be this one, but we’ll limit the discussion to seasons already in the books – 1997, he posted a 2.05 ERA. Two and change is not smaller than 1.73 in any math you learn in school, but it is in baseball, because in baseball your baseline shifts from year to year. Clemens’s ERA came in a league where the average team scored five runs a game. In Koufax’s National League, the average team scored four runs a game (the worst teams were around 3.5).As a result, though Clemens pitched fewer innings than Koufax, he saved more runs than did his predecessor (about 65 versus 60).
In this newspaper, we frequently refer to a statistic called Value Over Replacement Player, or VORP. Invented by Baseball Prospectus, VORP provides a baseline by which one can measure how a player is doing relative to his league and his position. It posits the replacement level player for each position; that is, how well the worst player available – a fringe major leaguer or even Triple-A veteran – would hit, and then tells you how many runs of offense a player has produced in excess of that hypothetical player. In the American League this year, the top 10 players in value over replacement are:
VORP is about providing a framework for evaluation. There is nothing strange, new age-y, or insular about it. It mixes up those same old stats that you’re used to seeing and produces a new number, one that is more instructive. It doesn’t remove your obligation to go out and see Roger Clemens, as Mr. Old School apparently has failed to do, but it helps you better appreciate what you just saw.
None of this is to say that Koufax was not a great pitcher, but simply that there were other pitchers at other times who were better. We know that by the same form of reasoning that allows us to know that Koufax was great, namely comparing him to his league. Without that knowledge, his 1.73 ERA is meaningless.
The old school writer’s criticism of this analysis was out of the “Mine Eyes Doth Tell Me So” school of reasoning. I’ve been around, he seemed to say. I saw Koufax and the Baseball Prospectus guy didn’t, and let me tell you something: he was really darned good. In this he is correct – the Baseball Prospectus guy is too young to have seen Koufax pitch. That’s not the only advantage Mr. Old School has over the junior scribe, but he’s unaware of it: He not only saw Koufax pitch, he saw Clemens pitch too, but because he’s apparently unaware or unwilling to admit that times have changed, he can’t see what his eyes are telling him about each pitcher’s relative burden.
VORP is not a revolution, but apparently, it will be televised, or at least broadcast. Gary Cohen used it, apparently positively, during yesterday’s Mets game. We could get fancy and say that baseball is being gripped by a new empiricism, but that’s too much for us dumb sportswriters. Let us say instead, as Bob Dylan did, that the old school is rapidly aging.
Mr. Goldman is the author of “Forging Genius,” a boigraphy of Casey Stengel, released this year.