* Barry and ball four -- it's the talk of the town * - Joan Ryan Thursday, May 6, 2004 Forget the arguments over Care Not Cash and whether San Francisco should close fire stations to save money and if California's workers' comp reform makes sense in the long run. Forget the scandal over steroids and BALCO. A new and vigorous debate has gripped the Bay Area. I'm referring, of course, to the Barry Bonds base-on-balls issue. The question on everyone's mind is this: Are opposing baseball managers helping or hurting the San Francisco Giants by walking the home run king so much? You hear it in line at Safeway. You hear it in snippets of conversation among the folks at the next dinner table and while parents are settling in at PTA meetings. You hear it most of all at SBC Park, where the Giants play and where frustrated fans have been driven to cluck and flap their arms like chickens every time a pitcher gives Bonds a free pass to first base. I am here to deliver good news. Three thousand miles from SBC Park sits a 34-year-old Harvard-Ph.D. statistician named Jerry Reiter, who has, for reasons his mathematical colleagues must find stupefying, carefully analyzed this exact question. He is a professor at Duke who usually calculates things like investment projections and automobile risks and the most efficient way to distribute census data. He was drawn into the Bonds debate while he and a graduate student were watching a Giants game on television two years ago. Bonds was in the midst of a 2002 season in which he walked 198 times, the most in major- league baseball history. This was a case, Reiter suspected, of conventional wisdom going unchallenged, something that is assumed to be smart because so many smart people say it is. Maybe the managers were right in walking Bonds so much, but maybe they weren't. Maybe it was one of those things like, say, locking drug users in jail. It seems on the surface to be beneficial but doesn't hold up under the glare of a statistician's desk lamp. "Statistics is detective work,'' Reiter said. "It's the search for truth. It's messy, noisy and not pretty. You get in there, get your hands dirty and hope when you come back you have something resembling the truth.'' Reiter hypothesized that the managers were making a mistake. "As great as Bonds is, over his career he still makes outs 70 percent of the time,'' he said. But he hits home runs more often than anyone who has ever lived. Thus the debate. Reiter and a few graduate students spent time over the past two seasons collecting and sorting Bonds' 2001, 2002 and 2003 statistics. In doing his analysis, Reiter took into account the caliber of pitchers who faced Bonds when he walked versus when he was not. He looked at the number of outs and the location of baserunners when Bonds came to the plate. He factored in the quality of the players batting behind Bonds. He ran the numbers through mysterious calculations that had names like "p-values for two-tailed statistical hypothesis tests.'' He found that his hypothesis wasn't far off. There were very few situations in which it was to a team's advantage to walk Bonds. In other words, for the most part, teams gave up more runs when they walked Bonds than when they let him hit. "Yet what we're seeing is teams walking him all the time in every situation,'' Reiter said. "The research runs counter to what managers are doing.'' Do you suppose managers will read the paper Reiter published in January's Baseball Research Journal and change their strategy? Not a chance. Most major- league managers and administrators never even read "Moneyball,'' the best- selling book about how the innovative Oakland A's managed to field a great team without breaking the bank. Baseball is like so much else in life. It's like voting, dating, parenting, dieting: Gut feelings, myth, lore and assumption carry more weight than black-and-white facts. We want to believe what we want to believe. Reiter himself is not immune. As a young man, he turned his baseball devotion to, of all teams, the Boston Red Sox -- who haven't won a championship in almost a century. Perhaps he's counting on the laws of probability to deliver one. More likely, he has hope for the Red Sox for the same reason managers have hope that walking Bonds will neutralize his batting power, the same reason any of us have hope for anything. Against all reason and all objective evidence, it feels like the right thing to do. http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/05/06/BAG6P6GHMM1.DTL ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ©2004 San Francisco Chronicle |