What Baseball Can Learn from Football

I was thinking about the upcoming Seattle Seahawks Week 17 game, and it got me thinking.  We really need to be clear about something.  

All these fancy new metrics - WAR, UZR, ISO, etc. - need to be used properly. 

These advanced stats are significant breakthroughs, brought to us by technologies such as Pitch F/X as well as tedious labor in terms of tallying batted ball location, positioning of fielders, etc.  Our advanced metrics tell a story more detailed than we've ever had before.  But they don't tell the entire story.

Not even close.

In football, we have advanced stats as well, but not nearly to the extent we have them in baseball.  Relative to football, baseball is sequential, deliberate, constrained and therefore quantifiable.

 

What bothers me heavily about some baseball sabermetricians, however, is that they don't understand the limits of their work.  They have a tendency to throw out, or greatly discount, statements such as "this player is a leader on the field" or "he's great in the community so he takes his work seriously," and instead focus exclusively on the player's wOBA or BB%, or whatever.

But football teaches us something.  Let's think about a random NFL offensive play from scrimmage.  What factors contribute to its success, or failure?  Can we quantify these factors (and therefore forecast future performance of the offensive unit)?

• Strength - this can be quantified, but only in a "laboratory," i.e. a weightroom, where muscle movements differ from those needed on the field
• Speed - similarly, this can only be approximated by proxy tests like the 40-yard dash
• Agility - same comment
• Throwing Accuracy - no, not really, our tests are not comprehensive for all scenarios
• Play Calling Intelligence - plays that work are considered intelligent, those that don't, aren't.  That's a dumb test.
• Effort - I am unaware of any way to quantify how hard someone is trying
• The Weather - temperature and precipitation play a massive role, but the best meteorologists in the world are inaccurate beyond 10 days forward

That's just a few of them.  If you want to get technical, there are millions (billions?) of factors affecting the outcome of a single football play - let alone an entire season - that we have no method of quantifying or forecasting.  We are hopeless, in a lot of ways.

Baseball is the same way.  A given baseball game has many more incalculable factors, than calculable ones.  The balance is probably weighted more towards the incalculable, by several orders of magnitude.

We can use our newfound sabermetric stats to improve forecasting, particularly in the long run.  That's why they're more useful in baseball (long season), than they are in football (very short season).

In the short run, especially a single game like Rams vs. Seahawks, you need to be very, very judicious in how much you expect the advanced stats to reliably predict the future.  You will often be let down.

I like writing about the aspect of baseball that is tangible and calculable, because we can speak definitively about numbers, and we can find amazing truths buried in the reams of data and information that baseball gives us.  But when the Mariners are playing Game 7 of the 2067 World Series*, I'll be throwing a lot of that data into the trash can.

Go Hawks.

*The Mariners suck.