The War on Stats (Part Two)

Derek Zumsteg

Note: This article is Part Two of a substantial re-working of "Sabermetrics and +175," which originally appeared on Rob Neyer's website as a Guest Shot, and has been corrected, revised, and shortened for publication here. Part One appeared last week.

This is going to play out a lot like the fall of Napster -- a tool with legal and illegal applications, like say, VCRs and thong underwear, but because of Napster's association with the illegal activities, it was crushed. Similarly, sabermetrics, which has greatly advanced our understanding of how to better watch, play, and win at baseball, will be associated with this gambling use and vigorously persecuted.

And like Napster, the ill-written story that describes how to do it will drive a new wave of bettors, frothing at the mouth for this new edge, to any tool mentioned in the story, and they'll use it to look for the wrong kind of data -- streaks, most likely.

Once the story breaks, Major League Baseball will say it condemns sports betting in any form, that this is a dangerous new venue that needs to be addressed. They'll pressure media sources not only to not cover how these things can be done, but to not carry those sorts of statistics, saying they encourage gambling. This seems like a leap in active content control, but baseball has already taken steps to consolidate and control the coverage of their sport, consolidated all the team pages (putting itself in the business of providing content, both in the form of articles and streaming broadcasts).

Pressure is now being applied to teams to not allow web journalists access to the press box unless they're tied to established media entities, like ESPN.com or CBS Sportsline.com. This means that while independent analysis and commentary can exist on the Web, it will always operate at a marked disadvantage to the established players. And as it consolidates, it uses its power to control image and influence discussion -- MLB.com will not carry content on any player that's negative, and carries front page stories on how the Twins' second-half decline is due to their small-market status.

Baseball is a huge and influential monopoly, and if it's willing to pretend that contraction's an option for purposes of labor negotiations, there's no telling what it would do if it felt gambling was on the rise. They have always seen it as threatening the game's integrity and reacted accordingly, dealing harsh and swift punishment to those involved in gambling scandals, from the earliest days of team-wide conspiracies to Pete Rose.

Baseball could well attack or buy out statistics services like STATS, Inc., and force them into a subscription model that requires credentials. People who want dangerous stats would be forced to compile them from box scores, which could be blocked as reproductions of copyrighted events. It sounds silly, but if you,d told me years ago that the MPAA would file and win lawsuits against people who even talked about DVD encryption, I'd have thought that was ludicrous.

Interestingly, football once faced a similar question about what to do with gamblers, and embraced them, going so far as to implement rules to help the average gambler (specifically, injury list publication rules on who may, might, and won't play in the next game). Baseball has always held the hard line, purporting their desire to maintain purity and at once bound by their need to maintain a line against Rose, who hangs around as a constant reminder of the dangers associated with gambling.

The sports media will be caught in a bind, between a new, huge, interested population looking for exactly the kind of coverage MLB is trying to discourage. I think they'll initially pay lip service to baseball, but at the same time working more and more useful information into broadcasts, but if MLB got aggressive and threatened to pull press credentials, they would force the issue and win. Fox Sports regional affiliates carry a huge load of baseball games already and are owned by all-the-way-to-the-right-of-the-dial News Corp, who'd likely love to pick up the slack.

Either way, in order to make this look good, networks would let their sports commentators loose, and the traditionalists will seize on this new development and tie it to their burning resentment of statheads in general. We'll see them shake their heads, sigh, and remind fans that it's all about enjoying the game, and not about statistics or gambling. There'll be all kinds of nasty asides ("... and the Pirates bullpen is 0-5 in games on turf with a full moon, but don't bet on that. "Don't bet on anything, folks. Thanks, Tim").

It's important to realize that baseball is not going to wage a war against the gambling industry, but on sports books, and the casinos that offer them. This is an important distinction. The tribal casinos that buy ad space and run acres of video slots, the card room that buys ad space in a program, these guys aren't baseball's chosen enemy because baseball regards roulette, black jack, and keno as fun family activities. And even if gambling addiction wrecks homes, it's at least better than tobacco advertising.

Baseball has already drawn a distinction in what it believes is good and bad gambling, and sports books are as far on the bad side as it gets. They'll have no reservations about trying to crush their perceived enemies, and if it means misinformation and hysteria, so be it. This is an industry, after all, that would have you believe they're all losing money and need sparkling new stadiums.

We should expect to see them supported by the kind of hysterical reaction. Gambling shares a dark-cloud taint with drugs that scares people into acting stupidly. Gambling is another vice, another addictive behavior that can be enjoyed, like delicious alcohol, or can destroy lives, like delicious alcohol. Through some arbitrary sorting through history society decided gambling was bad, except for state lotteries. Beer okay (up to a alcohol volume determined state-by-state), but pot illegal everywhere, even where the people have voted otherwise.

Gambling carries with it unique taint, though, which is that it brings forth visions of the world of crime and gangsters, of Pete Rose and his bad-hair friends running baseball bets from the clubhouse. Alcohol doesn't have this problem anymore -- and the gang wars of the 1920s are now seen as some sort of indulgence, instead of a time where ill-advised Puritanism created sustainable organized crime we're still not free of, in much the same way the War on Drugs has eroded our civil rights, imprisoned our population, and destroyed cities. Drugs, of course, have the same sort of taint, which makes employing those means okay.

I expect to see Families against Runs Created, the National Anti-Sabermetric League (NASL), and a thousand other organizations, popping up and lobbying networks to not offer that kind of child-endangering information, to keep baseball a game the whole family can go to without fear of being sucked into a seedy underworld of bookies and broken shins, writing angry, half-literate letters to the editor, and trying to get their local teams to take a strong stance against this stats-based gambling, before it goes too far.

"Won't somebody think of the children?" people will ask local news cameras.

And they'll be supported by every player and coach in baseball in interviews. We'll see managers blame everything on the second-guessing by people who play the numbers game, and who should go back to playing video poker. Questions about specific stats may be waved off with a dismissive "what, did you wager on this?"

Gambling interests, be they sports books or casinos in general, will regard this at first neutrally -- the shift is reflected in the handicap, and as the balance swings back towards ignorance, removed. But they have a huge PR budget, and that's money they don't hesitate to spin. When something threatens the industry, be it ill-advised tax revisions, or legislation that bans thinking about online gambling, they break out the lobbyists and the money, and the problem goes away.

In this case, though, they'll just watch. Because the people who are gambling, even the ones that are winning, are the ones that pay to keep the electricity flowing, and in the long run, bookmakers are in the risk-mitigation business, and cracking down on stats isn't going to make their margins any wider or thinner. Sports betting isn't a huge source of income, but it's a good one, because a guy who bets on Opening Day is pretty likely to come in nearly every day to bet all the way through.

If the pressure becomes too great, though -- if there's legislation to ban sports books entirely, or similarly ill-guided sweeping legislation ala the Digital Millennium Copyright Act -- I expect lawyers, lobbyists, and other spawn of Satan to come swarming out of the desert and leave Congress richer, fatter, and the bills dead in committee. But that wouldn't take the pressure away from the media outlets and baseball itself.

On the media front, however, quality baseball analysis could well be crushed entirely in the next five years, reduced to a few exiles from the mainstream trying to shout the truth over tall, well-constructed walls.

The best chance to avert this is to get stats into the mainstream fast, to vaccinate public opinion. I'm not optimistic that this is going to happen. The first Baseball Abstract authored by Bill James came out almost two decades ago, but my local newspapers still sort players by batting average. I can count on one hand the baseball organizations that understand and apply something as elementary as park effects. Few (such as the Oakland Athletics) are run with something approaching organizational intelligence, with a philosophy that's carried out through the farm system.

From those teams, it can spread -- the A's broadcast team offers on-base percentage for batters, a stat I'll see once in five games watching Mariners games. And the A's have built a successful organization on very little money, a model that begs to be imitated, and when others who are adopting their model, like San Diego, start to validate their methods, smart ownership groups are going to start hiring statheads for front office positions. If that happens fast enough, if the "good uses of analysis" become widespread before the gambling story breaks, we may be saved.

I'm not optimistic.

about the author

Derek Zumsteg appears regularly at baseballprospectus.com, which will become an underground band of freedom fighters if the above scenario comes to pass. Ask if they'll get to wear cool black berets at dmz@strikethree.com.