Of Aliens, Monkeys and Haloes

Dave Paisley

The term alien possession has been widely used to refer to mediocre or worse baseball players performing in an unnaturally great fashion. I really like the term, but, like Scott Adams with reverse telecommuting⁽¹⁾, I have to acknowledge that someone else came up with it first. I don't know who it was, but it wasn't me. So thanks, whoever you are.

Just over a week into the season, we already have a couple of candidates for alien possession of the year (Kevin Stocker, Derek Jeter, Jose Offerman -- who said money doesn't motivate?) However, early season alien possession is linked to another, more subtle, as yet unnamed phenomenon. For lack of a better term, I'll call it the halo effect.

Suppose you have a middle-of-the-road decent ballplayer on your team who has routinely turned in a .750 OPS (say, .330 OBP and .420 SLG.) With those numbers, let's hope he's not a major part of your offense, more likely a second baseman or left fielder. Let's look at our hypothetical player, or "Scrub 1" as I refer to him affectionately.

Here's a table of Scrub 1's performance in a hypothetical season. The first line shows an alien possession-like first 100 at-bats, about a month's worth. The second line shows his total season numbers, and the remaining line shows what the last 400 AB looked like once the first 100 alien AB are subtracted.

Looking at the middle line first, the total season numbers, we see the basic .330/.420/.750 values for OBP/SLG/OPS, where OPS (On-base Plus Slugging) is simply the first two added together. Then in the first line, we see that our stellar scrub has had himself an awesome first month. 40 hits, five doubles, five home runs and a dozen walks. Not only do his "stathead" stats look great, so does his batting average at .400.

 

Scrub 1	AB	H	2B	3B	HR	BB	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS
Early Season	100	40	5	0	5	12	.400	.464	.600	1.064
Total Season	500	131	25	0	18	51	.262	.330	.420	.750
Remainder	400	91	20	0	13	39	.228	.296	.375	.671

 
However, unless this is a player with a history of stellar offense, this amazing feat is more than likely just the random occurrence of a hot streak near the beginning of the season. But think of what Joe Fan is likely to think of this guy. All of sudden, he thinks this is the second coming of Babe Ruth and starts attributing all kinds of new offensive skills to good ol' Scrub 1. Radio commentators reinforce this notion with tales of off-season conditioning and oddball behavior:

"Well, Jim, Scrub 1 was telling me the other day how he only drank water out of the toilet in the off-season. He said if it was good enough for his dog, it's good enough for him... it  really seems to have lifted his game to another level."

And other such blather. Naive fans eat this up with big spoons, and the tale is spread over water cooler conversations at work, where more casual fans repeat the nonsense. In fact, Scrub 1 has probably had similar hot streaks in the past, but probably later in the season, when it's not to so easy to see the numbers change unless you pore over the tiny print stats in the back of Baseball Weekly.

After the hot start, though, Scrub 1 usually falls back into his old ways. The pixie dust wears off, and at the end of the season his numbers look just like they always did - .750 OPS, .262 BA. What the fan never notices is that for the last 80% of the season, Scrub 1 was just horrible, with a .228 BA, and a .296/.375/.671 OBP/SLG/OPS. That's pretty nasty. Let's say he manages to keep those numbers pretty even over those last 400 AB. After the hot start with the .400 BA, his average drops to .314 after 200 AB, .285 after 300 AB, .271 after 400 AB, finally ending up at .262 at the end of the season as indicated in the table.

Again, all Joe Fan notices is the batting average posted on the scoreboard when Scrub 1 gets up to bat, and that average only slowly declines from the hot start to the final mediocrity. So even though Scrub 1 ends the season totally average, the hot start lingers on in the memory of Joe Fan and Scrub 1 is credited with being much better than he actually was. And there's the halo effect.

So if there is a "halo effect", is there a "reverse halo effect," I hear you ask. Well, yes there is. Consider Scrub 1's teammate, Scrub 2.
 

Scrub 2	AB	H	2B	3B	HR	BB	AVG	OBP	SLG	OPS
Early Season	100	20	1	0	1	12	.200	.286	.240	.526
Total Season	500	131	25	0	18	51	.262	.330	.420	.750
Remainder	400	111	24	0	17	39	.278	.342	.465	.807

Poor Scrub 2 couldn't hit his way out of a paper bag in April, batting a brutal .200 with little power. Note that he ends the season with identical numbers to Scrub 1, though, which means he performs quite nicely over the remainder of the season.

After 200 AB, the average has crept up to .239, after 300 AB, it's .252, after 400 it's .258, until Scrub 2 hits .262 at the end of the year. But Joe Fan's perception of Scrub 2 is very different from his perception of Scrub 1. In his mind, Scrub 2 "struggled" all year. So instead of a halo, it was more like Scrub 2 had a monkey on his back.

In this case, where the two players end the season with identical records, the Joe Fan may actually notice that they had similar years, but if there's even a small discrepancy in the final numbers, the halo and monkey effects would linger.

Fan perception and the perceptions of managers, GMs and agents may not be the same. However, most "baseball people" don't seem to get even basic statistics, so I doubt that they'd really stop to consider the subtle mental effects of these perceptions. It can be very important early in a player's career to avoid monkey syndrome, while halo effect has propelled some players into regular playing time they flat out don't deserve.

So keep an eye out for haloes and monkeys in the next few weeks - we'll see if we can identify a few Scrub 1s and Scrub 2s.

(1) Reverse telecommuting: unlike normal telecommuting, where you do normal office work at home, reverse telecommuting is where you take home stuff to work. For instance, balancing your checkbook and reading strikethree.com while at work would be classified as reverse telecommuting.

about the author

Dave Paisley loves the way John Mabry runs. Except the speed, and perhaps the length of stride. And the lack of any kind of jump. Explain that Dave may want to use the word "hates" instead.