Pod Insights Freakonomics Radio 8. Who Stole All the Runs in Major League Baseball? About this episode It was a pretty good baseball season -- especially if you're a fan of the Yankees, Rays, Twins, Rangers, Reds, Braves, Phillies, or Giants, all of whom made the playoffs. But the post-season just opened with a telling event, a no-hitter pitched by the Phillies' Roy Halladay, which shows what's been missing all season: runs.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:46 Stephen J. Dubner? Which begs the question, why not apply it to other aspects of life? Like banking, for example. Well, PNC Bank did, since its inception, proving time and again that the best banking strategy isn't the exciting type, but the steady, reliable, definitely-not-YOLO type. PNC Bank: brilliantly boring since 1865. Brilliantly boring since 1865 is a registered mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. PNC Bank, National Association, Member FDIC. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Hotels.com. Hotels.com helps you find and book the right stay for work faster.
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2:30 Stephen J. Dubner? So Levitt, you're a guy who loves to catch cheaters. And it's October, which means the baseball playoffs are starting. Tell me what you know about the time-honored tradition of stealing signs from the other team.
2:42 Speaker 01 So I was talking with the Chicago White Sox about a number of different ways in which we could use data to better their baseball operations. And the thing that was most interesting to me was stealing signs. And I told them that I was certain that I could do a great job stealing signs and they could use that to their benefit.
3:03 Stephen J. Dubner? Now, why was that so interesting to you?
3:05 Speaker 01 Just that I like, I like to catch cheaters, but it's kind of, it's fun to cheat, too. It's fun to know that you can cheat. It'd be, it'd be fun for me to be sitting at home watching a baseball game and, and to have, be able to watch what the catcher was doing and say to my kids, hey, look, that next pitch is going to be a curveball. Or even better, to get on the phone to the dugout and say, hey, just wanted to let you guys know they're using Signal version C today. And so if you get a guy on base, that'll tell you what's being done.
3:35 Stephen J. Dubner? So you wanted to steal signs for the White Sox. You didn't want to catch other teams stealing their signs?
3:39 Speaker 01 I wanted to engage in the intellectual activity of, of understanding how to steal signs. Now, whether anyone actually stole any signs or not didn't really matter. I just thought it'd be fun to figure out how to steal signs, like code breaking, okay? World War II kind of stuff.
4:03 Speaker 02 Today on Freakonomics Radio, cracking the code on the national pastimes' new obsession with leather. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.
4:26 Stephen J. Dubner? This year, the number of runs scored in Major League Baseball was at an 18-year low, 1,105 fewer runs than last year. That's 1,105 guys who, instead of crossing the plate and scoring one more run to tell their grandkids about, instead had to jog back to the dugout, chin down. On the other hand, that means there were 1,105 times when the pitcher didn't kick in the Gatorade cooler.
4:52 Speaker 03 The 1-1. Santiago, it's a fly ball to right. He's gonna get it. Zeldrus makes the catch in this game.
4:59 Stephen J. Dubner? In the early part of the season, there was a flurry of no-hitters and even two perfect games, what should have been a third but got erased by a bad call.
5:07 Speaker 03 The first no-hitter in Rays' history.
5:08 Stephen J. Dubner? Some people were already calling it "The Year of the Pitcher."
5:11 Speaker 04 Two out, nobody on, ninth inning. And Braden turns, he throws, and it's swung on a ground ball to short. Taken there, Pennington's got it. He throws.
5:20 Speaker 03 A perfect pitch. Hit toward third. Castro has it. Spins, fires. A perfect game! Roy Hallen has thrown the second perfect game in Philadelphia.
5:32 Stephen J. Dubner? The old timers said not to get too excited, that scoring would heat up in the summertime, as it always does. But, when the season ended, the run totals were still way down. So here's a simple question for you: Where did all those runs go? There's a surprising truth buried deep in the numbers, where only guys like Mitchell Liptman can find them.
5:56 Speaker 05 OK, so we have a zone rating that came into fruition about 20 years ago. And zone rating is basically the number of balls that a fielder fields successfully.
6:12 Stephen J. Dubner? The thing about baseball, about all sports really, but baseball particularly, is that it comes with its own crop of fans turned scientists, people who analyze the game as if they were decoding the human genome. Mitchell Lichtman is a proud member of this stat geek squad. Like a lot of them, he spent some time working for a major league baseball club. In his case, the St. Louis Cardinals.
6:35 Speaker 05 Basically, what I do is I look at how hard a ball is hit, exactly what area on the field a ball is hit, go through five or six years' worth of data, and I figure out how often for every type of batted ball, the average fielder at each position fields that ball successfully. And then we compare that to how often a particular player at that position fields each of those balls successfully. And then we come up with a number which represents how good of a fielder that particular player is at that particular position.
7:13 Stephen J. Dubner? Wow. Think about what Lichtman's saying. Five or six years' worth of data for every outcome on every type of batted ball. That's what people are willing to go through to gain the slightest advantage in a high-stakes enterprise like baseball. They measure every input, every output, every action on the diamond that can possibly be expressed in numbers. Numbers that tell you who wins and why, that tell you which players are worth how much and which ones are a bad bet. They look at baseball very much the way an economist, like Steve Levitt, looks at the rest of the world. So let's think about this baseball mystery on our hands, the case of the missing runs. Where's the first place you'd look for them?
7:57 Stephen J. Dubner? I know the first place I'd look is cheating, or more specifically, the lack of cheating. That is, the end of the steroids era.
8:16 Stephen J. Dubner? In just a minute, we'll hear what Steve Levitt has to say about steroids. Plus, straight from the San Diego Padres dugout, manager Bud Black, a former pitcher, explains why pitchers aren't everything.
8:38 Stephen J. Dubner? Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Southern New Hampshire University. There's no hiding how convenient Southern New Hampshire University makes college. They offer over 80 career-focused graduate programs online. Classes have no set meeting times, so you can balance life and learning, and online tuition rates are some of the lowest in the country, making it all a little more manageable. A school this willing to work with you is worth the investment. Visit SNHU.edu/freakonomics to learn more.
9:09 Stephen J. Dubner? Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Hotels.com. Hotels.com helps you find and book the right stay for work faster. With business preferences, save your travel must haves, like gym access or breakfast, just once, then get tailored results whenever you search for work travel. Plus, with a free membership, you can save up to 20% on hotels and earn rewards on every stay for future travel. Book now at hotels.com. Visit hotels.com for details.
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10:14 Speaker 02 Hey fans, we're back with Freakonomics Radio from WNYC and American Public Media. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.
10:21 Stephen J. Dubner? So this theory is simple. Steroids helped turn great baseball players into even greater ones, hitting previously unthinkable numbers of home runs. Then came the scandals, the grand jury indictments busted reputations, and new rules that banned performance-enhancing drugs and increased testing. So it would make sense that players are backing away from steroids, becoming smaller, more human, and that is leading to less superhuman statistics, right? Steve Levitt isn't so sure.
10:52 Speaker 01 So twice in the past decade, I have really tried to find evidence that steroids matter in baseball. And both times, I invested a lot of effort and ended up finding no evidence that steroids mattered.
11:12 Stephen J. Dubner? It sounds hard to believe, but Levitt just isn't convinced that steroids helped all that much, which doesn't mean the players didn't have an incentive to use them.
11:20 Speaker 01 The stakes are high. In a world in which being a big homerun hitter is worth millions and millions of dollars, and performance-enhancing drugs are cheap, and you think you're unlikely to be detected, well, even if you're not sure whether they work or not, you'd probably use them anyway. It makes sense. It makes sense to try to do it.
11:37 Stephen J. Dubner? Here's a strange fact. The year steroids testing began, run scoring actually went up. There are a couple more confounding clues. In the minor leagues this year, run scoring is higher, even though they also have steroids testing. Also, in the majors, the run decline has come almost exclusively in the American League, even though testing there is the same as in the National League. So if all those runs didn't evaporate along with the steroids, what else might be happening?
12:09 Speaker 03 You're out of there.
12:11 Stephen J. Dubner? This brings us to the year of the pitcher theory. Let's go back to Mitchell Lichtman. He does believe that steroids helped hitters a lot. But, he points out, pitchers also use steroids. In fact, more than half the suspended players were pitchers. So, maybe steroids were more valuable to hitters than they were to pitchers. And now that everyone's on a level playing field, theoretically at least, could that be leading to pitcher domination? But wait a minute. If pitchers are so dominant, they should be striking out a lot more batters, right? The data tell a different story. The data tell us that pitchers aren't striking out more batters than they used to. In fact, they're not doing anything better than they used to.
12:54 Stephen J. Dubner? That leads us to our prime suspect: fielding. Here's Lichtman again.
13:01 Speaker 05 There's probably more of an emphasis in the post-steroid era of players that have speed and defense as a primary attributes, rather than hitting, slugging, hitting home runs, that sort of thing.
13:16 Stephen J. Dubner? Statisticians like Lichtman have invented a bunch of new metrics that help isolate what the pitcher does and what the fielders do. Stats like defensive efficiency, fielding-independent pitching, or FIP if you're a seamhead, and ultimate zone rating, or UZR. And if you look at those numbers, the answer is pretty clear. It's the fielders who've stolen all those runs.
13:40 Speaker 05 One of the reasons that teams are, some teams are focusing on defense and defensive evaluation using these advanced metrics is because it's overall, it's an undervalued commodity in baseball.
13:54 Stephen J. Dubner? An undervalued commodity. Anyone who's ever read Moneyball knows that a batter's on-base percentage used to be the undervalued commodity. Used to be. Then, the market caught up. Today, with fewer runs being scored and winning margins smaller, keeping runs off the scoreboard has become a bigger priority. That's great news if you're a good fielder who doesn't happen to hit so well. And that would describe Doug Glanville, who played nine seasons in the big leagues with three different teams. He ended his career with 293 consecutive games without an error.
14:32 Speaker 06 Well, I do think it's sort of a natural phenomenon in the game of baseball. It's a very cyclical sport. You go through times of different points of emphasis, the way offense is played, where defense is played. And so you'll see a cycle where there's some years you got a lot, you know, stolen bases as a priority, speed and defense. Obviously, the steroid era brought to light a lot of the emphasis on power numbers. And I think part of the cycle and adjustment coming off of this power game is now people are trying to pitch. They call it pitching to contact, trying to make sure that you use your defenders behind you and also catch the ball. So especially now with the power numbers down, it's even more important to win ball games to play defense.
15:14 Stephen J. Dubner? Let's stop for a minute and say this. Yes, run scoring is down, but it's hard to say exactly why. Some combination, maybe, of fewer steroids, good pitching, better fielding. Some people think the ball itself has changed. That's an argument baseball fans have every decade or so. Also, stadiums change. There's the brand-new Target Field, where the Minnesota Twins play, and where home runs have been much less plentiful than in the Twins' old home, the Metrodome. But whatever the reason, runs are scarcer than they used to be. Five years from now? Who knows? The game has cycles. Circumstances change, incentives change, and in response, people change their behavior. I can't predict how.
15:59 Stephen J. Dubner? All I can tell you is that baseball players will continue to play baseball and generate mountains of data for people like Mitchell Lichtman and Steve Levitt to sift through. You never know what they'll do with all those data, of course. You remember Levitt's scheme to break the code for his hometown Chicago White Sox?
16:18 Speaker 01 So, a few years later, I happened to be playing golf with a former Major League Baseball player, probably a future Hall of Famer. And I told him about the various analyses I've done of baseball, and I found that pitchers don't randomize properly and whatnot. And I must say, this guy could not have been much less interested in any of the things that I'd done. And then I just kind of threw in an offhand manner that I thought that I might be able to steal signs.
16:53 Speaker 01 And he said, steal signs. No, that's something more interesting. So I told him the story about the White Sox. And he said, oh, well, I know why the White Sox weren't interested in stealing signs. It's because Ozzy Guillen, the manager, he's the best sign stealer in the entire world. He doesn't need your help. Nobody steals signs better than Ozzy Guillen does. But I will say that this gentleman was very interested in enlisting my services to try to steal signs for another club. And so hopefully, coming soon to a ballpark near you will be the Steve Levitt Sign Stealing Show.
17:35 Speaker 02 Freakonomics Radio is a co-production of WNYC, American Public Media, and Dubner Productions. Our lineup for this episode, leading off, Christina Russo, producer in left field out in California, batting second, Ethan Lindsay, our marketplace-based producer, Michael Rayfield is the man behind the plate who mixes our show, and batting cleanup, executive producer Colin Campbell. We want to give a big shout out to Hayes Davenport, who pinch-hit is our stats guy on this episode. Subscribe to this podcast on iTunes and you'll get the next episode in your sleep. Go to FreakonomicsRadio.com to read and hear more about the hidden side of everything.
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