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Susan Slusser had a great piece of news to report to A's fans on Saturday and did so in the San Francisco Chronicle. Her article discussed that things may have changed on the re-signing Hideki Matsui front as Slusser wrote,

"the A's emphasis has turned to going younger and improving scouting and drafting, which might preclude re-signing Matsui, who is 37 and who had erratic production this past season. Interest in Matsui among team officials has waned as the A's continue to wait on a decision from MLB about their stadium situation, a drawn-out process that has created great frustration among Oakland's owners and front-office staff."

Although she walks that statement back a little highlighting Matsui and Bob Melvin's close relationship and such later in the article, this to me is a good sign. Matsui is not needed and though Slusser indicates the DH situation is hazy for the A's in 2012 - and it most certainly is - it is not hazy for a lack of options, such much so as hazy for a lack of good options - adding another bad option to the mix was not the solution. Matsui has had a great career, seems like a good humble guy, etc, but he is a luxury we do not need nor can afford in Oakland - and frankly at this point in his career luxury may be the wrong term altogether.

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First of all, I hate to be critical of Ron Washington because he's pretty much the only thing I like or respect about the Texas Rangers, who have become a smug, gesticulating bunch. Seriously, every time you stand on base and make a ridiculous gesture of sign-language/semaphore/epilepsy, an innocent puppy runs in front of a bus.

But this World Series matched up two managers who have definite strengths, neither one of which is exactly "being a great tactician". Tony LaRussa's is that he is one of the most innovative managers of our time, not afraid to buck convention if he doesn't agree with convention's wisdom. With the infield apparently back, LaRussa will sometimes bring his infield charging in as the pitch is being delivered, or at other times he will play his infield back until there are two strikes but then bring them in when he knows the batter is more defensive and just seeking contact. He has batted his pitcher 8th. This innovation can obscure the tactical blunders he is sometimes prone to, usually when he over-manages and finds himself out of players -- be it in the 20th inning or the 6th game of the World Series.

As for Washington, he is a master motivator and you get the feeling his players would run through a wall for him even if at the most inopportune time they might also slow up at the warning track and forget to catch the would-be final out of the World Series. But a tactical genius Wash is not. In fact, to my eyes he is one of the worst tacticians in baseball and it caught up to Texas this week.

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Good morning, everyone, Happy Friday! Anyone have a great costume for the parties this weekend? Any parties this weekend? I'll be at Knott's Scary Farm tonight and Disneyland tomorrow. What's everyone else up to? Anyone have any pictures of parties they may have been to last weekend? (Ahem.)

Welcome to the last day of the season, otherwise known as the first GAME SEVEN since 2002, in what has been a really, legitimately awesome World Series (unless you are a Rangers' fan). Eventually, we will start dissecting the upcoming 2012 A's season, working the rosters, and figuring out how we can turn a team full of worse-than-league-average hitters into some semblance of a real Major League team.

But today, we're going to talk about managers. Right after I make a comment about Frank McCourt. Like, worst person ever or what? I mean, that's horrible thing to say, even if you believe it's true, and absolutely horrific PR.

SF Gate published a blurb yesterday about Ron Washington, Moneyball, and Billy Beane. Washington is quoted that he's a big fan of Billy Beane and very grateful for his help, I thought this was interesting:

"You know," he [Washington] continued, "I was in Oakland when all of that happened, and to me it was a great movie about a general manager that was hamstrung as far as dollars go, and he had to find players and put them together under a formula that he thought would work."

The last line gave me pause: a formula he thought would work?. Beane's formula did work. The A's competed for years with the richest teams in the league all the way to the playoffs. They had no business winning the number of games they did (and while you can't discount the amazing pitching, the Moneyball philosophy worked for them, as well as it would work for the Red Sox years later). It's a pretty short-sighted opinion that the only measure of success is a seven game series, rather than the prior 162 games. But I digress.

Ron Washington has taken his team to two World Series' in two years. Do you wish Beane/the A's had hired him instead of Geren? Well, that's a no-brainer. Of course, what I mean is would Washington have made any difference in the A's circa 2007-2011?

But, of course, that's not what I really want to know. It's not fair to compare the 2011 A's to the 2011 Rangers, even at Geren's expense. No manager was going to change those teams' destinies this season. What I want to know, is: From what you have seen over the last two years, would Ron Washington have made a difference as the manager of a different, better, A's team? Say...the Oakland A's circa 2001-2006? Is there anything that Washington could have brought to the table that the previous A's managers didn't? Was he the lucky recipient of a fantastic Texas team the last two seasons, or should he be credited with putting it all together? How would you critique Washington's managing style (I'll post my thoughts later in the thread.)? Why didn't Billy hire him, and if he had it to do all over again, would he make the same decision? And if you want a bonus question; would you take La Russa back? How would you critique his playoff performance?

Game time 5:05 PM as we close out the season in St. Louis.

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Game six of the [yawn] St. Louis [yawn] Cardinals versus [yawn] the Texas Rang....zzzzzzzz

EDGE. OF. MY. SEAT.

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Sadly, Game 6 has been postponed until tomorrow. <Bitter.>

I'm unabashedly piggybacking on Dan's excellent post yesterday because I think it deserves much more time than a day on the front page. While my ideal is to blend "traditional", "magical", "unquantifiable" baseball with the best of what statistical analysis has to offer, I have to say that if Dan and the sabermetric crew tells me to use a certain stat to measure offensive performance, I can rest assured that it's the very best, most up-to-date barometer out there, and I should use it.

In layman's terms, yesterday's post exposed the serious flaws of using the trifecta of AVG/HR/RBI as any kind of a measure in offensive performance. And if you've been around AN for any length of time, I would think that you wouldn't argue a point with batting average anyway. It's been a long time since I've seen an argument lean on that stat. And as far as RBI is concerned (and not to be an English snob, but I still consider "Runs Batted In" as a plural, so technically a player should have 100 RBI; despite the cute colloquialism of the word "RBI" in general...but I digress), I think it's the worlds' most useless stat, possibly tied with the stupid "W/L". When you play for a team that scores twice as many runs as any other team in the league, it's no great surprise that you might win a few more games as a pitcher. Likewise, when your team scores twice as many runs as any other team in the league, it's also not surprising that you as a batter, might pick up a few more RBI in the course of the season. So I generally don't care about almost any of the above stats, unless the player is an outlier. Forty homeruns or a batting average of .350 is hard to ignore, from any stat. It's sorting out the rest of the players in the league that's the problem.

Like everyone else yesterday, I was shocked that the RBI stat has been proven to be just as useful (read: useless) as batting average and homeruns in measuring offensive performance. I pegged it as much more irrelevant. And like Dan and everyone else, I have noticed the "player stats" flash up on the screen during this World Series (which is actually everything I have asked for as a baseball fan; I love it), which tells me very little about players I don't know. Several solutions were proposed in yesterday's thread as broadcast replacements for AVG/HR/RBI, and Dan left it with AVG/OBP/SLG, which are comforting, warm and fuzzy to me, and almost as good as more advanced metrics. I know those numbers. I can work with those numbers, and I feel that the average baseball fan could warm up to them as well.

But if you want to know just a little bit more, yesterday Dan and iglew provided the links to weighted on-base average, or wOBA, which is more accurate than OPS, and as Dan put it: The great thing about wOBA is that it's essentially as close to perfect as we can get. It describes total offensive performance in a single number that's both context-neutral and comprehensive.

Here are two links that make sense of this stat:

The Book

SB Nation's Bless You Boys

In a nutshell:

To begin, we should note wOBA is on the same scale as On-Base Percentage, which has become 'mainstream' enough of a statistic that most people are aware that around .335 is league average, .370 is very good and above .400 is elite. Conversely, below .320 is bad and if you're below .300 you're probably employed by the Kansas City Royals.

In not-so-simplistic terms, wOBA measures the total run value of all the singles, doubles, triples, homers, non-intentional walks, hit-by-pitches and the times a player reaches base on errors accumulated by a player.

You don't have to calculate it (and that's a good thing); you can find it at FanGraphs (there's even a built-in calculator for all of your stat-y needs), and right now, that stat probably wins you the argument on AN if the numbers are in your favor. Seriously, take a look. It's not scary; it's kind of fun.

However.

Don't take away my homeruns.

Chicks dig the longball. Homeruns are sexy. And despite Major League trying to sell you on the excitement of the game-winning bunt, there is nothing, nothing more exciting to a baseball crowd than the homerun. I make no judgment call on whether or not Player A is better than Player B from the number of homeruns they hit (hello park difference, league pitchers, skewed divisions, injury time, etc), but damn it all if I don't want to know exactly how many homeruns every player has at all times. Weeks, 2; Sweeney 1, Willingham 29; Matsui, 12; Crisp, 8; Suzuki, 14, Sizemore, 11. I could go on. You want a stat at the top of my head at all times? That's the one.

In this World Series alone, gauge the reactions from fans when Nelson Cruz or Albert Pujols strides to the plate and hits it out to change the game. Absolutely nothing changes a game faster than a homerun. The homerun can take a game that is out of reach and turn it around. I think that homeruns exist not to provide a statistic, but for something entirely different; perhaps bragging rights, entrance to a secret club, or competing with ghosts of players past, and I for one, would sorely miss it if it wasn't a common stat broadcast in every game. You want exciting seasons? Have your players hit 35 or more homeruns. In 2006? Two A's players did. It's been a long five years since. With the homerun in your repertoire, you haven't yet lost a game if you're down 3-0. Bring back the stat; and while you're at it, can you conjure up two more 35 homerun players for the 2012 A's? True, it doesn't lend much credence to a sabermetric argument, but the homerun is sexy. Here's a vote for AVG/OBP/SLG/HR.

Today's exciting game 6 will take place at 5:05PM as the series shifts back to St. Louis. The Cardinals will need all of their fans; they are facing elimination.

Almost all television broadcasts do it. Most stadiums do it. FOX has been doing it all throughout the World Series. In the onscreen graphic that comes up when a batter walks to the plate, you'll always see three numbers, and often, those three numbers only: batting average, home runs, and runs batted in. The limitations of HRs and RBIs compared to modern stats like wOBA are widely known. But exactly how poorly do the traditional Triple Crown stats assess player performance, compared to the sophisticated tools we have now? And how bad are they compared to the also-popular "triple slash" set of stats, AVG/OBP/SLG, which is just as easy as AVG/HR/RBI to use?

A quick aside: The great thing about wOBA is that it's essentially as close to perfect as we can get. It describes total offensive performance in a single number that's both context-neutral and comprehensive. Unlike other advanced stats, it doesn't pick and choose certain attributes to measure, and all of its coefficients are calculated from actual baseball events instead of being conjured out of thin air. It makes for a great baseline we can work from.

So, armed with this knowledge, the Triple Crown stats were easy enough to test. I took every qualified batter season from 2009-2011 and ran correlation tests with batting average, home runs, and runs batted in, compared to wOBA.

Another quick aside: The measuring stick here is R². In a nutshell, R² gives an indication of how much of one statistic's variability can be explained by the other stat, or to give an example, an R² of 0.62 between wOBA and FictionalMadeUpStat says that FictionalMadeUpStat is responsible for up to 62% of what wOBA says. Since we're treating wOBA as our perfect barometer of value, this would say that FictionalMadeUpStat accounts for 62% of player value.

So, the results?

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Game 5 of what is a very exciting World Series will be played tonight.