Voros McCracken
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Robert "Vörös" McCracken (born 17 August 1971 in Chicago, Illinois; now residing in Phoenix, Arizona) is a prominent sabermetrician. Vörös is a nickname from his Hungarian heritage, meaning "red," specifically "blood red." He is most widely recognized for his pioneering work on Defense Independent Pitching Statistics (DIPS).
Contents |
[edit] DIPS published
McCracken first publicly disclosed his ideas about DIPS on November 18, 1999 on the rec.sports.baseball newsgroup on Usenet[3], with this announcement and request for advice: "I've been working on a pitching evaluation tool and thought I'd post it here to get some feedback. I call it "Defensive Independent Pitching" and what it does is evaluate a pitcher base[d] strictly on the statistics his defense has no ability to affect. . . ."
McCracken's findings implied that major league pitchers had relatively little control over the outcome of balls put into play against them. Specifically, McCracken found that the percentage of balls put into play against a particular pitcher that fell for hits did not correlate well across seasons. This implied that elements beyond the pitcher's control, including his defense, ballpark effects, the weather, and most importantly, randomness, had significant effects upon his performance. This theory flew in the face of conventional wisdom, but has been confirmed (at least in its simplest form) by many researchers.
His subsequent publication of "Pitchers and Defense: How Much Control Do Hurlers Have?" on the Baseball Prospectus website on January 23, 2001[4][5] sparked immediate intense and broad interest among baseball researchers. The very next day, ESPN baseball writer-analyst Rob Neyer in his widely read ESPN.com column touted McCracken's surprising discovery.[6] After explaining McCracken's findings, including reporting some of his own calculations from the previous years' pitching statistics and describing the aspects of DIPS that were most original, Neyer concluded: "And it seems to me that anyone who wants to project pitcher performance should read McCracken's article, because it'll blow your mind." In his book The Numbers Game, Alan Schwarz writes that McCracken told him “all hell broke loose” after Neyer's column appeared.[1] McCracken received nearly 2,000 emails in the next couple of days and thousands more in the ensuing months.
In his next column on January 26th, Neyer began: "I received an immense amount of mail regarding Wednesday's column, including a pair of messages from 'celebrity sabermetricians' Craig Wright and Bill James." In this long column Neyer incorporated extended quotations from Wright and James. Wright remained "distinctly uncomfortable with McCracken's conclusion," and specifically called attention to the effectiveness of knuckleball pitchers in producing low batting averages on balls in play. James, too, expressed some skepticism but recognized the potential value of McCracken's findings if further research bore them out. He argued that "the research really should be done, for several reasons. First, if McCracken turns out to be correct, this has important consequences, even allowing us, to a certain extent, to predict movements in pitcher's records. . . ."
Although he maintained some reservations about how McCracken's findings were being interpreted by others, James became a convert. In his New Historical Baseball Abstract (2001), James acknowledged that McCracken was correct, that the results were significant, and that James himself felt "stupid for not having realized it 30 years ago."[2]
McCracken continued to refine his new statistic, including addressing the issue of knuckleballers in his DIPS 2.0 in 2002. He published DIPS statistical results as well as extensions and improvements to his initial formulas in other forums, including Baseball Primer (now called Baseball Think Factory) [7] [8] [9].
[edit] Subsequent career
[edit] Red Sox
A year and a half after the publication of his "Pitchers and Defense" article, McCracken's discovery earned him a consulting position with the Boston Red Sox. An important consequence of this was that by early 2003, he ceased publishing revisions of his formulas or updated results. He announced this step with obvious excitement on his website on February 18, 2003[10]:
- "BIG TIME NEWS! 2/18/03: First off I'd like to apologize for the long time between updates. Other projects have dominated my time, and then another bigger project monopolized the rest. Not a good excuse but an excuse nonetheless and the best I can come up with since it's the truth.
- More bad news. There will be no projections released this season. I feel real bad both in the timing and the nature of the announcement, but the fact is, that they aren't coming. Why?
- Because since last October I've been working as a consultant to baseball operations for the Boston Red Sox. It's a dream come true and has already been a tremendous experience for me, and I'm thoroughly excited about the team and the nature of my work with them. The upcoming baseball season [h]as undertaken a whole new dimension for me and I can't wait for it to begin. . . ."
McCracken continued to work for the Red Sox through June 2005.
[edit] DIPS during and after Boston hiatus
What further changes McCracken may have made to DIPS since then have not been made public. However, other baseball researchers have continued to evaluate and to propose refinements to the measure.[3] And McCracken continued to think about how to measure performance in a variety of organized sports, such as international football (American soccer).[4]
[edit] VorosMcCracken.com
On October 25, 2007, McCracken reestablished communication with the baseball research community by introducing a new blog:
- Welcome to vorosmccracken.com!!
- After a long hiatus (about three years) of viewing baseball as not very much fun anymore, I’m back to . . . offer to you my insights on the sport I once analyzed for a living.
- What have I been doing? Watching soccer for the most part and having a damn fine time doing it, I might add. But I now think I was a little hard on the sport that made me famous and then broke. The 2007 season was the first time since 2005 I’ve really followed the sport any, so forgive me if I have some catching up to do.[5]
[edit] References
- ^ Alan Schwarz,The Numbers Game: Baseball’s Lifelong Fascination with Statistics (New York: St. Martin's, 2005)(ISBN 0-312-32223-2).
- ^ Bill James, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (New York: Free Press, 2001): 885. In a later column, Neyer noted the impact of McCracken's discovery on James' subsequent work: Rob Neyer, "Teams Have Most Success in 'Runs Prevented'," ESPN.com (July 3, 2002)[1]. For a recounting of McCracken's discovery and its influence on baseball analysis, see Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (New York: Norton, 2003): 234-243.
- ^ Perhaps the most trenchant critique has been presented by Tom Tippett, in his 2003 article "Can Pitchers Prevent Hits on Balls in Play?"[2]. Other evaluations and critiques can be found at DIPS.
- ^ For example, see this intervention on BigSoccer.com in a discussion of "Sabermetrics Applying to Soccer": http://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showthread.php?t=63798.
- ^ Welcome to vorosmccracken.com!!
[edit] Links to sources and works
- VorosMcCracken.com
- Baseball Digest Daily
- McCracken's Home Page
- DIPS Intro (1999)
- Pitching and Defense: How Much Control Do Hurlers Have? (2001)
- Mailbag: Pitching and Defense (2001)
- Neyer columns on DIPS (2001)
- DIPS Version 2.0 (2002)
- DIPS Version 2.0 Formula (2002)
- DIPS and its correlation with ERA for the following year (2002)
- The Great Debate (2005)
