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Burnett's Struggles Are Physical, Not Mental

Posted by Moshe Mandel at 5:00 pm 6 Responses »
Jun 172010

One silly media narrative that I have always hated is the idea that inconsistent athletes struggle due to some sort of mental deficiency rather than a simple lack of talent. The issue came up this morning, when Joel Sherman stated the following in a column:

It was craft vs. daft. Moyer, the pitcher with the greatest ratio of least stuff to most savvy, discombobulated the Yankees without topping 81 mph. Burnett, the pitcher with the greatest ratio of most stuff to least savvy, single-handedly revived the reeling Phillies with a combination of inaccuracy, indifference and ineptness that would have made Oliver Perez proud….

Can you imagine if you could put Moyer’s brain in Burnett’s head? You would have fewer tattoos, a higher pitching IQ and an ace. Instead, Burnett is what he is: the Lamar Odom of baseball, a player who fails to maximize awesome skills due to a lack of concentration and daily conviction.

AJ Burnett’s struggles have nothing to do with a lack of conviction, effort, or concentration. They are attributable to a lack of skill.

Burnett has some of the best “stuff” in all of baseball, which leads people to believe that he is as skilled as some of the aces that grace the mound around baseball, such as Doc Halladay or Justin Verlander. Once one makes that assumption, it is easy to take the next logical step and believe that he simply does not try as hard as they do or focus as well as they do and therefore is not as successful. However, this house of cards is built upon a faulty foundation, as it ignores the fact that command and control are both physical skills of pitching.

Being able to locate the ball and throw strikes where you want them on a consistent basis requires incredible precision, something that AJ Burnett is simply not equipped for. He has trouble consistently repeating his delivery, not for a lack of trying but because it is quite difficult, particularly for a pitcher of his height and build, and he is not physically gifted enough to do so. While his stuff compares favorably to that of anybody in the game today, his subpar command and control and his limited repertoire mean that an off-day for even one of his pitches can lead to a difficult outing.

Even if Burnett does lose focus at times, his struggles have little to do with conviction. He can go to the mound with complete focus and want so very badly to throw strikes, yet some nights it will be to no avail. He has physical limitations that make him a solid #2 starter rather than an ace, and people need to stop psychoanalyzing him after every run of poor starts.

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Discussion: Can We Really Judge A Player's Effort?

Posted by Moshe Mandel at 7:00 pm 5 Responses »
Feb 162010


Last week, I wrote a post about aversive racism in sports analysis. In the post, I provided an example in the perceived effort levels of Dustin Pedroia and Robinson Cano, and suggested that it is almost impossible for us to judge whether a player cares and is giving his all. Mets pitcher John Maine, in an interview with Matt Cerrone, touched on this same issue:

John Maine: I think, especially here in New York, you see a lot of negative things in the papers and you see a lot of negative things from the fans. I personally don’t mind it, I know they want to win… But, they’ve got to realize that we want to win too. We are not going out there to try and lose. We are not going out there to try to give up a home run. We are not trying to boot balls. We’re not trying to lose 100 games. We are out there to try and win too. Even if somebody has a bad week or a bad month, it’s not a reflection on their personality. They are good guys and we are out there busting our butts. Sometimes it’s just doesn’t happen… We are out there trying to win for us and the fans.

Matthew Cerrone: I notice some fans who feel certain players don’t try hard enough…

John Maine: Try harder? Why don’t I try to maybe throw harder? That makes no sense. We do care.

Maine is speaking very strongly here while emphasizing a point that was discussed in last year’s RAB article that spawned my racism post. In that article, Joe built off the following two quotes, one from a post I had written, and one from RJ Anderson of DRays Bay. Here is mine:

Unless a player is obviously dogging it, it is impossible to discern whether a player is giving his all by watching on television. We can try and interpret the events on the field, but ultimately, we just do not have enough information about the player’s level of preparation, will to improve, or willingness to try new things. Usually, a player who is not performing or is making the same errors repeatedly is trying to change, but cannot execute. Does anyone truly believe that these players are satisfied with failure on the largest stage for baseball in the world? The assumption should be that the players are attempting to avoid failure unless they clearly show otherwise.

And here is RJ’s:

Imagine practicing an instrument nearly every single day since you were 12-years-old. For more than half your life, all you know is playing that instrument. You play some concerts, some shows at a club, and as it turns out, people like you. The club starts paying you upfront and things look great, but you’ve been doing this for 12+ years. What drives you to continue? It wasn’t the money until recently; it isn’t the fame because you have little. Is it the desire to master the craft?

Upton has put in more hours at a baseball field than most of us will our entire lives. By suggesting that he doesn’t care about the game you’re suggesting that most of his life is irrelevant to him. I suppose it could be true, but why the hell would he continue to play if he hated and was disinterested by it?

All of these excerpts point towards a single conclusion: as fans, we should assume that players are trying unless we have convincing evidence to the alternative. Robinson Cano provides a perfect example of a guy who has been bitten by the propensity for fans to judge a player’s effort by one or two plays rather than looking at his entire profile. He is a guy who has gotten a reputation for being lazy despite constantly showing willingness to work on his craft during his “free time.” Cano certainly cares, yet any instance in a 162 game season where it does not look like he is giving every ounce of energy to beat out a ground ball serves to reinforce this false reputation.

I am not suggesting that every player goes all out on every play, because that is simply not a realistic expectation. It is possible, and likely, that a player will have days where he is just not feeling it and simply cannot reach down and find an extra bit of energy to help the team. But to conclude that there are players who are generally lazy or do not care based upon the little information that we can glean from our couches seems irresponsible to me. As Maine stated, they do care.

Do you agree? Are you more confident in our abilities to judge effort? Chime in below.

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The "This Guy Is Not Trying" Fallacy

Posted by Moshe Mandel at 10:58 am 14 Responses »
Sep 102009

Often, fans see a player that constantly makes the same mistakes and assumes that the player is not trying, or is too stubborn to change his ways. This line of thinking has led many fans to become incredibly frustrated with Joba Chamberlain. After he allowed four of the first five hitters to reach in last night’s game, fans on many of the blogs I frequent were echoing that familiar refrain: “I am really sick of Joba. He is really showing no effort or inclination to get better. He is just stubborn and unwilling to change.” This is a ridiculous fallacy, as we really know very little about what is going on in a player’s head or behind the scenes.

Unless a player is obviously dogging it, it is impossible to discern whether a player is giving his all by watching on television. We can try and interpret the events on the field, but ultimately, we just do not have enough information about the player’s level of preparation, will to improve, or willingness to try new things. Usually, a player who is not performing or is making the same errors repeatedly is trying to change, but cannot execute. Does anyone truly believe that these players are satisfied with failure on the largest stage for baseball in the world? The assumption should be that the players are attempting to avoid failure unless they clearly show otherwise.

This brings me to Joba Chamberlain. He wants to get better, and the notion that he is not trying is not supported by anything but his lack of performance. He is not throwing strikes because he is not confident in his stuff and is afraid of getting hit. We can shout “Just Throw Strikes!!!!” at the television all we want, but it is much easier said than done. He wants to throw strikes, he just does not believe in himself enough at this point to do so. He therefore nibbles at the edges, trying to avoid the fat part of the bat. His shaking off the catcher stems from the same issue. He just does not have confidence in the pitches that the catcher is calling for. This is a less drastic version of the problem Clay Buccholz dealt with for a while, where he was so afraid to throw the next pitch that he would check on the runner at first an inordinate amount of times so as to delay having to come to the plate.

Are these guys not trying to improve? Are they satisfied with their failures? Of course not. It is not a matter of effort for Joba. It is a matter of execution.

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Thinking About Effort

Posted by Moshe Mandel at 10:15 am No Responses »
Jun 192009

One of the issues that was raised over at RAB following the Yankees awful loss against the Nationals last night was the perception that the team gave a poor effort or was not prepared to play. When a vastly superior club loses to an inferior team, the typical reaction is to search for answers past the talent on the field. The thinking is that if one team is that much more skilled than the other, it must be something external to talent, such as a lack of effort, that led to the poor result. Couple that with two poor offensive performances, and suddenly the team looks like they are not trying.

I believe that it is impossible for us to sit in our homes and judge effort. There were no plays over the last two games that exhibited a lack of hustle or laziness. Rather, the team took a bad approach to two pitchers they had never seen before, reacting to a pitcher throwing strikes by swinging early in at bats. That may make sense against Johan Santana, but with Craig Stammen, you want to force him to throw as many pitches as possible, as a mistake is sure to come. This poor approach led to two consecutive nights of poor at-bats and quick innings, made even more frustrating by the fact that the Yankees only allowed 3 runs in each game. However, struggles at the plate are likely to make any team look slow and listless. As fans, it makes us feel like nothing is happening, which we very quickly equate with not trying. When the team pitches poorly but tears the cover off the ball and loses, we have no such reaction, because a team scoring 10 runs never looks listless, even if they are playing just as poorly as the Yankees did last night.

Quite frankly, unless I hear or see something to the contrary, I do not think effort has anything to do with the Yankees recent poor play. They are just not executing, and it has led to some embarrassing defeats. They need to turn things around before the season spirals out of their control.

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