If you’ve been looking at product packaging recently you’ve probably noticed this development. It seems companies are favoring generic looks over designs that make their brand stand out. This is the opposite of what I thought package design was supposed to be about, but what do I know? Observe the recent change in Ronzoni pasta boxes:

But maybe it goes deeper than the packaging. When UPS changed their brilliant Paul Rand-designed logo to a Mac OS desktop icon in 2003 I knew something was wrong. Are we dispensing with any font that doesn’t come with Windows? The typography on the new Ronzoni box is awful: a bad humanist typeface in awkward small caps, the tail of the “R” given a little curl so it makes at least some reference to the original logo in lieu of actual interaction with the adjacent “o”, or anything on the box for that matter. It might as well just say ‘Pasta’ because it appears Ronzoni’s goal is to have this box blend right in on the supermarket shelf.

Here’s another one, part of Pepsi’s recent re-branding frenzy:

Again, this might as well just say “Juice”. The most prominent word is “100%” and Tropicana has practically pushed their name off the edge of the carton. They’ve also opted for a bland logo, retaining only the leaf as a dot over the “i” in reference to the old one. And the cap, well, I’m not going to go there.

I’d love it if someone could explain to me what’s going on here because clearly I’m missing something. What I do know is that some sort of movement is happening, and it’s incredibly boring.

The article starts off making a great deal of sense:

I never thought of him as a great player when I watched him play. I never felt any special excitement when he was in the game. I didn’t think he deserved the MVP he won in 2000 — in my memory his own teammate Barry Bonds was clearly the better player — and I thought when I watched him play that Kent was a first baseman masquerading as a second baseman. Even when he became the all-time home run leader for second basemen, I yawned. Big deal. I thought: That’s like setting the NFL record for most rushing yards by a quarterback, or NBA record for most assist by a power forward, or something. It’s quaint and worth a little bit of applause, but it hardly stands a a defining hallmark of greatness.

But then he goes on to say that in five years, once we’ve forgotten how utterly boring Kent was, his numbers will remind us that he was actually great.

Please.

I’m a stat enthusiast. Really, I’m a big fan of reading, discussing, and memorizing numbers. I think we need them to augment our memories which can be “tainted” by emotion and omission. Especially for players on small market teams who aren’t on TV and in the news all the time, statistics help us consolidate our observations and take into account all the games we didn’t see. But our experience of players is worth a great deal too.

I’m as excited as anyone that the geeks are finally being heard. I was a computer nerd in 1994 when some people had computers and some people had heard of the Internet, but nobody really used them. Nobody would listen to Bill James in 1978 and now he’s practically a celebrity. Baseball strategy (both on and off the field) is changing and SABR geeks are getting their due, and it’s all very exciting.

But numbers are not the game. I think, as we become more enthralled with statistics, we run the risk of confusing the menu with the meal, of “believing” the stats and disregarding our experiences. In effect we’re taking ourselves out of the picture which will ruin our enjoyment of baseball in the long run. Numbers can tell us a lot about baseball players, but the numbers themselves are not baseball players. There are aspects of Jeff Kent beyond his 377 home runs and his .500 slugging average. Yes, these are potentially “Hall of Fame numbers”, but that doesn’t mean that Jeff Kent is a Hall of Famer.

The batting title is an award given every year to the player with the highest batting average in the league. It’s automatic–there’s no vote. If your average is the highest, you win. The MVP award, which is more prestigious, is awarded by a committee who makes the decision based on many different factors. Of course statistics are considered. They have to be, because nothing else so neatly summarizes all the events of the season and rounds up the players that should be considered. But there’s no formula for the MVP. The final decision is left to people who saw what the numeric summary doesn’t include: the extra hustle down the first base line, the diving catches in the outfield, the encouragement of teammates, the intimidation of opponents, and any of a thousand other things a player could do that make him valuable.

So what about Jeff Kent? What don’t we quantify? What are the things that made us forget about him, year after year? What about his lack of leadership skills? His “difficult” personality? His off-season motorcycle accident after promising not to ride the contraption in his contract? There are things certain players can get away with. Manny Ramirez can intercept a teammate’s throw in center field and Dennis Rodman could go to sleep when his team had the ball and we don’t question whether they’re worth having on the team. Kent couldn’t get away with that kind of stuff. He had no flare, panache, spark, whatever you want to call it. There’s no Legend of Jeff Kent. He was boring. Would I want him on my team? Of course (those moronic Mets!), but that’s not the point. Were his numbers excellent? Yes, but that’s not the point either. The point is that it’s called the Hall of Fame, not the Hall of Numbers. I’m all for putting his cards in hard cases, sponsoring his page on Baseball-Reference.com or whatever you want to do, but you can’t put him in the Hall of Fame on the basis of his numbers alone.

Well, of course you can. In fact we probably will. But I would encourage Joe Posnanski to give his gut a little more credit. And as long as baseball is a sport played by humans, whose careers are made of blood, guts, stamina, charisma, and skill, I encourage everyone to consider the whole picture, not just the accountant’s bottom line.

Let me preface this by saying I have a soft spot for Jeff Kent. He appeared during those recent dark days of the New York Mets: the 1991-93 seasons. These were the years of Vince Coleman, in which the speedster declared “I don’t know nothing about no Jackie Robinson”, injured Dwight Gooden’s arm while golfing in the clubhouse, and tossed a firecracker into a crowd of fans outside Dodger Stadium. A promising new pitcher named Anthony Young set the all-time MLB record for consecutive losses (27), and the team as a whole lost 84, 90, and finally 103 games before the strike of 1994 saved them from further embarrassment.

Jeff Kent was something to get excited about. He wasn’t as young as rookies usually are, and he looked like a nervous businessman stuffed into a baseball player’s uniform, but this only reinforced my hopes. The Mets were so bad I knew they needed something completely different, and this guy was weird. And then he started hitting home runs. He hit way more home runs than a middle infielder should hit, and he wasn’t bad in the field either. The only other player on the team to be excited about was perhaps Tim Bogar. Remember Tim Bogar?

Of course, as is their style, the Mets traded him for a past-his-prime player (Carlos Baerga) and the following year he was an MVP candidate (.316 OBP, .472 SLG, 29 HRs, 38 doubles, 121 RBIs). But an MVP candidate does not a Hall of Famer make. Kent became an MVP winner in 2000 and, as Tom Verducci’s Sports Illustrated article states “he drove in 100 runs for six consecutive seasons and eight times in all, both unprecedented at his position.” He also hit 27% more home runs than any other second baseman and the only middle infielders with more RBIs are Rogers Hornsby, Cal Ripken, and Alex Rodriguez.

I think these points are worth mentioning because Kent deserves credit for them, but also because the article basically awards Kent a place in the Hall based on his RBI numbers, and I think to place him in the company of those three middle infielders is patently ridiculous. When surrounded by All Stars, certain players will become All Stars. The 1997-2003 Giants weren’t exactly laden with stars, but they had Barry Bonds, one of the biggest ever. Good players like Kent, Rich Aurilia, and J.T. Snow produced some uncharacteristically high numbers during those years and the team seemed to be somehow charmed.

I think it’s obvious that using RBIs as an indicator of greatness is flawed. When the players around you are getting on base all the time, your hits are inevitably going to drive them home. Until there’s a good argument that clutch hitting is a skill I think we can attribute high RBI totals as much to the 1 and 2 hitters as to the 3, 4, and 5 hitters. The guys on base should really get assists, like in hockey, which are nearly equal in value (as in hockey’s point system) to the RBI itself if we’re going to take RBIs seriously.

What’s less obvious, or at least less talked-about, is the Great Team Factor. I’m not going to try to quantify this, but there are plenty of players who are clearly helped by the players around them. Baseball is a team sport, and there’s nothing wrong with this as far as the game goes. Good chemistry is good chemistry; it’s what you want on your team. But there is something wrong with letting players into the Hall of Fame because of who they played with.

A pitcher is not a Great Pitcher if they throw a no-hitter. They’re Great if they throw a no-hitter and then find a way to prevent their team from losing the following week when they’re not “on”. Nor is a pitcher great because they have a season with a 2.20 ERA and 200 strikeouts the year their team won the World Series. They have to sustain those numbers in lean times. Being great is not just about what you do in the spotlight. It’s more about what you do the rest of the time, which is the majority of the time. It’s coming to work every day and always finding a way to contribute and help others contribute regardless of the weather, how you’re feeling, how everyone else is feeling, and the importance of the game.

Jeff Kent was a very good second baseman who produced uncharacteristically high numbers because he was on a team with Barry Bonds. Had he been on, for example, Kansas City I don’t think he would have played nearly as well, and I don’t think we’d be seriously considering him for the Hall of Fame. I think he’d be like a Gary Gaetti or a Wally Joyner: a very good player, capable of driving in 120 runs if he played for a contender, but not a Hall of Famer. I know this is a grey area and clearly there’s no way to prove it, but to me Kent was not a player you could build a team around. He didn’t have the charisma of Hershiser (who should be in the Hall), the shocking power of Bonds, the grace of Ozzie, the wit of Maddux, or the leadership skills of Jeter.

So while I’ve been a Jeff Kent fan from the time he arrived on the scene, I don’t think he belongs in the Hall of Fame. It’s not because Kent’s numbers aren’t impressive, they are. It’s because, on his own, he just doesn’t have what the Great Players have.

How many years will pass before his reputation as a cheater changes into that of a pioneer?

How many years will it be before the player that believes in better hitting through chemistry is the rule rather than the exception? When will high school baseballers need to choose between the juice and the bench?

I hope I’m not being overly pessimistic here, and it’s not that I think this scenario is unavoidable, but it does seem like The American Way. We believe in competition. We believe that the best player should win whether the sport is baseball, business, or politics. The idea of evolution, survival of the fittest, strongest, smartest, seems natural to us. It’s difficult for us to comprehend someone not wanting to be better at what they do. Surely we applaud Bonds’s desire to be a better baseball player, we just object to the way he did it.

When the United States constitution was written, our government was set up so that anyone who could elicit more votes than his opponents could serve in public office. I know our founding fathers are not currently in vogue, but let’s pretend for a moment that they believed in the capacity of people (white males) to govern themselves, that the social hierarchy associated with life under the British Empire was undesirable, and that the idea of your neighbor Herb the Dairy Farmer speaking up for your town’s interests in federal government was a new and exciting prospect for those used to living under the law of a high and distant king.

But, as we Americans will, some of us became professional politicians who studied and practiced at being elected to public office. I can only imagine that at first this was a repugnant development. It is hard for me to believe that there was not some resentment against these people by those who didn’t have the time or money to spend studying politics but who nevertheless were intelligent, in touch, and fully capable of serving in government. I would even venture to say that the professional politicians were perceived as cheaters, and that they were abusing the system.

I think a case can still be made for professional politicians being cheaters, but we believe so strongly in our right to be good at what we do that we have a hard time finding fault with those who happen to “do” public office. I was a fan of Jesse Ventura in the Minnesota governor’s office 1999-2002. The media had a great time portraying him as ridiculous which, in fact, he was. He had little political experience (four years as mayor of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota), he didn’t look like a politician, he didn’t talk like a politician, and it was easy to dismiss him as incapable of governing. But isn’t he in a sense more qualified, more authentic than most of his contemporaries? Wouldn’t he have been, at one time, accepted as a more “honest” candidate? To me, he is in many ways more appealing than the men and women who wake up, put on their politician’s clothes, warm up their politican’s voice, and build their name and reputation, year after year, by representing my interests.

Barry Bonds is one of the new breed of baseball players who are taking baseball playing to the next level. For now their methods are not widely accepted. They are regarded as unfair, unethical, and dangerous. We don’t like the idea of our young athletes using performance-enhancing drugs, and we don’t want the records of the old greats to be broken unfairly. But this dislike is in conflict with our belief in the right to pursue competence and even greatness in our area of expertise. As a baseball fan I found Bonds’s performance 2001-2004 to be hugely enjoyable and even inspiring to watch. While I can’t help feeling somewhat cheated or deceived by the realization that used HGH to help him do what he did, I have a hard time drawing a line that restricts players from taking advantage of advances in technology, and I suspect that rules against steroid use will loosen, rather than tighten in the long run. Let me try another example.

The past 6 years have been extraordinarily profitable for the United States. We have become accustomed to a way of life in which land, oil, iPods, air conditioning, and money are treated as inexhaustable. We have been living beyond our means and paying little attention to the future. Now we are surprised and horrified at the economic “crisis” that is upon us, as if we are entitled to our profligacy and circumstances are consipiring against us. I’m sure the first credit default swaps raised a few eyebrows, but their moneymaking power overcame our reservations. We now blame the “complexity” of collateralized debt obligations for the current situation. But what about their questionable morality?

Credit derivative trading is a practice that probably belongs in casinos. That it was sanctioned by our government as suitable for banks is now widely perceived as a disgrace. I submit that the longtime common practice of short selling in the stock market needs to be similarly re-examined, and that it won’t be. The spirit in which these activities are carried out does not foster a sense of togetherness among us–they are devisive practices that encourage us to hope for the downfall of others, and ultimately promote sabotage.

It is currently popular to point fingers at the Bush administration on the right and the liberal Democratic congress on the left for our situation, but profiting from the demise of others seems to be a part of The American Way. It is competition. Because baseball has rules against using steroids, rules that were written from a consensus of morality, we can simply and clearly state that Jose Canseco was in the wrong when he took steroids: he broke the rules, acted immorally. But because financial institutions have recently had no rules against credit derivative trading or short selling, we still need to wait for our collective morality to coalesce into legislation, and the catalyst for this is financial hardship. Credit default swaps will soon be outlawed while short selling will not. It’s difficult to imagine a persuasive argument for short selling as kinder or more proper than credit derivatives, but they have yet to be blamed for damaging our economy.

My point is that, as long as things make us wealthier or better baseball players they are accepted, their questionable morality or sustainability ignored. It seems we need quite a jolt to think about the consequences of our behavior. I’m not here to scold anyone, and I wholeheartedly include myself among those who require a good jolt. I think it is part of our culture, and I don’t think it’s something that needs to be “fixed”. It’s the dark side of competition. It’s a necessary counterpart to growth, adventure, and progress. Our ideas about how we should act can’t completely rule what we do. Nobody really wants to be completely moral–it’s boring. Instead I propose we celebrate this recession, this chance for introspection, and remember that it happens every 10-20 years. It’s part of who we are. We’ve gone too far, now we need to reign it back in. We’ll go too far again soon. We may start pumping our athletes full of all kinds of substances. But before we condemn them, let’s really ask ourselves if we want the alternative.

Something else you could have done with $209M is to pay the players of Tampa Bay ($44M), Minnesota ($62M), Florida ($22M), and Arizona ($66M). This would give you two first place teams, two respectable (better than .500) teams, and $15M left over for hot dogs. Or you could have bought the Yankees: a decent team that pretends they’re great. And how many hot dogs would $15M get you at the new Yankee Stadium anyway?

The increase in player movement in the past 50 years has left a lot of us wondering what we’re actually rooting for when we follow our favorite team. With so little consistency in rosters from one season to the next I guess the answer is that we’re following a company that trades in baseball players. But just as wall street investors avoid developing emotional attachments to companies in order to remain objective, you’d better avoid developing an emotional attachment to any players on your team because chances are they won’t be around for long.

But I don’t really enjoy thinking of baseball as a business. There are plenty of other businesses to follow. I prefer baseball as a sport where teams compete, players are tested against each other, and where beautiful, exciting, and unexpected things happen. The Yankees are making it more and more difficult to enjoy the sport of baseball. I’m picking on the Yankees, but I could say the same of the Mets, Dodgers, Angels, or really any team that paid more than double the league’s lowest payroll which is, well, everyone. The Florida Marlins’ payroll last year was $21.8M while the second-lowest, the Rays, was $43.8M (that’s right–the Yankees spent 10 times what the Marlins spent).

You could say that the Marlins ended up having a decent season, that the Athletics have had many decent seasons as a low-budget team, they can compete, what’s the problem? The problem is what it’s like being a fan of these teams. The scrappy young players you fell in love with are bought up in the offseason by some monolith like the Yankees, and you end up the following April with a team that only slightly resembles that which you knew last year. And if you’re really unlucky you have a former Yankees player soiling the dignity of your team’s uniform.

Baseball needs a salary cap. I can only imagine that teams would be forced to concentrate more on things like coaching and scouting. You know, finding talented players and developing their baseball skills instead of spending more and more money on assets (players) that may appreciate in value (perform well) and trading them off if they don’t.

If baseball is to be enjoyed as a business, which it can, then there’s no question that the Yankees are the worst, the least exciting, the most gluttonous firm. Let’s see standings that reflect this. Let’s see a listing in the newspaper’s business section of the Major League Baseball Exchange (MLBE), where each team is valued as some ratio of capital invested to earning potential. Let’s trade bubble gum cards of owners and GMs. And we don’t need to watch the games any more than we need to watch the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

At a time where our national gluttony is perhaps near its peak in embarrassment, I’m tired of the Yankees’ success in the standings (if not in the post-season) every year. I’m tired of them being “contenders” simply by spending money that other companies don’t have. I’m interested in the small company with the low budget that’s developing an exciting new strategy or product. Nobody would invest in the Yankees after this many years of outrageous spending with little or no post-season success.

I think so many of us are disillusioned with baseball because we’re not sure exactly what it is. If baseball is a business, if we’re going to keep letting teams spend without limit, then we need to change the standings to reflect input as well as output. If baseball is a sport, where all teams start from the same place, with the same amount of resources, then we can actually value teams by what happens on the field. To do this under the current circumstances, as many of us have found, is simply too disheartening.

I’m not at all sure that an enterprising young sabermetrician should spend any time trying to top all those smart guys [John Dewan, Nate Silver, Mitchel Lichtman] with a new system for analyzing raw fielding data. But taking all the smart guys’ work and mashing it up, Nate Silver-style, to get something loaded with confidence? That has to be worth a few hours.

This is an interesting idea, but at the moment I’m skeptical that it would work. Or at least there’s a big question to be answered before any work could start. It’s something like this:

Presumably Nate Silver has a reliable way of evaluating different “metrics” (polls) based on sample size, geographic distribution, historical poller accuracy/bias, etc. He may even value subsets of data from certain polls over others (e.g., Poller X is more accurate in Montana than in Utah). The key point is that there is a final numerical result (the election outcome) against which the polls can be evaluated.

Baseball fielding statistics are not so simple. Some people have attached numeric values (e.g. runs allowed, plays made) to defensive metrics, but the formula for computing these “results” is usually defined by the same person that invented the metric, if not the metric itself. For example, Bill James defines a “run created” by giving a formula:

H+BB−CS+HBP−GIDP * (1.125*singles + 1.69*doubles + …) etc…

It’s a mathematical entity, not a real one like a number of votes. You can’t watch a game and make a note every time a “run created” occurs. This is not to say there’s anything wrong with the runs created metric, but we don’t have a way of quantifying its accuracy. I happen to think it works pretty well, but I can’t quantify it because the thing it claims to measure doesn’t actually exist. There’s no more authoritative answer to how many runs a player created than the runs created formula itself.

In other words, the runs created metric measures runs created with 100% accuracy. Big deal. Why should I care about runs created?

That, in a nutshell, is my problem with all of the recent defensive metrics I’ve seen. They have yet to prove to me that what they measure is worth caring about. If I hear Chase Utley had 37 “plays made above average” last year, I want to know what a “play made above average” is, and so far I’m not convinced it’s that important.

As far as combining these various defensive metrics goes, I think it would be easy to end up with an absurd stat like OPS, which is kind of like adding your height and weight to measure your “bigness”.

I guess yet another way of stating the problem is that if we’re performing mathematical operations on “physical” quantities, we have to make sure we’re working with compatible units. Bill James’s runs created formula in effect converts all its parameters to runs by assigning a portion of a run to a single, a home run, a walk, etc. But these recent fielding statistics all measure different things, and I have no idea what their units are or how to write them in terms of each other, which seems like a prerequisite for a useful formula.

Anyway, maybe it’s my lack of intuitive feel for the fielding stats that makes me unable to see how combining them would work. I’m definitely open to that possibility, but I’d need to be convinced.

I think that what’s needed for more accurate evaluation of players’ fielding abilities is more detailed data collection. I want to see aerial cameras installed that track where each player sets up, how fast they move in each direction, how accurate their throws are, etc. Surely if the technology exists for modeling pitches (in close to real time) the technology exists for recording player positioning and movement. We can find new ways to manipulate the same old data, but when it comes to fielding I just don’t think a body data exists that can provide real insight.