Intern Bill investigates.

David Pinto up at the terrific Baseball Musings had a post up a few days ago pointing out that the “Sabermetric Teams,” the clubs that feature statistical baseball analysis for their front office decisions, are not doing too well this year. To wit:

That got me thinking. Sabermetric teams really disappointed in 2008.

- Manny Acta’s Nationals own the worst record in the majors.

- The Cleveland Indians stand 14 games out of first place.

- The Blue Jays put together a good pitching staff, but couldn’t match it with a decent offense.

- The Oakland Athletics started in contention but trades threw them into a tailspin.

- Detroit didn’t live up to the hype of their winter trades.

- San Diego sits in last place in the NL West.

- Trey Hillman’s Royals haven’t improved, and sabermetric pitcher Brian Bannister pitched poorly.

The Red Sox and Diamondbacks are still in contention. Arizona hasn’t blown anyone away, however, and the Red Sox in a three-way race for the wild card.

There are some issues here – Manny Acta doesn’t make personnel decisions, and it seems like the Rays front office has been open to sabermetrics, but the track record speaks for itself. This season will not be known as the “year of the stat.€ But with so many teams adopting this kind of strategy, how can this be?

Random chance: For a moment, try to imagine overweight 1st basemen, speedy centerfielders, and hard-throwing young pitchers about to get “Dusty’ed,” not as human beings per se, but as assets in a stock portfolio that only operate about six months a year. Throughout the history of baseball, there have been thousands and thousands of such assets that either perform better or worse than expected due to a number of factors, some of which are beyond our control. When seen in the multi-decade context of baseball history, the struggles that numbers-oriented teams have gone through are really just slight fluctuations on a graph that seem bigger than they actually are because they occur in the period in which we live. Although six teams using the same philosophy might be damning to some, it could be just bad luck that’ll work itself out over time. This explanation is very, very possible.

Bad math: It’s not that numbers-oriented front offices don’t work, it’s that they’re doing the numbers wrong! Maybe a young staffer screwed up a formula somewhere. Maybe instead of using IsoD or OBA, they should have used something else. If only these front offices used the right numbers, used them correctly, or got just plain smarter, they wouldn’t struggle as much. This is of course is the argument socialists use when arguing why Soviet Russia didn’t work out so well, but whatever. This is also almost entirely unquantifiable.

Maybe they don’t know anything after all: Statistical baseball analysis is such an attractive discipline because it’s so inclusive, and in some cases, so easy. The numbers don’t care if you’re a novice, tinkering in your study, because analytics is a science, and the numbers speak for themselves. A person doesn’t need years of experience on dusty sandlots with a radar gun and the “right eye,” or the ability to look a prospect and see the types of “baseball moves” that scream “big-leaguer.€ All one needs is a calculator, an excel program, a few message boards, and a lifetime membership to baseball prospectus, and voila! Not only can one be smarter (and theoretically have more successful ideas) than the ignorant scouts who have the audacity to practice their craft the same way it’s been done for decades, one also has the license to high-mindedly scoff at the mere mention of the words “hustle” and “character.€

The tricky thing about someone thinking they know everything is that unless they’re, like, a God or something, they don’t, and when they finally realize how wrong they’ve been the intellectual crash is inevitable. It’ll be interesting to see if statistical baseball analysis doesn’t really work what this crash will look like.