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By Michael Humphreys

Baseball fans love to compare the players of today to the players who came before, but one must wonder how great the margin of error in these comparisons is. Is there any way of knowing who the real baseball greats are, and whose legend should stand the test of time?

Let’s take Omar Vizquel as an example. So says Wikipedia, “Vizquel is considered one of baseball’s all-time best fielding shortstops.” It’s true, Vizquel “is considered” a great fielder. Of shortstops, he

-holds the highest career fielding percentage of those with a long career.
-has participated in more double plays (and his primary double play partner just entered the Hall of Fame)
-is third in career assists
-has played more games at shortstop than anyone in major league history.

On top of all that, Vizquel has received more Gold Gloves than any other shortstop except for Ozzie “Wizard of Oz” Smith. Indeed, writers have described Omar and Ozzie as the “graceful Fred Astaire” and “acrobatic Gene Kelly,” respectively, of shortstops.

Vizquel has something of a signature play—fielding ordinary grounders (not just bunts) with his bare hand and throwing in one motion. He was the starting shortstop for the most successful American League team of the 1990s, second only to the Yankees. He hasn’t been much of a hitter, even for a shortstop, so it’s not unreasonable to infer he must have been a great fielder to hang on as long as he has.

But, after all that, how do we really Vizquel actually is one of baseball’s all-time best fielding shortstops? With metrics.

Let’s start with the question: What is the job of a fielder? To help his team prevent runs. At shortstop, this mainly involves converting ground balls into outs and getting the second out on double plays—in other words, recording assists. (It is very rare that shortstops catch fly balls or pop ups that couldn’t be fielded by at least two and as many as five other fielders. Most of the differences in putout rates for shortstops reflect how much they ‘hog’ these easy chances, not how many marginal hits they help their teams prevent. And line drive putouts at short are mostly dumb-luck plays.)

It is not the job of a shortstop (or any fielder) to look “graceful” or make trick plays. It’s not even a fielder’s job to avoid errors. In fact, a fielder who makes ten more successful plays but also ten more errors has just the same value as the fielder who makes an average number of plays and errors, because an error is no worse than a play not made.

Any fielding metric for shortstop needs to estimate how many assists a shortstop generated above or below what an average shortstop would have, playing for the same team. My system uses some arithmetic and the statistical technique of “regression analysis,” resulting in what I call Defensive Regression Analysis, or DRA.

DRA estimates the number of assists the league average shortstop would have recorded in place of the shortstop you’re rating by starting with the average number of shortstop assists per team that year and adjusting that number up or down based on statistically significant relationships between shortstop assists and other defensive statistics of the player’s team that are

1. not influenced by the shortstop himself,
2. as little influenced by the fielding quality of his teammates as possible, and
3. independent (approximately) of each ot

spring training baseball piece:

Justin Hargett, Associate Publicist

In part one of a two part series on Major League Baseball’s spring training, OUP editor, Theo Calderara reports from Tampa, FL on the New York Yankees‘ season prospects and financial standing. Stay tuned for part two from Port St. Lucie, FL and the New York Mets, coming soon… To learn more about spring training check out Under The March Sun: The Story of Spring Training by Charles Fountain.

“I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going. There will be fewer people unemployed and everybody will work longer hours and harder than ever before. And that means that they ought to have a chance for recreation and for taking their minds off their work even more than before. Baseball provides a recreation which does not last over two hours or two hours and a half, and which can be got for very little cost.”—Franklin Delano Roosevelt

These days, it’s a rare baseball game that is over in two and a half hours. And a trip to the Yankee Stadium can hardly “be got for very little cost.” But with the economy collapsing around us, can baseball still help us keep our minds off our troubles? Oxford marketing’s own Brian Hughes and I headed to Tampa, spring home of the Yankees, to search for the answer.

It’s certainly not a foregone conclusion. Baseball is bigger business than ever, so money is never far from the field, and for no team is that more true than the Evil Empire. The Yankees are set to open a new, $1.5 billion stadium this year, but with New York’s financial firms collapsing, they’re having trouble selling the luxury boxes that were the unspoken motivation behind the so-called House that Jeter Built. When we arrived in Tampa, the Yankees’ 275-million-dollar one-man circus, Alex Rodriguez, had just left town to have hip surgery, placing third base in the hands of the less-than-immortal Cody Ransom, and drawing attention away from his other offseason travails. Scheduled to take the mound in the first game of the weekend was C.C. Sabathia, the team’s latest high-priced free agent acquisition, who is poised to take home $161 million of the $441 million the Yankees committed to new players this offseason.

It has been eight seasons since their last World Series title—an eternity in Yankee Years—and angry ticket holders, already upset about the byzantine process of obtaining seats in the new Stadium, could be forgiven for feeling as if their money was being used to bail out yet another failing corporation.

So what would the mood be like at George M. Steinbrenner Field? Would bloodthirsty populism rule the day? Would fans decry supposedly wasteful spending and demand a return to fiscal responsibility?

Absolutely not. We heard no complaints about the new ballpark in the Bronx. And nobody said a word against the Yankees’ new starting pitcher, who turned in a couple of solid innings, working around some incredibly shoddy defense by two players who, luckily, aren’t expected to see much action this year. No one grumbled about Spring Training ticket prices—which, as Charles Fountain could surely tell you, aren’t so far off regular season prices. The only time anyone brought up the recession was in response to the price of beer—far below prices at the old Yankee Stadium, much less the new one—and even that seemed more like the old fashioned New York tradition of amusing oneself by giving other people a hard time than like a serious complaint. After all, nobody actually turned down the beer.

And once Sabathia let loose the first pitch, financial worries seemed to melt away, replaced by a whole other set of worries: about the movement on C.C.’s fastball, or the durability of Joba Chamberlain, or the aging outfield. So we soaked in some sun, saw a pair of good games (one win, one loss), and even stimulated the local economy a bit by indulging in that other great American pastime, eating. Ultimately, we found that, while you can’t take the money out of baseball, you can at least forget about it for a few innings.

Maybe President Roosevelt was on to something. I wonder whether he had any interesting ideas about how to solve an economic crisis.

Charles Fountain teaches journalism at Northeastern University.  His newest book, Under The March Sun: The Story of Spring Training chronicles the history of baseball’s annual six-week ritual and how it grew from a shoestring-budget road trip into a billion-dollar-a-year business.  This week and next Fountain will be blogging about his adventures at Spring Training for Powell’s.  With their kind permission we will be reprinting them here.  Check out the final post below.

When St. Petersburg’s future mayor Al Lang was negotiating with St. Louis Browns owner Branch Rickey to bring spring training to St. Petersburg in 1914, the two men agreed that the city businessmen sponsoring the trip would pay for the Browns travel to St. Pete, and pay for their lodging while they were there. They also agreed that the comped traveling party would include five writers from the St. Louis newspapers. The newspaper guys were key for St. Petersburg. This whole spring training deal was an effort to get the city’s name out there, and how better to do it than through the datelines in big city newspapers. “There can be no cleaner, no more penetrating, no more exhaustive advertising for [our] city,” wrote the organizers, “than the letters and telegrams to their home papers, written by the high-class, competent correspondents and writers who always accompany these major league ball clubs during their spring training trips.” (My favorite part of that, by the way, is where it says: “high-class, competent correspondents and writers.” We sportswriters haven’t always gotten that kind of respect.)

Ninety-five years later, when the Phoenix suburb of Goodyear, Arizona committed to spending $100 million in public money to build a new spring training facility for the Indians and Reds, proponents talked about the national publicity spring training would generate, as Goodyear grows from rural farm village to a city with an expected mid-century population in excess of 400,000.

Nobody has ever been able to determine what the cash value of a newspaper dateline is, but for nearly a century, communities investing in spring training have touted their importance. When the Yankees came to St. Petersburg in 1925, for six weeks every winter, the dozen-odd daily newspapers in New York would carry daily stories with the St. Petersburg dateline, and St. Petersburg grew into a major city.

Hot Springs, Arkansas grew its early-century profile as a resort town by hosting eight different major league teams for spring training between 1900-1925. Before it was known as the home of Disney World, Orlando was perhaps best known to northerners as the long-time spring training home of the Washington Senators. Before they were a part of the American consciousness as Gulf Coast resort towns, Bradenton and Sarasota cracked the northern consciousness as the spring training homes of the Braves and the Red Sox.

Some towns are still best known to America as spring training destinations. Vero Beach, Port St. Lucie, and Lakeland, Florida all have their own individual charms, and the folks who live there do so for reasons other than baseball. But people beyond the borders of these smallish cities know them only as spring training datelines.

Some cities have outgrown their spring training datelines. Back in the early sixties, Fort Lauderdale was known for spring break and Yankees spring training. No more. The Orioles are there now, and spring training gets lost in the bustle of everything else that goes on in Fort Lauderdale. Even Yankees spring training, now in Tampa, is but a blip on the busy radar of that bustling city. St. Petersburg willingly let spring training go this year; the Tampa Bay Rays play their regular season games in St. Petersburg, of course, and the mayor felt that spring training might be in competition with the regular season.
But some towns still seek the cache of a national dateline. Peoria and Surprise, Arizona, anonymous suburbs northwest of Phoenix, bought themselves a bit of national presence when they brought spring training to town in 1993 and 2003, respectively. “Having Peoria, Arizona as a national dateline every spring was a real coup for us,” said Cactus League president and Peoria community services director J. P. de la Montaigne. Goodyear and Glendale feel the same way today.

But while these national datelines may have been, and may continue to be, good publicity for the warm-weather cities that host spring training, they are even better balm for readers in the cold-weather cities where those newspapers are published. Forget crocuses and robins. Nothing says spring to a winter-bound newspaper reader better than a spring training dateline from Florida or Arizona.

Charles Fountain teaches journalism at Northeastern University.  His newest book, Under The March Sun: The Story of Spring Training chronicles the history of baseball’s annual six-week ritual and how it grew from a shoestring-budget road trip into a billion-dollar-a-year business.  This week and next Fountain will be blogging about his adventures at Spring Training for Powell’s.  With their kind permission we will be reprinting them here.  Check out the forth post below.

A reporter asked me today which was my favorite of all the spring training sites. I told her that I had always been partial to two places that lost spring training this year—Dodgertown in Vero Beach and Al Lang Field in St. Petersburg—and told her why—the history and ambiance of Dodgertown, that great view of Tampa Bay from Al Lang.

But that got me to thinking: How long can I keep saying my favorite spring training site isn’t a spring training site anymore, and what then, among the active sites, would now be my favorite?

There are really no bad spring training sites. Among the current inventory of spring training parks and facilities, all but one has been either built or completely overhauled in the last twenty years.

But which one is the best? What makes a spring training site special? Is it the grandeur of the ballpark? The new parks in Glendale (White Sox and Dodgers) and Goodyear (Indians) will certainly enter the conversation as more people visit them; but most discussions of grand spring training stadiums would probably begin with Steinbrenner Field, formerly Legends Field, the Tampa home of the Yankees. Surely Champion Stadium at Walt Disney World is as pretty as they come, its lines and construction evoking parks of the 1920s, with all the 21st century amenities. But as much as the visual evokes the heritage of the game, the damn place keeps changing its name practically every year. It’s only a decade old and it’s been known officially as Disney Field, Crackerjack Stadium, The Ballpark at Disney’s Wide World of Sports, and now Champion Stadium. What kind of heritage can there be a place that changes its name all the time?

The prettiest, most comfortable, most amenity-rich spring training ballpark is probably Brighthouse Networks Field in Clearwater, where the Phillies play, but it sits on one of the ugliest pieces of land in all of Florida, surrounded by high-voltage electrical wires and a particularly busy and soulless piece of U.S. Route 19.

So, is the scenery beyond the outfield fences important? Tough to beat the Cactus League parks then. Virtually every park looks out upon a mountain range, and in Tempe Diablo Stadium, the mountain looms just past the left field fence, sorta’ like the wall at Fenway Park only five time higher.

Is history important? With this year’s shuttering of Dodgertown, Winter Haven and Al Lang, that really leaves only two choices. Fort Lauderdale Stadium was built for the Yankees in 1962 and has been home to the Orioles since the Yankees left for Tampa in ’96. It’s a window on old-time spring training, which is exactly why it’s doomed. It doesn’t have the clubhouse, strength-training, or medical-rehab facilities to support a modern spring training, and it doesn’t even have room for the Orioles minor leaguers, who train across the state in Sarasota. So the Orioles will be leaving Fort Lauderdale for somewhere, maybe as early as next year.

That will leave Hi Corbett Field in Tucson as the last of spring training’s historical parks. Home to the Rockies now, it was built in the 1920s and has hosted spring training every year since 1947, when Bill Veeck brought the Indians there. It’s where the spring training scenes from the movie Major League were filmed; that alone makes it worth the visit.

How much weight to you give to the spirit of the fans when it comes to making a place special? Every team likes to claim that its fans are the best. Cubs fans and Red Sox fans are probably the most famous, but for pure unadulterated, demonstrative affection, it would be tough to top the sea of Cardinal red that fans wear to Roger Dean Stadium in Jupiter to watch St. Louis play.

Is the neighborhood important—you know, the old real estate maxim of location, location, location. Then it’s probably got to be Scottsdale Stadium, right in the heart of downtown, just a couple of blocks from the bars and restaurants of Old Town Scottsdale. It’s spring training’s only neighborhood ballpark, and what a neighborhood!

As I’ve traveled about spring training the last three years, I can’t tell you how many different places I heard someone say: This is the best complex in all of spring training. Or: We wouldn’t trade spring training sites with anyone. Or: There’s no place better for getting a team ready for the season. Or: I wouldn’t come anywhere else for spring training.

So bring out all the clichés: Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Home is where the heart is—or maybe, more accurately: the heart is where home is. The best spring training facility? It’s really quite simple. That’s going to be the place where your team plays.

Charles Fountain teaches journalism at Northeastern University.  His newest book, Under The March Sun: The Story of Spring Training chronicles the history of baseball’s annual six-week ritual and how it grew from a shoestring-budget road trip into a billion-dollar-a-year business.  This week and next Fountain will be blogging about his adventures at Spring Training for Powell’s.  With their kind permission we will be reprinting them here.  Check out the second post below.

The Cactus League, spring training baseball in Arizona, really had two beginnings. The first came in 1947, and it was a very small part of the American civil rights movement. Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck had been watching closely the progress of Jackie Robinson, intending to integrate his own team as soon as the Robinson story played out. Veeck had had some uncomfortable run-ins with segregation while running spring training in Florida for the minor league Milwaukee Brewers, and he felt that Arizona would be more hospitable to an integrated team. So in 1947, he took the Indians to Tucson, persuading Horace Stoneham to bring the New York Giants to Phoenix so the Indians would have someone to play exhibition games against. There were no blacks at Indians spring training in 1947; Veeck integrated the Indians in July of that year when he signed Larry Doby. When he brought Doby to spring training in 1948, he found he was only partly right about Tucson and an integrated team. The city was not exactly welcoming, just less hostile than many places in segregated Florida might have been.

The real father of the Cactus League was a Mesa rancher and hotel owner by the name of the Dwight Patterson, who brought the Cubs to Mesa and worked to grow the league to seven clubs during the 1950s and ‘60s. But in a talk I gave at the Arizona State University Cronkite School of Journalism yesterday, I skipped over Patterson and went right from Veeck to O.P.M. as the second beginning of the Cactus League.

O.P.M., as the politicians and business developers like to explain, is Other People’s Money, and it’s become the secret to spring training baseball in Florida and Arizona. In the mid 1980s, Florida had found a way to build sparkling new spring training facilities using O.P.M., instituting a tourist development or “bed tax” on hotel stays. The tax brought in millions of dollars to Florida counties and several used the windfall to build new, made-to-order, spring training complexes and lure teams from other Florida cities to theirs. Major league baseball teams, who’d always had to pretty much take what they could get from cash-strapped local governments in the smaller cities where they trained, were suddenly being given everything they asked for and more, the communities saying: “Hey, it’s not our money; the tourists are paying for this.”

Arizona didn’t have any OP.M., but when the Indians announced in 1991 that they would be leaving Arizona for Florida, and other Cactus League teams started looking hard at these new facilities in Florida, Arizona quickly figured out they’d better get some O.P.M. too. The state instituted a tax on car rentals in Maricopa County—Greater Phoenix—of $2.50 per rental contract, the money to go to the construction and maintenance of spring training facilities. The revenues helped stave off any more defections, building new facilities for the Cubs, Brewers, Mariners and Padres. But the money quickly ran out, and in 2000, Cactus League officials were able to attach a rider to a bill for a new football stadium for the Arizona Cardinals. That money, from a bed tax and an increase in the car rental tax, allowed Arizona to become the aggressor, luring six teams from Florida over the span of a dozen years. When the Cincinnati Reds move from Sarasota to join the Indians in the Phoenix suburb of Goodyear next year, the Cactus and Grapefruit leagues will be equal at 15 teams apiece.

But both Florida and Arizona have now run out of O.P.M., the revenues committed years in advance. And in this economy they don’t have any of their own.

Perhaps that’s the next book.

Charles Fountain teaches journalism at Northeastern University.  His newest book, Under The March Sun: The Story of Spring Training chronicles the history of baseball’s annual six-week ritual and how it grew from a shoestring-budget road trip into a billion-dollar-a-year business.  This week and next Fountain will be blogging about his adventures at Spring Training for Powell’s.  With their kind permission we will be reprinting them here.  Check out the first one below.

Waiting at the airport to go from Orlando to Phoenix has summoned thoughts of spring training travel, and the differences between March baseball in Florida and Arizona.

Travel is probably the critical difference between Grapefruit and Cactus leagues. It is at the very least the difference that gets talked about with the most passion and regularity. In Arizona, twelve of the fourteen teams are located in and around Phoenix. The largest spread between any two teams training in the Valley of the Sun is the forty miles between the Angels in Tempe and the Royals and Rangers up in Surprise. Two teams, the Rockies and the Diamondbacks play down in Tucson, just over a hundred miles from the center of Phoenix and players and writers—especially the writers—grumble whenever they have to make the 90-minute to two-hour trip through the desert for a game down in Tucson. “Ease of travel” is the one phrase general managers and team officials most regularly use when talking about why they like training in Arizona.

In Florida, by contrast, 90 minutes would be a rather short bus ride; the farthest distance between teams is more than twice the ride from Phoenix to Tucson. The bus ride from Fort Lauderdale where the Orioles train, to Dunedin, home to the Blue Jays just northwest of Tampa, would be 250 miles. Not surprisingly, the Orioles and Blue Jays never take that ride; they don’t play one another in Florida. And there are many other teams whose paths hardly ever cross in Florida. With teams spread from Fort Myers to Dunedin on the Gulf Coast, from Fort Lauderdale to Viera on the Atlantic Coast, and with three more teams spread along I-4 from Lakeland to Disney, the Grapefruit League map is a map of all of the Southern Florida, and long bus rides are the bane of everybody’s existence. When the Red Sox and Twins ride up from Fort Myers to Clearwater or Dunedin, the ride begins at seven in the morning and can take more than three hours. The ride home, through Tampa Bay’s punishing rush-hour traffic, is generally even longer. When the Orioles, down in Fort Lauderdale, go anywhere except up to Jupiter to play the Cardinals or the Marlins, it’s a sunrise-to-sunset affair. “Managing travel” so as to not lose too much time to player training is how Grapefruit League GMs and team execs discuss the travel challenges of Florida.

The weather gets a lot of talk too. For most of winter-bound America, there’s not a lot of difference between the sun of Florida and the sun of Arizona, but the locals in both states like to point out how theirs is better. “They get all that rain in Florida,” say the chamber of commerce people in Arizona. “You lose a lot of games and training time to rain.”

“Players don’t sweat in Arizona,” counters one Florida person. “They don’t get in the same kind of shape because they never sweat. You look at the conditioning of teams in the early season, and you’ll see that the teams that trained in Florida seem to be in much better shape.”

But the difference that matters most these days is money. Spring training is big business now, and since the beginning of this century, Arizona has spent $250 million in public money building and improving spring training facilities for major league baseball teams. Florida has spent too, but $100 million less than Arizona has. This has led to a dramatic shift in the spring training map. Since 1998, five teams have shifted from Florida to Arizona, with a sixth, the Cincinnati Reds, scheduled to join them in 2010. When that happens the leagues will be even at 15 teams apiece for the first time.

That has a nice symmetry, but it will surely not remain that way forever. Inevitably, some team will start to see a greener patch of grass and a greener pile of money in a new community, hankering for spring training, and the map will change again. It’s not likely to happen soon in this economy; state budgets in both Florida and Arizona are in tatters. But history shows us that recessions are not forever. Baseball and spring training surely are.