RealGM

As inspired by tmorgan's question. Yes I admit I started rambling a bit, but he asked a good question and it's WAY off-topic from the thread it was in, so here's my response to keep this in one localized place....

Well a great question to ask about Leyland, and I'll be completely honest. I am naive at times as I don't like to make false assumptions and I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt, however, I am NOT naive enough to know that the average Tigers fan thinks VERY highly of Jim Leyland. and I have dealt with this issue on a regular basis in the past 'cause my father is old-fashioned and loved him to death and we constantly battled on this issue, although as of late, after convincing him that Leyland is relatively inept (which took me about 200 pieces of evidence as we both watch almost every game), he has started to come around full circle and abandoned his unconditional loyalty and looked at the real science of his decisions. He now sees his efficacy as night/day, and not the good side for Leyland's case....

Any-who, I explain the Tigers record as of today as an utter embarrassment of what it SHOULD BE (and we also need to keep in mind we have LOST COUNTLESS games in the previous seasons still unresolved and unaccounted for on why they had to happen when they DID NOT HAVE TO HAPPEN). I know the diehard loyal fans here are happy with 1st place, but to me it's a joke. If you break down how much money is spent, and divide that by wins, the cost of a win is a serious dollar amount. Meaning, if we look to the end of a given year, how much in REAL DOLLARS is it worth if a team ends up with 85 wins? Now what if you could say AT THAT POINT, you could magically convert an 85 to 90, what would be the cash value of just plunking a +5 AFTER THE FACT? Don't you think that would be worth some serious cash as a theoretical construct? I SINCERELY BELIEVE, that through proper mngmt and decisions that the Tigers could EASILY get an extra 5 wins a season, and with good fortune AS MANY AS 10 EXTRA WINS over the course of a season(depending on complex variables in my analysis of different tree sets) just by doing things differently with the SAME player and monetary resources.

Of course, these diehard fans will also say "well we went to a World Series", well yes I realize that, in fact I went to the games so yes I acknowledge it happened firsthand. Going to the WS isn't proof that Leyland did a good job. Heck, forget the WS, let's talk about Joe Schmucklebocker who bought a winning lottery ticket for $200M, hell, he beat out millions of other people and picked the right numbers. Does that mean he's a genius lottery picker? No, of course not, and YES, of course it's an absurd analogy, it only serves to prove that a circumstance of a chance event DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY constitute universal a universal truth. Have you ever heard the phrase "correlation is not causation"? That is a similar question, and we are getting off on a tangent, but the point is you can't just find one example and invent a way around that one example and use it as an ultimate proof/truth to make your point. In the year we went to the WS, Leyland did a TERRIBLE job, an absolutely TERRIBLE job, just as he has done every year, and statistical variance of chance events worked well for us is in terms of circumstantial luck, as well as nice performances by the players overall that favorably lined up for us that year.

As a matter of statistics, when you have a couple dozen player and math computations and 5 years or so, naturally the numbers by default will converge as a matter of circumstance to make one of those years the best year, and one of those years the worst year, and somehow this WS experience deluded the fan-base to think that Leyland is some kind of baseball genius, while from my perspective, it honestly makes me want to cry that humanity can be so easily sold on anything it just feels like believing regardless of the facts and the objective data that can show an even more promising alternative. To me, it's just really sad.

If you look at the Tigers over the last couple years, and you look at the 4 major sports, TO ME, the Tigers are just about the #1 team in all of sports that has achieved the LEAST AMOUNT given the $ resources and player resource chips available to them. Meaning, that with the cornerstone of good players already in place, and money available to them, they accomplish the most disappointing result of almost any team out of all 4 major sports. Thus, when MOST fans look at the record, they see a 1st place nomenclature and think everything is honky-dory, but it is NOT in my mind. We should be the #1 team in baseball with the fortune we have in the combo of player chips and monetary resources, yes i know the Yankees spend more, but we are actually in a position to achieve more than them with less money given what we hold in our hand overall if you look at all of our franchise's assets.

So to answer your question, I justify our record as UTTER SHAME. I don't agree with a ton of the moves of DD, but despite that, if I was not allowed to veto any of his moves and only the moves of Jim Leyland in terms of batting order decisions, pinch-hit choices, bunting decisions, stealing decisions etc. etc. etc. we could have more wins this year just on stuff that he has penalized us on by being excessively negligent with respect to what optimal strategy would dictate.

The majority of our deficiencies come in the form of the offensive side, not pitching. For one, it's not iron-clad conclusive down to a science to say oh you should pull this guy then, and that guy then, and let him pitch one more batter and so on. My analysis of the wins we have lost THIS year from Leyland's incompetence has a rather small and also uncertain proportion with regard to pitching decisions, which pitching has been relatively good for us all things considered. It's in the roster/lineup/tactical decisions where he really hinders us.

In terms of your stats, well you have to understand that you can't make blanket statements or generalities of what is common. For example, let's create a hypothetical year where we have a team that has given up 1000 runs and only scored 200. How does that sound? Well what if I told you that was a team that had a .500 win pct? How? Well in this freak year, we won say a ton of games by 1 run, and had a freak game where an accident happened and we gave up 800 runs in 1 game. Now that's an absurd anomaly, but it shows that if you forecast 100 years of baseball to extrapolate THEMES of stats, you can't automatically assume that the averages are an automatic qualifier or benchmark of what is happening in any given situation. If you want to crack down on your OPS generalities and I want to crack down on the 100 mistakes Leyland made this year, well then pound for pound we'd really have to evaluate everything in a diary fashion and analyze it like the Earth was going to end tomorrow to prove beyond certainty why it is the case that one side is correct versus the other. Now unfortunately I haven't kept a diary of all of these events, if I had, then I could just copy/paste it for you and it would speak for itself. But I don't have DD's ear or Mr. Illitch's ear, and I don't have anything to gain by proving my point on an internet board.

All I can tell you is that, of course contrary to public opinion on this board as of late, I am a master of logic and game theory and I have conclusively watched almost every single game this year and the last couple years, and I have a MASSIVE amount of data observed that suggests Leyland has really poor baseball logic, it's not even decent, it's just really bad. Now, granted "bad" is a matter of perception. If you compare him to say my grandmother, well he does quite well cause my grandmother can barely identify what sport baseball is, let alone how to win at it. He just makes mistake after mistake after mistake, and he cannot learn from it, because he cannot see it, because he has a philosophy and a belief in his system that defies the code of optimal strategy. Now of course this can all be rectified if you were to say I'm wrong and he's right, thus nullifying everything that I'm saying here. I don't expect anybody here on the internet to automatically believe me, after all he's the manager of the Tigers and I'm not. But if you also remember, Galileo was a pretty smart guy too, and it actually took something like 300+ years after his death before people in power acknowledged he was right and he was given an apology.

Now, you might ask, well how do resolve this issue, how do know if Leyland knows more about baseball, or this random internet guy does? Well, obviously I don't have the diary of a catalog of Leyland mistakes, after all I wasn't preparing in advance to have to justify myself to this very question, although sometimes I wish I would have. In fact, on another topic, I have a catalog of these type of mistakes in the NFL across ALL teams. As a sports strategy enthusiast, I am mainly a football and baseball junkie, and I am currently writing a book on advanced football strategies as I write this post, which will be finalized within the next week or so, and I am submitting that to Lion's officials. I planned a similar expedition for baseball, however football was my first choice and my first passion thus I am finalizing the details of that project before I move on with my baseball project.

So let me theorize of a hypothetical conversation to illustrate how I do know more about baseball strategy than Jim Leyland. Now, I'm also a poker expert (which I have done for a living but given up due to boredom with it as an unrewarding career). I will use a poker analogy as poker is popular and a lot of people might connect with this analogy. Let's say DD and Mike Illitch agreed to an experiment, and this experiment is to have a sit-down with myself and with Mr. Leyland to discuss the merits of why each person thinks they deserve the job to call the mngmt shots on a daily basis of how to play the game and instruct the team. Well I wholeheartedly believe that it would be a lopsided conversation on MANY, MANY accounts of Leyland trying to justify his actions as the converse of my actions, say just 1 example offhand being his choice to not have Laird bunt when I requested it in a recent thread (and this is 1 of 100 or so this year). Now for the poker analogy. Well any novice poker player knows that if there was 1 card to be dealt and you were on a straight draw, well you have 4 outs out of 46 unseen cards (2 players) for a 4/46 chance of hitting your card. So you can do the math and figure out how much it is worth to call given the size of the pot and the bet. Now let's say you had instead, a flush draw, and let's say for argument's sake you were sure you would win if you hit it, well in that case you would have 9 cards to win. So let's compare the situations, one is a little more than twice as valuable as the other. IF we were to manufacture an analogous baseball example in conversation about to-bunt or not-to-bunt, or to steal or not to steal, or to pinch hit or not to pinch hit, whatever, you would soon find that Leyland would be lost in this conversation. He doesn't have the ability or the skill to process these things, and not ONLY because of a math deficiency, but because of a LOGICAL deficiency, in that after all the years of baseball he's been in, he still doesn't truly understand the situations and the math and the probabilities and the outcomes and the alternatives and the extended trees of future events etc. etc. etc., that he would just shoot from the hip. I would be able to present my case in a very clear and obvious fashion that would make sense as to why my strategy would do better in real and legitimate and objective terms of what my decisions are worth in actual value, while a Leyland response would just come down to "I know what my guys can do and what they are capable of". He really doesn't know, he just thinks he knows, because he is guided by his own one-dimensional and inside-the-box pre-conceived instincts of what he thinks he's right because it FEELS right to him. That's the type of baseball man he is, and it's ineffective and it's negligent when we are talking about 1 of 30 of these positions that exist that also have countless millions of dollars on the line. It's absolutely nuts!

I read all this.

I recognize that Leyland makes some boneheaded moves, perhaps even a lot of them. That said, you can't dismiss this season's results as an anomaly.

First, you need to seperate Leyland and Dombrowski, as your complaints about our resources vs. our record are mostly DD's issue. The GM's had some blunders -- some epic ones, in fact -- but that doesn't make Leyland responsible for what is essentially $45 mil+ in dead payroll (Willis, Bonderman, Robertson, and, until the last month, Ordonez).

Tell me (now if you don't want to check, I don't blame you), is there another team in recent memory that was 9 games over .500 while getting out-OPS'd by 10 points or more? I don't doubt there are a few, but I do doubt there are many. Does that make Leyland brilliant? No, of course not, but it leaves open the possibility that he deserves less criticism than you claim, at least for this year.

I know Leyland doesn't work from knowing the amount of expected runs available in each situation, thus knowing when to bunt, when to steal, when to hit and run, when to pinch hit, etc. Using that criterium, he does dumb things. I also know he knows a LOT of things you don't -- the types of pitches each of his hitters prefers, the pitches that opposing pitchers tend to use in tough situations, which pitchers are easier to bunt against, which baserunners can get by on pure speed, which basestealers rely on a good read off the pitcher and which can steal off the catcher alone... I could continue, but the list goes on for quite a while.

I don't doubt that you're a knowledgable fan. I also note you have a large ego about your knowledge of logic and stats. It takes a certain degree of arrogance to believe you know of all of the variables in a single at bat, let alone for more complex actions that require knowing the hitter, the pitcher, the catcher, the infielders, the benches, the weather, and the umpires. Harry Seldon you're not, and whatever Leyland's true competence level is, you're definitely grossly overestimating yourself.

Well, for one, I don't see how you can say I'm grossly overestimating myself based upon this post or any post I have made. The sum of the value of my ideas of baseball theory aren't even fully represented within the 60 or so posts I've even made on this site, plus how can you know how much of my knowledge I am divulging or not? If you want to say that I haven't produced much on this board or enough to sell you and convince you on why I'm so strong in this area that's one thing, but it is not absolute to say that I am overestimating my abilities based upon what I choose to disclose here.

You are right about not everything about this franchise being solely Leyland's fault. It would be unfair to Leyland to judge him for the hand he was dealt by DD on anything that was attributed to a DD mistake. In my overall estimation of Leyland's abilities and choices however, I don't see him managing a correct roster of players well in that he currently doesn't manage an incorrect roster of players well, so the mistakes would still be there on his end even if I could change the roster from and DD decisions that I would like to alter.

I really like DD as a person and I can see his value in many areas, but overall he's just made too many illogical decisions, and he has caused a lot of damage along with Leyland in his separate functions. In fact, one could easily argue that he has cost us more wins than Leyland depending on how much influence he has had in retaining Leyland in the first place I am 100% adamant in my estimation that Leyland has been here MANY years too long. Through strategic movements the Tigers could accomplish the same amount of wins as they have currently with easily $10M in less expenditures on an annual basis if they followed my philosophies. And keep in mind, it's not like I'm keeping a scorecard of guys like Dontrelle Willis and waiting to see who circumstantially failed and adding that into the bank in a theoretical posture of going back and making those changes. I'm basing my analysis on the projections and acceptance of the moves DD has made AT THE TIME they were made, and evaluating the logic of those choices at that time.

Let me create a simple scenario, say we want to play a coin toss game, well if you choose heads and bet $100, well you have a 50/50 shot. If you lose and it's tails, it's not like I grade you as making a $100 mistake, you in fact made a neutral choice considering at the time the bet was placed you had an even chance to win or lose, thus it would be the same as if you didn't bet. The outcome of the toss is irrelevant in terms of analyzing the judgment skill you placed in making the choice. For DD's scorecards, I have him unfortunately rated as a C- based upon my disagreements with his mngmt logic. So I don't give him extra penalty for Dontrelle or extra bonus for the Edwin Jackson trade AFTER I get to see what they did, as I have to evaluate those trades as what they were worth at the time in terms of the logic and strategy. And he gets such a LOW grade, not because he doesn't know baseball, but because MY CONTENTION is that he makes evaluations through improper metrics and incorrect rationale for what he thinks contributes to a winning formula.

And to be honest, my first instincts on my grade for him is actually in the D range, I really just upped it to a C- to try and be overly fair and give him a little benefit of the doubt. He's just battling such an uphill obstacle because he doesn't view the game correctly as I see it, in terms of being able to maximize wins. Really, if anything, he's just costing Illitch countless millions every year that are going to waste and not generating a return. If you are a stock investor, do you know what it means to not have a diversified portfolio and expose yourself to an unusually high amount of industry-specific risk of which you don't get paid for? Well if you have a business-school background you will know that is all dead weight and there is no reason to expose yourself to the types of risk that create penalties without a reward, and you can factor those risks out for free through proper diversification. If you don't have a business-school background you can just google "stock diversification" as well as the risk-related terms mentioned here and within a few minutes you could grasp the concept of which I am alluding to. DD is bleeding Illitch's pockets for no reason and getting nothing in return for this extra $10M++ per year.

Moving on, I appreciate the sentiment of what you say regarding nuances Leyland may know. It's not like at Leyland and see a worthless person there, quite the contrary. Look at it this way, say if I woke up tomorrow and I owned the Tigers, what would I do? (not counting various roster moves which I would do IMMEDIATELY, such as probably calling up Sizemore and Dlugach and removing Everette permanently and making Polanco a strategic bench player) But in terms of the manager, do you know who I would hire? I wouldn't hire anybody this year. And possibly not next year. I might just keep Leyland!!!! And here's why. I have some MAJOR fundamental problems with how he manages the game. However, if I had a sitdown with him and I were to show him my baseball logic and the areas I disagree with him on and the nuances of how I want him to instruct the players on strategic elements, there's no reason to think that Leyland couldn't make a few minor tweaks to take advantage of my logic and enhance the team. I don't even have to be in the dugout to have Leyland affected in such a way that would give me full assurances that we are doing everything we can to win games. It would only take me a couple of days to integrate with him a few mechanical changes, and he already has rapport down with the players as well as other intangibles. If I was the owner of the Tigers, my #1 choice would be to keep Leyland and just inspire him with a few thoughts, so long as he was compliant with my strategy changes, which I believe he would appreciate if we were able to sit down and I could show him why I'm making said changes. I don't see any reason why he would dissent with me if he truly cares about winning, as I believe he's smart enough to realize my case when I could literally draw my ideas out on paper right in front of him. I don't believe that he could deny my strategies in a physical meeting if he had an open mind to just listen to what I have to show him.

As far as your OPS question, well I definitely don't know the answer off the top of my head, but that's really detracting from the key points, and whether such an answer supported any viewpoint, it wouldn't necessarily be correct in reality, again correlation is not necessarily causation. Plus not only that, I would never ever use OPS as I don't find it effective, I essentially replace OPS with my OE% as I trust that and believe in that being more sound (albeit it correlates highly to OPS but I'd rather forget OPS exists cause it's inadequate to at least some extent). I spend my time not trying to get tricked by random coincidences, but rather to build as best I can an infallible logical machine, therefore I can then know the end results and outputs are by default logical and superior in nature. I don't need to analyze other irrelevant and circumstantial details that by their very nature dissent with my machine, as I can find all kinds of stats of all kinds of sorts that have their own story that are different than the story produced by my logic machine, so what, I don't care about those stories if a faulty machine (premise) produced them in the first place.

Again, I read it all.

Correlation is not causation, I know. It's also wrong to discount the possibility of causation, which you're coming dangerously close to doing.

Diversifying your portfolio is just about the worst possible analogy to pull out here. If you don't take some risks while running a franchise, you're going to be a decent but unspectacular club forever. You don't avoid drafting all Boras clients just because the agent is a douche, you don't avoid all top high school pitchers because the fail rate is higher, you don't eschew trades because you know your own personnel better, and you don't always try to lock up your decent players to long-term deals to avoid the potential of a bigger contract if they bust out. Running a team involves educated risk-taking -- unfortunately, DD has a mixed track record lately.

Finally -- just back off a bit. If it will get you to stop talking like a pedagogue and thus get someone besides me to actually read what you're typing, consider this: I have a MBA (in marketing, but hey, I took all the general courses, too), I scored a 177 on the LSAT but decided against law school, and I teach for a living. You don't particularly impress me; similarly, I wouldn't expect anyone else to be impressed by my background -- we're all equal here, and unsubtle hints that you're "more equal" than others is only going to get you laughed at.

I also don't want to hear that I'm wrong to judge what you're presenting on these forums because I can't be aware of what you AREN'T presenting on these forums. I judge what is put before me, which is all I can do -- surely someone as enamored with logic as you are understands that when I talk about your theory, I mean the theory I know of, and when I talk about your knowledge, I talk about the information you've presented. Do I really have to preface every sentence with "based on what you've written so far...."?"

I went to business school as well, but that's not the point, it's not about intelligence, it's about the mastery in the fields of game theory and logic. I know a lot of brilliant people, but while being book smart and highly intelligent people, some people just don't have the consultative mind to solve problems at a high enough of a threshold to put them into a spectrum of being the very best there is in that type of work and in this case with specific respect to sports-related strategies.

So yes, maybe you are a really smart guy, but you wouldn't have the answers to the secrets of mastering baseball strategy unless you actually spent a lot of your personal time trying to "crack the code" of baseball. It's all about what you choose to spend your time on. Do you spend a lot of your time thinking about marketing? I spend an inordinate amount of my time dissecting logic/strategy because that stuff I am obsessed with. If you haven't spent any of your time studying sports strategies that doesn't mean you would be incapable of adopting them or understanding them if you really delved into it deeply.

I could take probably any person with a 100 IQ and teach them how to solve these things to the point that they would understand what to look for and what the process is for uncovering an optimal strategy. It's just like algebra, if you took just a random smart kid in school and gave him an algebra test for the first time and never explained to him what variables were or showed him how to solve algebra problems, he might be pretty darn confused and not sure what to do. But if you teach him the mechanics and show him how to dig around to solve problems for himself, then he doesn't have to be the smartest guy in the world to tackle algebra problems. But he's probably not going to self-teach himself how to do algebra, he needs to be educated on it first, unless he has a lot of time on his hands and he wants to google it and learn it for himself. It's just easier to not have to guess if he's getting good information on how best to learn that subject and just simply are taught by somebody who already has that stuff down to a science. Thus, if you lost your day job and decided your personal hobby was going to be to master sports strategies, sure you could probably make a lot of progress without any help from anybody, by just using your brain and the resources on the internet to advance your education on the subject, but you still would have to put in a lot of time into it, and no matter how much time you put into it you could always increase your education and improve your ideas by continuously spending more and more and more time trying to solve these things. That's what I do, just because this stuff interests me more than any other subject it is. It cannot be expected that others who are casual sports fans could compete with that, as there's just not any practical way for most people to have CHOSEN to make as much of a time investment into this stuff as I have.

Stephen Hawking is a smart guy too. But I bet if he were here right now and I asked him to tell me how to win at baseball with optimal strategy and to tell me his theories he wouldn't have a clue what to say. Now granted, he might be able to come up with all kinds of theories if he actually spent time studying baseball, but his intelligence doesn't mean that he automatically would just know off the top of his head how to break down baseball to a science, cause he would literally have to do that first in order to answer the question correctly. Thus, anybody who's intelligent must do the same, they can't just use instincts to know the best answers, they might get 95% of the way there with little time investment, but they can't find the true meat of optimal strategies that aren't readily visible without doing a little digging. Stephen Hawking just doesn't spend any time deciphering sports strategy, he instead spends all of his time trying to solve the mysteries of black holes and the origins of the Universe. I don't spend my time studying those things, I spend my time thinking about the logic/strategy of games. That's my passion, just as Black Holes are his.

I have no doubt you've spent a lot of time refining your methodology, but again, there's nothing for anyone to comment on as far as validity goes.

Guess that's it.

tmorgan wrote:I have no doubt you've spent a lot of time refining your methodology, but again, there's nothing for anyone to comment on as far as validity goes.

Guess that's it.

Yeah, well i'm relatively new to this board, I just got here. We'll just have to see how things go when various discussions pop up regarding the analysis of any specific strategies or situations that we end up conversing on as time goes on, so that the people here can make up their own minds as to whether there is validity to my ideas.

TSE, no offense my man but no way in hell you could do what Leyland does, because frankly my high school baseball coach probably knows more about the game then you do.

And no sport in this world is only won strategically, tons of factor go into any one sport. There is no way of "cracking" baseball, basketball, or football, because nothing always goes as planned, nothing is ever perfect. If it was, the Giants would not have beat the Patriots, Michigan would not have lost to App State, the Pistons would have more rings by now, the Tigers would have beat the Cardinals, the list goes on & on.