Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 30: Is There Racial Bias in Baseball Broadcasting?/What to Make of Brian McCann

Episode Date: August 28, 2012

Ben and Sam question the conclusions of an article in The Atlantic about racial bias in baseball broadcasting, then talk about whether Brian McCann’s best is behind him and whether his down year is the result of bad hitting hitting or bad luck.

Good evening and good morning and welcome to Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus. It is Tuesday, August 28th, and we are recording the 30th episode of our show. recording the 30th episode of our show. In Long Beach, California, I am Sam Miller, and in New York City, yawning into a $100 microphone, Ben Lindbergh has interrupted his preparation of tomorrow's column to speak to me and to you all. Ben, how are you doing today? Great. I'm going to try to sound as chipper today as I sounded yesterday. And you give me a lot of credit thinking that I'm already working on my column. Thank you for that.

Well, that's promising. Do you have a topic you would like to speak about? Yeah, I would like to talk about the study, or I don't know that I would call it a study. Uh-oh. Already the claws are out. The article in The Atlantic yesterday about race or nationality and the way that broadcasters talk about players.

And I'll be talking about Brian McCann, but we can probably just tack that on to the end of what will surely be a spirited discussion that gets us both into trouble. Why don't you tell everybody about the study that is perhaps not a study? Okay. I don't know how spirited it will be because it seems, based on our brief pre-show conversation, that maybe we both agree on this, but maybe we will find a way to disagree and make it more interesting. The article that came out yesterday, it basically studied the way that broadcasters describe players for a week worth of games and sort of tried to identify the intangible terms or the terms that broadcasters use to describe

players' intangible talents. And it came to the conclusion that there was some bias or some preference towards using certain terms for certain players. The takeaway was Latino players are almost 13% less likely to be praised for intangibles than their white counterparts. Announcers are nearly 14% more likely to praise a U.S. Canadian-born player for intangibles than they are their international counterparts.

So this came out, and it got picked up a bunch of different places, linked more or less everywhere. And the conclusion seemed to be that this was maybe a sort of a final word on something that people have often kind of, I don't know if joked about is the right word, but acknowledged or tried to say that certain players are more likely to be discussed in these terms. terms in this article were hustle, talented, aggressive, patient, good effort, athlete, hardworking, athletic, clutch, professional. I don't know that all of those are necessarily intangible qualities. Something like patience seems like it could describe a tangible quality. But anyway, there has long been a conception, I guess, since the days of Fire Joe Morgan maybe popularized it. But before that, even that little players and white players were more likely to be described as scrappy or to have their effort praised than non-white players. to have their effort praised than non-white players.

And so this study was kind of taken as confirmation of that. And that's how it was reported or linked in most places I saw. And you and I, I think, had a somewhat different reaction when we read it independently. I don't know what the alternative to independently would be. We were reading over each other's shoulders maybe. I read it to you. Yes, right. Because you are illiterate, so you do need a reader.

Yes. And you and I, I think, kind of got the impression that this was sort of flimsy at best. Do you want to talk about why you felt that way? Briefly, because I know that you've put more work into this than I have. But it seems to me that there's very little discussion about really the methodology, the sort of questions that you would have about methodology and there's very little data and so it's really hard to parse exactly what it is they found how significant it is how many how many descriptions apply to each player whether we're talking about if 14% is 7 instead of 6, or if it's

70 instead of 60. And I don't know, I mean, I've occasionally have sort of enterprised kind of research projects that I didn't know where they were going to go. And there's always complications that arise that you're not anticipating. The answers are never quite as cut and dried. And so I imagine that with 10 different people watching these games, that there's a real substantial subjectivity to what is considered, what does get logged, what does get logged as get logged what does get logged as positive what does get logged as negative and i imagine that the premise of the study was sort of known to the people in fact i i know based on the kickstarter page that that there was a sort of hypothesis and i think there's always a a tendency to find things that support a hypothesis if you're

not careful. And I'm not saying that this study does any of those things. I think that what I would say is that there's not nearly enough information presented to decide whether this study does any of these things. And also, I mean, just glancing at some of the results make they make mention of the fact that like for instance Jim Tomey is one of the most praised uh players that week and it was the week he hit his 600th home run um which obviously is uh a complicating factor you can't really you can't really draw any conclusions from that four brewers in the top 10 most praised players and Carlos Zambrano in the most criticized because that was the week that he sort of walked away from baseball. Yes, yeah, exactly with Zambrano.

So four Brewers were in the most praised. They were in the middle of a six-game winning streak, so that makes sense. Nine of the most praised or most criticized players were either Dodgers or playing the Dodgers, and so you wonder whether they controlled for the broadcast crew. And these are all issues that you would have a good study to control for, and it's just not clear whether they did. Yeah, and I have had many an idea for a flawed study in my day and conducted many a flawed study. And often what I do when I do that, preferably before I do

that, before I waste my time doing that, is talk to Colin Wires, who is our director of research at BP and sort of just generally a debunker of flawed research, both at BP and elsewhere. flawed research, both at BP and elsewhere. And he took a look at the data and he asked the authors for their data, which they shared with him. And he may write about this, may not write about this, but he had some pretty serious concerns about the conclusions they drew from the data they gathered, even apart from any questions you might have had about the methods that they used to collect that data. And so I just, I think, I mean, I certainly would not be surprised to learn that people have a subconscious bias or prejudice towards certain groups or against certain groups and that that might affect the way that they speak about them. In fact, I would sort of be surprised if that weren't the case, I guess. But I don't think that this article supported that.

I don't think this article either confirmed or denied any ideas that I had about that. And I mean, there's a, there's an actual line in the article that says this is a scientific analysis. Um, and so I think if you just kind of skimmed it and assumed that the people who said it was a scientific analysis, you know, were knew what they were doing and took the proper measures. And I don't think that the people who did this had any kind of ulterior motives or, or, or were acting in bad faith or anything like that. I think they thought that their conclusions were valid. I just don't know if I agree. And I think just how quickly it was linked and retweeted and praised, really, for being thought-provoking or a must-read

article surprised me, because I felt like some of the people who praised it might have been a bit more skeptical had it been some other subject. I think there was an element of people expecting this to be the case and seeing an article that labeled itself scientific analysis that seemed to conclude what we might have expected it to conclude. And maybe they were a little more willing to accept that than they should have been, possibly. Do you think that there is a study that could be done on this topic that would be important? I guess, I mean, it would, however you try it, I'm sure it would be a nightmare to control for everything you need to control for and to do it in a standardized, really rigorous way.

I'm sure it would be possible. I'm sure there's some way to do it. watching more games and really just coming up with a very more scientific than this way of classifying those intangible terms. And, I mean, even were it performed correctly or perfectly, I don't know that it would be a groundbreaking conclusion that people might be more inclined to talk about people who share some of their characteristics in a more positive way without being aware of that. I think you and I probably both have over the past few years, we've probably both at times sensed that this is a true conclusion. I think that probably my suspicion is that a great deal of it is the fact that broadcasters as well as journalists do have access to players. And they do talk to players a lot. They research these guys.

And the language issue is significant. And if you are an English-speaking broadcaster, you probably speak to half the team a lot more than the other half of the team, and you have relationships with the other half of the team. And so, I mean, I don't think that it would surprise me in the least if this were a true phenomenon. I think taking some of the leaps that these types of things tend to go to that sort of imply a little bit more sinister motives in the hearts

of the people who are talking is probably a bit much, but maybe not. I mean, until we have a good study, it's hard to say. I mean, I'm certainly, I would be interested in it, and I don't know if there's anything that could be done with it, but it's always interesting to find out that we're all horrible people. Yeah. I was listening to an interview, an old interview on Up and In with John Marossi from Fox Sports, who was saying sort of what you're saying, that since he doesn't speak Spanish, he feels like he misses out on a lot of the stories that he could otherwise tell. And that it bothers him as a journalist that he isn't able to bring those same stories to his readers just because of that

language barrier. And that if there's one thing that he wants to work on, it's becoming fluent in Spanish or good enough in Spanish to talk to anyone. And so, yeah, I think that's sort of maybe a less sinister explanation for this effect, if it is an effect. So, yeah, it was – I wouldn't be surprised if the conclusions of this article had some sort of basis in fact, just not that this article really demonstrated that conclusively to me. What is that? Morosi? Italian, you think? Yeah, but I'm – I don't know if we can yeah i'm uh i that was just a joke then i don't actually think that john morosi's ancestral background is a factor here uh probably not a very well executed joke um and uh one that i hope doesn't ruin my career. So Brian McCann, who is also probably his ancestral background, is not relevant to the issue here.

The issue here is that Brian McCann has had a pretty lousy season by his standards. He's actually not had that lousy of a season, but he's having the worst year offensively of his career. He is batting seventh in the Braves lineup frequently, sometimes for the first time since 2008. And in August, he doesn't have an extra base hit. The sub issue here is that he has a shoulder injury. He has fraying on his labrum. And there's also a BABIP question with him of whether this is merely a BABIP drop. And perhaps more concerning for a player who is 14 months from free agency, the fact is that he is a catcher approaching 30.

The fact is that he is a catcher approaching 30. Do you think that we have seen the best of Brian McCann's career pass us by? And do you think that he's a factor in this year's pennant race for good or ill? I guess I would say that any, what is he, 28? He is 28. It is his age 28 season. It's possible that he has had one of those birthdays that does not get updated on his season line. But, yeah, he's 28.

He is 28. Yeah, I guess it's always a safe assumption that a catcher who has been catching for many years and who came up when he was 21 and is now past what we typically, at least a little bit past what we typically think of as the physical prime even for a position that doesn't age its players quite as harshly as Ketcher. I guess the safe thing is to say that we have seen the best of him, but I would not put it past him certainly to come back and be something close to what he was before. As for whether he is a factor, yes, I would say he's a factor in that he is on a team that is in a pennant race

and fighting for a pennant spot or for a playoff spot. The Braves, I guess, are lucky in that they have a good backup catcher. Although nothing like prime Brian McCann. David Ross is one of the better backup catchers certainly in the league and I guess really has been more productive than McCann this season. So yeah, I guess I would say that the safe thing to say is that maybe we've seen the best of him already, but I definitely wouldn't write him off being one of the best catchers in baseball again, because really for the last several years, he has been as good as really just about anyone,

I would say, at that position, certainly as consistent as anyone. One of the interesting things about his season is that he has, he's one of those sort of classic cases where everything about him is the same, except for his his BABIP. He has basically the same power, his walk rate is identical to his career rate, his strikeout rate is essentially identical, line drive rate, ground ball, fly ball rates, all very similar. And yet, the Braves have decided that uh this is not a fluke they um they've moved him down in the order I mean he's he batted third or fourth 90 percent of the time last year he batted third or fourth uh or fifth every day through the end of June and um they clearly decided that um that this is actually a real phenomenon,

that Brian McCann is not the same hitter he was. And I find that interesting from an analyst's perspective, an analytical perspective, because it has all the markers of a performance drop that could be easily written off with all the information at our disposal. all the information at our disposal and the Braves who presumably I think we have to I tend to assume that they're acting rationally disagreeing so it makes me wonder what you know how how many well either the Braves are wrong which is also possible I mean I don't mean to to say that teams are always correct but either the Braves are wrong or there are conceivably lots of times like this where all the numbers suggests one thing but there are factors uh at play that the numbers don't suggest um the other thing is that he is um as you say he's 28 and catchers age quickly and sometimes they age uglily um but it is like dan uncle or in an ugly manner that's a good question um his his season uh his his line this year is um 236 batting average 310 on base 414 slugging

for a 255 true average pakoda projects a 233 average 316 obp 389 slugging and 256 true average. Pocota projects a 233 average, 316 OBP, 389 slugging, and 256 true average, which if you had trouble with those numbers, those are all basically the same. It projects those for him in 2020. It is not the case that the aging curve typically or

as a mean works this quickly. It is probably not the case that Brian McCann is old and dead. So anyway. I mean, the Braves would not be the first team to, I think, read too much into a fluky season. It has happened. It has happened, yes.

Certainly they know more about Brian McCann than we do, if only because they have watched Brian McCann every day, which is not something I can say. And so I don't, if I had seen every one of his games this year, I might have a more informed opinion about whether the low BABIP was just a fluky thing where he's hitting balls really hard right at people or whether he's just hitting the ball less hard. And as you mentioned, with the shoulder injury, that maybe gives you some more reason to think that possibly he's, you know, more of his batted balls are not going for hits because he's maybe not hitting the ball as hard. And yet, as you mentioned, his power is pretty much intact.

So, yeah, it's hard to say. I don't know. Obviously, they have seen him every day, and they would have a pretty good idea of that, you would think. Okay, well, Ben, I'm terrified that I'm going to unnecessarily insult another European subgroup, so let's wrap this up before I get us in any deeper. We'll be back tomorrow with episode 31 of Effectively Wild, and we'll talk to you then.