Is Clay Zavada…
- A reliever for the Arizona Diamondbacks?
- A bully who picked on Nerdtron in his youth?
- The Robert Goulet Memorial Mustached American of the Year?
- Both 1 and 3
That’s right, in addition to putting together a nice 50+ innings in the desert, Zavada deservedly took home the Mustached American of the Year. The American Mustache Institute put out a press release, which included a curious claim about players sporting the ‘stache.
The mustache’s enhancement of a player’s skills has stirred controversy in the sport as an internal report produced by Major League Baseball reportedly said it believes Zavada’s mustache was responsible for at least 42 of his 52 strikeouts in 2009
Here at Nerd Central we don’t hide our affection for those who tout the lip sweater a bit less gracefully than Zavada. So we went about investigating whether a mustache truly could improve a baseball player’s ability.
There are 100 nerds in the nerdbase, but not all of them managed to play in the season of their card. One of the nerds is a manager (who got fired partway through the season of his nerd card). Another nerd is Pope John Paul II, who had to be thrown out because a VORP (Value Over Replacement Pontiff) of infinity skews the results. We’re left with 49 nerds without the facial hair tag, and 39 with it. The easiest way to compare them is to look at their ERA+ or OPS+ (depending on position) as a comparison of how they did relative to their peers in the league, and a rough way to put pitchers and position players on the same scale. We end up with the results below, where the two boxplots show the clean shaven and the razor phobic. The scale on left is ERA+/OPS+, and you can see each group contains some sorry baseball players.
The mustache is worth about 4 points of OBP+/ERA+ over the shaven, and the nerd can use all of the help he can get. It’s not statistically significant (sadly), but there are still the intangibles that come with the mustache. We’re looking forward to the time when statistics friendly GMs start realizing the benefit of fielding teams of players who look like this, and strongly encourage you to keep a facial hair column in your fantasy baseball draft spreadsheet.
Tags: arizona diamondbacks, clay zavada, labia sebucula, mustache, Robert Goulet Memorial Mustached American of the Year presented by Quicken®, statistics
(4.88 out of 5)
Great analysis, though I’m curious if you were looking at career numbers or single season numbers. I might also expect the difference between facial hair and clean-shaven to be larger among non-nerds, given those players tend to be more evenly distributed in talent from bad to great while nerds, unfortunately, tend to be skewed towards poor stats.
I used single year statistics. After all, the nerd card is a single snapshot of a player, and how do we know Jeff McKnight[1] didn’t shave the next year? So the approach I used was to look up his 1991 OPS+, which is the season that corresponds to his card. As far as there being a bigger difference among baseball players in general, who knows, but the nerds are a surprisingly and disappointingly average bunch. Those boxplots are centered around plus-statistics of 100; the nerds don’t seem unusually talentless at baseball.
[1] I would have guessed, based on card alone, that McKnight would have been the least productive nerd, but that’s not the case. He did play baseball like a 14 year old high school freshman lost between his locker and the computer lab, OPS+ of 15, but there are several players worse. Any guesses?