In an effort to be conciliatory, I am going to strike the statement and refer people to the comments. You are free to form your own opinions. I am also going to close down the comments, because the Mitchell Report is keeping me very busy. I stand by my response. If you have any further comments, you may direct them to my personal e-mail.

Here is the endnote in question from Baseball and Billions in which Zimbalist explains his use of PROD.

5. The measures of performance used in this exercise are, of course, imperfect. Home runs enter slugging percentage a four times more valuable than singles. A single and a walk enter equally. Stolen bases and caught stealing do not figure in our measurement at all. Kevin Ryan (1991) has suggested using a purer measurement based on Thorn and Palmer (1989). They ran computer simulations of over 100,000 baseball games and estimated the run values of each type of play. For instance, a single is estimated to be worth .47 runs, a walk .33 runs, a double .78 runs, a triple 1.09 runs, a homer 1.40 runs. We used the “run value” of performance measure and came up with very similar estimates. The fit of our regressions was not improved.

At issue is not the actual source. Thorn and Palmer (1989) or Cramer (1972) would have have been acceptable citations for justifying the use of PROD. However, the statement above references this as the source for an alternate measure that was not employed, not PROD. And I do not believe this necessarily rises to a charge of plagiarism. In regard to the standards Zimbalist used to criticize my justifications of statements in my book, my treatment passes well above the threshold set to justify criticism. That was my main point in making the statement. But again, I am striking the statement, and any future readers of this post will be directed to the comments for an explanation.

Also, I never said that academics need not cite non-academic work. Here is my response to what I believe Joe is referring to.

New information first: Hidden Game of Baseball [= Thorn and Palmer 1984] (p51) gives credit to Dick Cramer in 1972 for the formula which we now call OPS. [And a closely related version of the formula was constructed even earlier, in 1964, by Earnshaw Cook]. So there is no fair reason to say that Zimbalist should have cited this particular book in the first place in connection with the statistic “PROD.”

In my followup post (#10), I will agree with ZimbalistFactChecker that my sentence “Zimbalist says he cited the 1989 book.” is misleading, because it sounds as though I am saying Zimbalist in his reply said 1989 expressly, which he did not do.

I don’t intend to quibble any further with ZimbalistFactChecker on this; we do agree on the facts about the citation dispute, but disagree very much on interpretation, mine being that there is no basis to be using Zimbalist’s failure to cite the Hidden Game of Baseball as evidence to criticize him. The context which I said ZFC#9 lacks is available in my posts 8,10 and 11. The key point here is that I have read both Thorn and Palmer 1984 and the relevant portion of Thorn and Palmer 1989 and can say with confidence that the relevant material is in both books, and only referred to as PRO in the 1989 book, and that if a citation for PROD were necessary at all, citation of the 1989 book alone would suffice perfectly. Because of the similarity in the references, it is understandable that Zimbalist in his reply could fail to understand that JC was really talking about a different book. I don’t care for the social science style of bibliographic citation; it leads too easily to honest confusion even if you attend to the year but don’t recognize it – [different work I don't know? earlier edition of same book? typo in the citation?]

I give Zimbalist a complete pass on the confusion about the book. He claims to have cited “Thorn and Palmer”, and he did cite it(albeit not exactly on point to JC’s charge) and it does indeed contain the relevant material.

Nor do I believe JC is right to criticize him for failing to cite the 1984 book anyway. Now that I have looked at the Hidden Game itself (p.51), I see that Thorn and Palmer in fact credit the OPS formula to Dick Cramer in 1972; his name for it was Batter Run Average (BRA).

JC said Zimbalist failed to cite TP84: “These estimates also measure hitter value using a measure known as “PROD”. PROD is the sum of OBP and SLG—yes, that is OPS—yet Thorn and Palmer (1984) are not credited.”

Zimbalist responded that he had cited TP (but gave no year–joe arthur is therefore incorrect to say that “Zimbalist says he cited the 1989 book”). Here is the relevant paragraph from Zimbalist’s response”

In any event, I am simply not persuaded by some of the specific arguments that often come out of that literature. As part of Bradbury’s rebuttal, he asserts that I used PROD back in my 1992 book, Baseball and Billions, and that I did not cite Thorn and Palmer. That’s incorrect.

I then pointed out that Zimbalist had cited a different work by TP and, more importantly, that he had cited TP89 not as a source for PROD/OPS but as a source for an alternate (linear weights) measure of player performance rather than the PROD/OPS measure that Zimbalist used in his book.

There is nothing “misleading without context” in this sequence. If anything, the misleading parts are Zimbalist citing TP but not specifying which year/book and joe arthur following up by claiming that Zimbalist had cited a specific work (which, as noted above, he did not do).

In either case, the prior question is whether the concept had become sufficiently public domain to require citation in the first place. You aren’t ordinarily expected to footnote the original inventors of OBP or ERA, for example. OPS (PRO) caught on quickly, in newspapers and other books, popularized in part by its appearance in the sabermetric-savvy encyclopedia Total Baseball(1st edition 1989), also by Thorn and Palmer. Clear citation of that book would be sufficient, and that (1989 book) is what Zimbalist has claimed in his reply. Also JC is on record from last year as arguing that it is not necessary in academic work to cite non-peer reviewed, non-academic work.

–neither author listed in the index (unless Zimbalist counts Arnold Palmer or Jim Palmer as one of the authors)
–Thorn and Palmer, Total Baseball, 1989 (not 1984) listed in the references section
–no reference to Thorn and Palmer (any pub, any year) in Chapter 4 on player performance and salaries
–Thorn and Palmer (again 1989, not 1984) cited in endnote 5 of Appendix A. In this note Zimbalist says he uses PROD (aka OPS) instead of a weighting concept proposed by Thorn and Palmer (1989).

I don’t care for Zimbalist’s unqualified assertion that he did cite the book either (his citation is like a neighborhood play at 2nd base), and I understand that you were in kind of a footnote war with Zimbalist because he implied you made an undocumented assertion about clutch hitting, when you had documented it, but there’s a difference here. Your footnote charge is more serious. I don’t think that you should have made what amounts to a charge of plagiarism based on recollection alone.

I’m not impressed. Though I know Zimbalist is not exclusively a sports economist, he seems to be the leading academic in what is an awfully small field. For him to claim to be an expert on baseball economics without an intimate familiarity with James’, and especially Pappas’ and Silver’s work (he seems to be totally unaware of the existence of their work) is ignorant.

The ‘Scully Model’ that pervades academic baseball economics is outdated; it was ahead of its time in 1974 but has since been passed by leaps and bounds by Pappas’ MW/MP work and now Silver’s MORP. By all means, sabermetrics shouldn’t be construed to be the be-all-end-all of player evaluation (who wants to place odds that Zimbalist hasn’t even read beer and tacos?), but it’s miles ahead of the Scully model, and though no one would suggest you run a baseball team solely by the numbers, no one would ever suggest operating without them.

Zimbalist (or some other sports economist) could make a career out of putting the sabernomic theory to the test at a rigorous, academic level. To be unaware of its importance is unacceptable for someone who calls himself an expert in the field.