Dear Dave- I recently spent some time indulging my inner stat nerd, but I’ve kind of stopped because whenever I challenged the sabrmetric orthodoxy, I felt a fair amount of antagonism and condescension. Do you think there’s a bunker mentality among the current generation of baseball analysts that gets in the way of progress? A couple of comments for what they are worth:
– Bill James fought and won a lot of these battles 20-30 years ago. Front offices have stat departments. Hernandez and Greinke won the CYA easily and Blyleven went to the HOF. SABR and friends are part of the conversation, not lonely voices of reason in a sea of stupidity.
– The metrics could be a lot better. OPS+, WAR, FIP, UZR all have flaws that are pretty obvious. There needs to be more recognition that conclusions based on these metrics are educated guesses, not facts. And that playing with numbers and statistics are not the same thing.
“The metrics could be a lot better. OPS+, WAR, FIP, UZR all have flaws that are pretty obvious.”
Pretty certain Pierre didn’t say anything about wOBA
JohnnyK
15 years ago
Re: CC opting out – unless he falls off a cliff, isn’t it a lock that the Yankees have to keep him, thus virtually guaranteeing that he will at least get another 5- or 6-year deal at the same AAV?
Pierre
15 years ago
paytrick- I just looked at wOBA. Seems pretty good. And UZR is definitely a huge step in the right direction. I’m just bothered by the degree to which some of these metrics are used as argument-enders. Especially ones like WAR and FIP and OPS+ that have issues. For example, I don’t believe that a 4 WAR player actually was worth 4 wins or necessarily had a better year than a 3 WAR player. Or that FIP is at all good at describing extreme pitcher types.
Dear Dave- I recently spent some time indulging my inner stat nerd, but I’ve kind of stopped because whenever I challenged the sabrmetric orthodoxy, I felt a fair amount of antagonism and condescension. Do you think there’s a bunker mentality among the current generation of baseball analysts that gets in the way of progress? A couple of comments for what they are worth:
– Bill James fought and won a lot of these battles 20-30 years ago. Front offices have stat departments. Hernandez and Greinke won the CYA easily and Blyleven went to the HOF. SABR and friends are part of the conversation, not lonely voices of reason in a sea of stupidity.
– The metrics could be a lot better. OPS+, WAR, FIP, UZR all have flaws that are pretty obvious. There needs to be more recognition that conclusions based on these metrics are educated guesses, not facts. And that playing with numbers and statistics are not the same thing.
Thanks and good luck.
Pierre,
I actually disagree pretty strongly. What’s wrong with wOBA? It’s very nearly perfect.
And, considering the poor quality of the input data, which we can’t fix, how could you improve UZR notably?
“The metrics could be a lot better. OPS+, WAR, FIP, UZR all have flaws that are pretty obvious.”
Pretty certain Pierre didn’t say anything about wOBA
Re: CC opting out – unless he falls off a cliff, isn’t it a lock that the Yankees have to keep him, thus virtually guaranteeing that he will at least get another 5- or 6-year deal at the same AAV?
paytrick- I just looked at wOBA. Seems pretty good. And UZR is definitely a huge step in the right direction. I’m just bothered by the degree to which some of these metrics are used as argument-enders. Especially ones like WAR and FIP and OPS+ that have issues. For example, I don’t believe that a 4 WAR player actually was worth 4 wins or necessarily had a better year than a 3 WAR player. Or that FIP is at all good at describing extreme pitcher types.