FanGraphs Chat – 2/16/11

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February 16, 2011





 

Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.

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Pierre
13 years ago

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.

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Paytrick42
13 years ago
Reply to  Pierre

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?

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Cloud Computer
13 years ago
Reply to  Paytrick42

“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

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