Of course, the real crux of the disagreement, the strand of argument underlying everything, is in how we think of the game and what various means of measuring what happens on the field (which is all statistics are) say about that. For decades and decades batting average was king. And then some people noticed that it had some major flaws as a number, most notably because it assumed all hits had equal value (that is, that a single and a home run had exactly the same value) and discounted walks altogether. Then we started to notice that other stats like RBI and ERA were in many ways dependent upon factors outside of an individual’s control, like the number of runners on base in front of them or the quality of the defense behind them. And some, like pitcher wins, were just totally nonsensical, seeking to credit, or blame, a single player for the outcome of a team game that contains multiple components to winning, plenty of them completely outside of that player’s control.
In other words, people were trying to rationalize these numbers. To put them in a context of what they were trying to do, what they were saying, and identifying their short falls. To some extent, this gets misunderstood a lot. There’s nothing wrong with keeping track of the number of runs an individual drives in, for example, it’s just that you can’t use those numbers to evaluate a player’s productivity as an individual player, because it’s dependent to a large degree on the performance of the players in front of him getting on base and giving him a chance to drive in runs. Similarly, batting average may be a flawed number, but we all still reference it when we refer to a players “slash line” (batting average/on base percentage/slugging percentage), because with the context of those other numbers it can tell us something.
This is what people like Murray Chass don’t like about people like Bill James, not numbers. They see the major blogs gaining ground and readership with this new rationalist thinking. They see more and mainstream writers slowly coming around to this way of thinking and endorsing many of their conclusions. They see OBP and OPS getting mentioned more and more, advanced defensive metrics getting serious mainstream discussion and mentions in the context of things like Gold Glove voting, and even WAR slowly starting to creep into the mainstream conversation, if oftentimes with a healthy dose of skepticism. And they see Zack Greinke and Tim Lincecum and Felix Hernandez winning Cy Youngs with respective win totals of 16, 15, and 13, while Bert Blylevan gets closer and close to a now probable induction into the Hall of Fame while Jack Morris languishes around 50% of the vote. And they don’t like it.
There’s plenty of reasons for them to be unhappy, I suppose. Part of it is tradition. Anytime something starts to change, especially when it’s been unchanged for so long, there’s always at least a decently sized minority that doesn’t like it simply because it’s change. More of it, I’d imagine, is professional bias. A world in whichwe recognize that players like Juan Uribe and Cody Ross don’t stop being who they are simply because they have a couple of good weeks at a particular time of the season, and that players who do what they did mostly out of luck and good timing, rather than being uniquely good at hitting in the postseason while being mediocre the rest of the year is a world in which it’s much less fun to be a narrative writer. In the current world, you can make up psychological reasons for why certain things happen or pretend you know what players and coaches are thinking and use it to spin out whatever crazy column you want to write, if that’s your thing. In that world, we find out that the Yankees lost the ALCS because they didn’t treat a game at the beginning of August as though it were an elimination game in the playoffs and that Alex Rodriguez, a career .290/.396/.528 hitter in the postseason compared to .303/.387/.571 in the regular season, is in fact a terrible postseason player because of [insert crazy armchair psychobabble analysis here]. That world’s a lot more interesting to live in if you’d prefer to spin stories about, rather then aggregate and analyze the things that happen on a Major League Baseball field.
To jump off on a bit of a tangent though, you can really get to the heart of this by examining the rather farcical ways in which the “traditionalists” attack the “new school.” The obious one, of course, is accusing saberists of being “geeks who hang out with their spreadsheets in their mother’s basement and probably don’t even watch baseball.” I’m generally of the opinion that you should assume anyone who even approximates this argument should be assumed to be doing a bit of performance art, because it’s never made any sense to me. I mean, you really think that someone who doesn’t like baseball is going to put their time and energy into developing new ways to measure the events that happen on the field, mostly for very little compensation? And that actually seems reasonable compared to the “mother’s basement” thing. Far from hanging out underground, Bill James is an adviser to the Boston Red Sox. Rob Neyer is a senior writer for ESPN. Billy Beane and Sandy Alderson and Jed Hoyer are running baseball teams. And oh yeah, Brian Cashman and Theo Epstein are heading the sport’s most prestigious (and successful, at least recently) franchises. What’s Murray Chass doing? Blogging.
And that’s really the long and short of it. Rather than being about numbers, in the general or particular sense, this was (is) a fight between reason and cliche. The Chass camp likes to think of pitchers who “pitch to the score” and “know how to win,” or scrappy utility players who “know how to hit in the postseason.” People like me find that illogical on the face of it. Pitchers want to get guys out and not give up runs. If they do that and their offense scores runs for them, they’ll probably win. Good hitters will hit well, in October or any other month, and given a meaningful sample size that’s what you’ll see. And no, there’s no such thing as clutch hitting as a repeatable skill.
To their credit, most of “the writers” have been open minded to this, and in retrospect it was sort of silly to think that they wouldn’t be, a knee-jerk reaction to the resistance of a few and what was seen as a slowness on the part of others to “come around.” But now, you can clearly see that most of the writers have at least adopted the rationalist way of thinking about what various numbers mean. And as I’ve argued previously, I think the Chasses of the world made a huge tactical error in choosing to fight over Felix this season. After all, it was a rather extreme case given the historically bad nature of the Mariners offense, and indeed, many of the arguments deployed border on self-refuting. Chass, for example, has argued that Felix should have wonn the Cy Young in 2009, when he won 19 games, but not 2010, even though Felix’s numbers were better in 2010 than they were in 2009 in most regards. But his win total dropped from 19 to 13. Why? Certainly not because of anything Felix did wrong. Putting even a modicum of skepticism to these arguments, it becomes clear that it was overtly being argued that Felix should be penalized for playing on a bad team, even though he has no control over how many runs his offense scored. Putting those extremely bad arguments together with the extreme discrepancy between the excellence of the pitcher and the awfulness of the rest of the team, I’d say the anti-Felix camp did more to help Hernandez than anyone else.
The arguments will go on, of course. The curmudgeon set is never going to change their ways, and to the extent we obsess over that we’re doomed to a war of attrition for a while longer. Traditionalists will still toss around insults when confronted with people who think differently than they do. We’ll still have plenty of nonsense to FJM. And we’ll probably be faced with late summer arguments over awards and Hall of Famers and so on the same way we always have been since the internet revolutionized baseball commentary. But make no mistake, the larger fight is very much over, and the basement dwellers have won.
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