It’s that special time of year. The birds are chirping, the grass is borderline visible, and spring training is upon us. Of course, you know what that means- other than the return of exposed skin on the opposite gender, which is lovely- another round of whining about statheads ruining the sport of baseball. The debate seems to be the loudest in baseball (I don’t recall anyone burning down a village when QB ratings were introduced to football), and I feel like that’s for good reason…even though it’s wrong.
Something we can all agree on is that Logic should be the star of the next season of Tool Academy. Seriously, I don’t care how many calls we have to make, VH1 was invented for that exact purpose. Another thing we can agree on is that statistics in baseball are more significant than in other sports. For those of you that have been out of school too long/drank away knowledge/hate numbers/occasionally get dates/all of the above, I’ll explain. Baseball is unique in that it has an incredibly large number of games, and a large number of events within each game. So you get a repeated test against a certain set of variables, and then 161 more repeated tests under different conditions. As these repetitions add up, it becomes more likely that the various statistics are representative of the true values that player should achieve. Football doesn’t allow for this, because even something like passing attempts (which is a huge number) only comes in 16 test situations. Outliers are more likely to exist, because the actual mean is harder to define. Basketball and hockey have simliar problems. Throw in the relatively isolated nature of events in a baseball game (that is, if a guy hits a home run, his own pitcher had nothing to do with it), unlike other major sports which are either inherently team-based (football), have a lot of ebb and flow making singling out instances difficult (hockey, basketball), or both. This is an incredibly long way of saying that baseball players will, logically, eventually regress/progress to whatever the statistic should be, whereas in other sports, it is possible to be lucky/flukey/play the Bills and Lions for the majority of the season (kind of. You know what I mean.).
The question becomes, then, why the backlash? Even golf has embraced statistics as a part of the game, and most of the other major sports either have or are trying to do so. If anything, these sports are helping to improve everyone’s understanding of the significance of statistics, or the lack thereof. But baseball tends to get very angry old people whining about VORPies or whatever they decide to call the stat guys this year. The problem lies with a disconnect in generations of baseball fans. Baseball, unlike football or basketball, has had a professional league since roughly the dawn of time. Some fans still remember watching guys like Mickey Mantle, in an era where you couldn’t measure pitch speed, home run distance, or testosterone levels in the blood. This (with an assist from the era of purple prose) led to a tall-taleification of baseball accounts. Listening to an old baseball fan is akin to listening to your grandfather tell you that he had to walk to school in 10 feet of snow, carrying all his siblings on his back, uphill, both ways. The past gets romanticized at the expense of anything resembling progress. Which brings us back to statistics. If you tell the old baseball fan that his favorite player was, in fact, a lifetime .221 hitter that averaged more strikeouts than total bases, the fan would curse you and tell you that you were wrong. Even though you have numbers to back it up, they won’t let you destroy the false memory. In current times, people who resist the stats tend to do so because they SEE something that your silly numbers can’t measure. These are the people that think Derek Jeter should win the MVP, because you can’t quantify grit and leadership. Oddly enough, they’ll embrace batting average, hits, singles, doubles, triples, home runs, RBIs, ERAs, and a million other stats that have been around for a while- because they’ve been there long enough to matter. A .400 average? ZOMG TEDDY BALLGAME. But you try and pull out a VORP- or, hell, even a WHIP- and suddenly you’re out of an easily recognizable realm. God help us all if you cite an EqA.
But that’s not the problem. The problem lies with the complete inablity for either group (non-statheads, statheads) to fully respect the other. Personally, I find watching an entire baseball game to be kind of dull- which is due, in no small part, to the lack of a hometown team to follow while growing up. I’ve been a Blue Jays fan for as long as I can remember, but living in Erie, PA kind of limited my viewing options for games. So I did what any normal kid would do…I digested box scores. I would try to figure out what happened in the game from them. More importantly, I tried to use them to extrapolate what would happen in the future from them (for the record, I was never that popular with the other gender, and this would probably be why). Any sort of trend I could glean from that was like cracking a hidden code. I can honestly say that I enjoy baseball more as a source of data than as a game…but that’s not to say I hate the game, I just really like numbers. If I go to a game? I have a good time and don’t pay attention to numbers. Playoffs roll around and I’m watching like everyone else. But the regular season lacks a lot of drama for me, so I found a way to enhance the game for myself. And that, in a long, self-serving, rambling way, is what it should be. Traditionalists need to stop thinking their game is under attack, and some stat people need to remember that there is a game to be played and not just spreadsheets to be made. Stats should enhance the game, and allow people to see things within it that they would not otherwise see, but should also remain unobtrusive enough that the game doesn’t get lost in a sea of numbers.
What needs to- and won’t- happen is in the hands of sportswriters. Namely, stop writing the easy article. Maybe instead of playing off the debate, try to diffuse it. Note that an OPS+, even if you can’t calculate it at home, can be a rather useful tool to digest a player’s value. Or if you don’t like OPS+ or another stat, give a good reason. Point out something that you think isn’t properly accounted for…preferably that isn’t grit. This isn’t in the hands of the statisticians- they can’t dumb down the numbers to make them more accessible without diminishing the value therein. But by progressing this way, we can make a smarter generation of sports fans, one that won’t flip out if you point out the similarities between these two players.
Except for Philly fans. They’re a lost cause.
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