The Baseball Perspective: Stats?

I have not written in a while, and I don’t have a great reason for it. There has been a level of being lazy mixed with busy mixed with apathy mixed with a lack of ideas. My reviews are clogging up but that has so much to do with actually reading, playing and watching things to review.

So, today I want to talk about baseball stats, but not in the standard way. I have become a bigger and bigger fan of sabermetrics as I have gotten older, but I don’t want to just hammer people over the head with math and numbers here. We will talk later on about why I loved sabermetrics before I even knew what they were at a later time.

Today is more about the war that stats have started. The traditional baseball world, as far as men in MLB, has been slowly dying out and being replaced with advanced metrics. Yet fans and commentators continue to fight with those who look past the surface. When I first looked into stats I didn’t know much more than what I was told via play by play guys and pregame commentators. I was told ERA measures a pitchers worth, that batting average measured a hitters worth, and that there are some players that are just clutch. But they were wrong. Everyone was, some by ignorance, and most by choice.

I was wrong by ignorance. I was watching a different game then. But the problem became that people still don’t want to see the science. And that is the term I am going to use from here on out. Sabermetrics is nothing but a science, and it produces testable hypothesis and evidence to produce theories. That is what angers so many people. The game has been taken away from the strong jocks, and given to the nerd. Hence the term “Stat Geek”.

Here is the thing, the science is what it is. It is flawed in some areas (fielding stats still have a lot of ground to cover) and actually predictive in others ( FIPS is a good example here). But none of it is perfect. And that is science. Let me give an example here. Let’s look at The Germ Theory. (I use this because most people would not argue against it.) It is established and credible that viruses and bacteria are the basic causes for sickness. But what if we are wrong? Meaning, what if our means of measurement, our ability to experiment, and our math skill are all too primitive to accurately measure why we get sick? This isn’t an outrageous claim. Before the germ theory we were left with the Four Bodily Fluids (yellow and black bile, blood and phlegm) and their balance as a means for determining health. This is where we got leeching and blood letting as medical procedures. It wasn’t until the LATE 1800′s that the germ theory was really proven. It was 1870 before the sterilized medical instruments. That is nearly thousands of years before we knew how we got sick.

My point is that as technology grows, so does our ability to get closer to the truth. There is still chances we could be wrong about so many things (with neurology advancing at new paces we could be wrong about a lot of things) but what we have is our best guesses.

That is all sabermetrics is. The best guess at predicting and evaluating performance. But people don’t, and sometimes won’t, see it or give the science any credence. If a sabermetrics advocate is right, he/she is ignored, if wrong he/she is ridiculed. Sports has become one of the last safe places for the physically fit to dominate the physically weak. Every other line of life is dominated by the more intelligent. But sport is where people like James Harrison can make a living being idiots. But baseball has changed.

Baseball now prizes the smartest man in the room. Theo Epstein revamped the Red Sox image in that of sabermetrics, taking Moneyball and applying MONEY to it. Neal Huntington is doing the same thing in Pittsburgh. We are out of the stone age when it comes to baseball, but people still want to use rocks and spears (Pitcher Wins and RBI) to fight the battle instead of guns and bombs (RA and OPS), and the sad part is sabermetrics is using lasers and lightsabers (FIP and wOBA).

The youth of today is more split, and that is a good sign. Science will always progress on. Factual evidence will always trump subjective experience. It is this line of thinking that changed me into a new person. I value evidence over everything else. I seek facts, truth and answers. And experiment is infinitely better than a myth, no matter the benefits of the myth. Sabermetrics are not always right, but they are the best guess, and fighting them is like fighting Evolution or Gravity or Thermodynamics or any other theory. If you are trying to prove them wrong, then you are on the right path to science, but using old methods will get you nowhere b