Dustin Pedroia wins AL MVP

Awww, do I have to?

 

Originally I was asking spinted, but because you are opposed to Neyer's craft, I'm directing my question to you. Why don't you respect his craft? By respect I don't mean "agree" but I think that his well-formulated and carefully crafted arguments should be respected. What don't you agree with? Why do you think that UZR is inadequate? Or why shouldn't a GM look at a free agent's VORP before finalizing a contract offer? See, I'm not saying that we should only look at calculators and spreadsheets, but I also think that baseball has and will continue to evolve from the era of Branch Rickey and Tom Greenwade. The eyes tell us something---and the numbers tell us something. Together, they can create a much clearer and accurate picture than if we merely relied on one thing. I think Rob Neyer, Bill James, Keith Law, Joe Sheehan and countless others are contributing very important work that benefits not just baseball fans and observers, but baseball insiders. And I can't say the same about journalists like the aforementioned Sherman, Massarotti and Kurkjian. I don't think it's an either/or, binary choice. So why don't you respect his work? And don't just rail against sabermetrics and label Neyer and his ilk the nerds who don glasses and pocket protectors and sleep in their mother's basements. Why don't you expect stats like RC, UZR, OPS+ and EQA? Why aren't they more effective indicators of a player's performance than, say, .BA, HR and RBI?

 

If the numbers can tell the same guy (I swear, I'm not his agent) that the Rays will make the playoffs and that Obama will overperform his poll number in North Carolina, it's time to respect the numbers or be utterly and completely behind.

This isn't like getting a cellphone.

 

See, Zeke, it's much easier to dismiss the numbers than to actually try and open a book and understand them. I can't say I'm a Ph.D. when it comes to sabermetrics, but I at least recognize their value and I would always want the G.M. of the Boston Red Sox---my team of choice---to integrate them into their organizational philosophy. Instead, though, it's easy to understand why old-school journalists continue to deny Neyer the voting rights he so clearly deserves---he's smarter than 99.9% of them and runs intellectual circles around them. But the BBWA doesn't want to have writers like Neyer outshine their members.

 

yes! another red sox fan. just what our site needs.

 

There goes the neighborhood.

 

I've been trying very hard to be open-minded about sabermetrics, so the basement-dweller and pocket protector stuff is not my thing. It's low-lying fruit, and it just turns what is an interesting and mostly adult discussion into a juvenile one. (And I like the topic too much.)

Instead of criticizing it again, I'll say I hope for some kind of harmonic convergence of the traditionalists and the stat guys. Is that possible? I don't think so. To paraphrase Kissinger, the debate is so contentious and will stay that way because there's nothing on the line. One camp seems to have a throbbing obsession with numbers -- RC, UZR, OPS, EQA, the rest of that alphabet soup -- that some of the uninitiated, frankly, find incomprehensible. It's OK to devise these formulas, but what does it mean? That is to say, what does it really mean? Do you need someone to prove that Carl Crawford is probably a better defensive left fielder than Gary Matthews Jr.?

The other camp is being told that almost every clump of knowledge they've gathered, from the formative years onward, is defective. That takes some nerve, don't you think? At the end of the day, all these numbers tell us is how a guy did. Somebody's got to make the decision -- using powers of close evaluation that can't be graphed -- on how that guy's going to do. In a perfect world, and only the Red Sox have come close to this, the stat geeks should feed the scouts and vice versa. Mutually beneficial to one another. But then you have places like Houston, which eliminated the position of someone who had been scouting for the Astros for a quarter-century.

 

Dude, seriously. Do you ever like an award pick? I mean, EVER?

We can set our clock to you griping about the baseball awards, regardless of the winner.

 

First of all, Genco, I know what VORP is .. a fucking contrived formula with no basis in reality.
I have no freaking idea what URZ is and, honestly, I don't want to know because I'm betting it's another formula that starts with an arbitrary assumption (i.e., no basis in reality)
As for Neyer, the next time he makes an intelligent observation about what he sees in a player rather than what his statistics tell him will be the first. He's not a writer, he a sabermasturbator.
And his writing pretty much sucks. too.

 

Just one, because it's late, and probably past his bedtime.

 

What the fuck are you? You have your head buried in the sand. Most people are willing to accept there are different ways to evaluate the game. Your just teliing people to get off your lawn. Was the guy who invented the RBI a stat geek. I guess, to you the world is still flat, Tyrannosaurus Spnited.

You remind me of Hondo and Old Tony when it comes to the Global Warming debate. Please don't let facts get in the way of a good story.