Blue Jays beat writers’ obsession with StatCast numbers

Or hoping to get picked up by FanGraphs or Baseball Prospectus.

 

More than disliking new-era stats, I grow weary of the amateur sabermetricians who hold their nose if they must reference old, established numbers like batting average and ERA.

Do they have their limitations? Sure. Have they lost all legitimacy? Nope -- if only for the fact that they're common and useful to both the casual and the intense fan to draw comparisons.

And you didn't become Thomas Boswell when you discovered defensive WAR, dude.

 

I'm with the chorus in being worn out and annoyed by the reliance on numbers and dumb stats that obscure the bottom line (if the ball was caught or resulted in an out, I don't care about its hit probability), and thus I clicked the link expecting to hate it...but it was actually OK. I thought Shi did a good job of using the advanced stats to underline the difficulty of the catch given Hernandez's ankle and foot issues. He transitioned pretty easily from there into a solid modern featurized gamer. OK let me have it.

 

I knew a guy who had one of those FanGraphs jobs. Loved doing it for about a year and was tapped out and burned out.

 

I like analytics and acknowledge they lead to better chances of winning and a greater understanding of a player's contribution. Game to game it's a slog..
It's just another lazy way to call a game or do write up.

 

"Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore their names are Famine, Pestilence, Destruction, and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are DVOA, win rate, success rate and yards per route run."

 

One of the best posts I’ve seen on here in a long time.

 

Yeah that was outstanding. First-ballot HOF stuff.

 

Lmao. Brilliant.

 

Ray Guy marvels at the hang time on that post. Well done.

 

I want to see the numbers of the algebra and trig and geometry behind the Backdoor Maddux.

 

This post according to my calculations is worth 5 WAR on its own!