Bob Ryan: I don't think the "average" fan cares about advanced metrics in MLB

This thread is dumber than the column which inspired it. I base that on WAR and the eye test.

 

So no one is going to discuss the Oakland A's and their 664 wins from 2000 thru '06?

Their 190 wins the last 2 seasons?

Their 27 wins so far in 2014 while competing in the same division as the Billionaire Boys Club?

That's ALL sabermetrics. Sure, it would have been nice to see them win it once in 7 trips to the postseason since 2000 -- a 1-7 record, including 1-6 in the ALDS. That's a pretty awful takeaway.

Now, do the average fans care that the A's sausage is stuffed with SABR? I don't know. I doubt Bob Ryan knows. Maybe we should go ask the fans. Maybe they have been paying attention.

 

How a team finds, selects and employs good players is interesting. But I do believe most fans are more interested in whether or not their team has any and (here's a part of A's history which may explain why Bay Area residents are leery of embracing the team) whether or not they can keep them.

 

Oooooh. It's certainly not "all sabermetrics." Especially now, when everyone does it. Traditional scouting is vitally important, particularly in the draft, when trading for prospects, or when prospecting in Latin America. Beane used sabermetrics as a tool when others had not caught up yet, but the A's success is not "all sabermetrics." Even stat heads now obsess just as much over mph and Pitch F/X data. That stuff just wasn't available before.

 

You might be right. I mean, he's on the team now so that's a big part of it.

 

Without Sabremetrics The A's would have never found Jeremy Brown

 

I'll wade in, prepared for the inevitable slap down.

I feel pretty comfortable saying I truly AM the average baseball fan of 2014. I won't go into the demographics behind that statement, but I'm comfortable with the statement. In general, I'm the guy who (those of you who write re: baseball for a living) you are writing for. Your target market. Attending 6-8 games a year, watching Baseball Tonight & checking his fantasy team in the morning. I don't think, considering Ryan's column as a whole, that he's wrong.

I enjoy the new metrics & they've been a nice supplement to my understanding of the game. However, the entire "movement" is becoming tiresome. It's a game, not a science project. Frankly, sabermetricians & data zealots have reached the exact same place (IMO, of course) as the doofus hipster / pretentious beer snob. WAR & OPS vs. IBU, ABV & "mouthfeel."

Yep, you're the smartest cat in the bar / ballpark. We all bow down. Please, now, just stop talking and watch the game / drink your Pliney the f*cking Elder....

 

I don't have an issue with writers not turning columns into statistics term papers. I do have a problem with them being willfully WRONG in light of the things deeper study has revealed. For example, don't tell me someone is a great contributor on the bases if he steals 40 bases but is thrown out 25 times.

 

But what if 40-25 is only part of that runner's contribution? How many times has he gone from first to third on a single so that he scores on a sac-fly or WP/PB, etc? How many times has he scored from second on a single vis-a-vis the importance of those runs over the course of a season?

SB/CS is not the end-all be-all of running stats.

 

Of course not. But if you're basing your opinion that he's a great basepath contributor solely on those 40 stolen bases, and ignoring the 25 CSs, then you are passing bad information or, as you point out, perhaps good information reached solely by luck.

Bill James puts out a handbook each year that includes the stats you're talking about - what each runner did on a single when he was at first, etc., etc. Tangentially, looking at those tables was the first time I ever got my dad to nod approvingly at something other than BA-HR-RBI, essentially. He thought it was terrific to have access to that information.

I don't understand the resistance to utilizing huge data sets, which baseball provides, to glean deeper truths. Some of the arguments you hear - about 20 times a game during a typical White Sox broadcast, for example - are the equivalent of saying, "I don't care what decades worth of tax records show. Income equality in this country is not growing, because everyone on my block has a house about the same size."

 

Does anyone besides Hawk regard baserunning stats as newfangled and exotic? They are just the collation of data that was always available on your scorecards. I'm pretty sure I remember announcers in the '70s giving both stolen base and caught stealing numbers if they thought a man on first might try a steal.

 

Dude, we had a prominent poster here last summer arguing fiercely that Carlos Beltran's high stole base percentage was not relevant to his Hall of Fame credentials, just his raw number of successful stolen bases.

But anyway, that was just an example I pulled out of my ass as a simplification of the point I was making.

The fact is, baseball announcers and writers make flat-out inaccurate, provably wrong statements all the time. (As do, for example, political or policy writers.)