Dustin Pedroia wins AL MVP

Careful; I'm not totally simpatico with your view on this, either.

 

OK, ask Olney what he thinks of sabermetric.

 

I shot an URZ for $99 at a firing range in Vegas last week.

 

Writing: Buster Olney > Rob Neyer
On Television: Buster Olney < Rob Neyer

 

That's not exactly a ringing endorsement in my book.

 

I've never read anytning by Olney that was based on VORP or URZ (I still have no idea what that is).
And I never said statistical measures donlt mean anything or that all sabermetrics is bad.
But VORP? URZ? RC-27? C'mon. These are not stats they are mathematical contrivances.

 

What would you have thought (did you think?) of ERA when it first came out?

 

ERA is a simple satistical measure...number of earned runs allowed per nine innings pitched.
No baseline averages, no multiply by .8 because that's the arbitrary value someone decided to use, no ballpark adjustments. Just a straight forward statictic.
It does not take 5 convoluted paraghraphs to explain the 40 different factors that went into it, as it does with some figment of some sabermetricians imagination that is known as VORP.

 

That is not a valid reason to dismiss a new statistic, just because the variables used are convoluted to you.

 

The "variables" are contrived. Why did they decide to multiply something by .8? Because they felt like it?

 

Because some variables are more important than others, a common statistical occurence. They must be weighted.

 

Precisely.

VORP is always going to be a bit arbitrary because, of course, what the exact value of a replacement player is must be somewhat arbitrarily fixed.

That said, baseball has such a wealth of data available that being scared or automatically dismissive of new ways to measure performance is just silly. All they have to do is do the calculations for past players. If the statistic is useful, the great players of the past will rise to the top, just like you would expect them to.

Then, the truly interesting thing is to look at the players you didn't expect to be at the top, and try to determine whether the difference is because of a flaw in the measurement or a flaw in the conventional wisdom.

Sometimes, it's the former. Often, it's the latter.