Salon's Kaufman accuses Kindred of 'ignorance'

I didn't say that.

Schwarz was a math student at Penn and has been well-entrenched in sabermetrics. You connect the dots.

Didn't say that, either. This is what I'm driving at.

All this kind of bullshit needs to be thrown out the window.

 

ERA+. that sounds cute.

 

Yeah, it's insanely nerdy and complex. It measures how a pitcher performed against other pitchers in his era. Why in the world would a HOF voter want to know that? :

 

Brock was the dominant base stealer in an era of base stealing, hit .300, and drove pitchers to distraction. One of the name players of his era. Clearly deserving. As is Raines.

 

If you think two people voted for Jay Bell for any other reason than he was nice to them, or he gave them a good interview, you're deluded.

 

There's a Moneyball-like book coming out on the 2008 Rays. Maybe it will bother to mention the pitching talent the organization has mined, unlike the book done by the guy married to Tabitha Soren.

 

And you don't think it might be useful to have some way of quantifying the words in bold, so people who never saw Brock play don't just have to take your word for it?

Also, for the record, Lou Brock may have hit .300, but more importantly, he got on base 34.3 percent of the time. He made an out in 65.7 percent of his career plate appearances, which wasn't all that much better than the league average during his career. Just sayin'.

 

I quickly realized the reference you were making, but my first reaction was "Kurt Loder wrote a book about baseball?"

 

No, not really. The Potter Stewart argument works for me. Who was a more dominant base-stealer than Lou Brock? Sorry, but when it comes to the Hall, "player that helped define his era" means a lot more than "VORP"

 

I just think, generally speaking, that objective ("He stole successfully on 75 percent of his attempts and was slightly above average at getting on base") is better than subjective ("Dooley says he defined the period 1961-1979.")

And this isn't to rip Lou Brock, who was a very good player and a deserving Hall of Famer.

 

I wasn't under the impression "Moneyball" ever set out to be anything beyond what it was. I could name a thousand things that aren't in the book. You can do the same about any book, movie or story. It's about what it's about. It's not about what it's not about. What's wrong with that?

(And as an aside, and not directed at you ... I've heard all the cracks about how the A's had such great pitching and didn't win a World Series. Amazing that that's never happened before in the history of major league baseball. All the old-school ways of scouting players always resulted in the team with the best pitching staff getting to and winning every World Series. Got it!)

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And in answer to the bolded question: How about Tim Raines, who stole successfully on 808 of his 954 steal attempts, an 84.7 percent success rate?