Statistics in Baseball

Why does it make me a Communist to like sabermetrics? I know this subject has been written about a million times, but Joe Posnanski talked about it recently and that's really had me thinking. The mainstream media would have you believe that if you love statistics, you can't be considered a real, true baseball fan. Bloggers who live in their mother's basements are ruining the game, yadda yadda yadda...that sort of stuff. Why is this?

Before I get into the why, let's clarify the argument against sabermetrics. I feel like the mainstream media portrays sabermetricians in an incorrect and rather unfair light in two main ways. One, they claim that stat lovers never watch actually baseball games (they may not even care about baseball games), but just love going over data again and again on the computers, so they don't and can't understand the game. Maybe there are some people like that out there, but I would be willing to guarantee that 99% of people who claim they love baseball stats also watch their fair share of games.

Take me for instance. I love baseball stats and I love baseball, but I don't feel like these two passions are irreconcilable. I don't even think they're two separate passions - I feel like they're one and the same. My love of baseball is what caused me to want to understand it more, to dig deeper into baseball stats, and to get a gain a more comprehensive understanding of the game that I love. These stats have only fed my baseball fever, but they in no way are replacing the fact that I love to watch a game and do it on a fairly regular basis.

Next, the mainstream media turns the stats debate into a zero-sum game. What do you trust more, stats or scouts? If you had to pick one, which would you choose? Do you prefer numbers over people? I want to know, why can't you have both? Statistics are great, but I don't think you'll find a single writer on a popular sabermetrics blog (like FanGraphs or the Hardball Times) that would admit that stats should be used to the exclusion of everything else. Statistics and scouting both have their strengths and weaknesses and when used in the proper combination, they can dovetail beautifully and complement each other.

The trick is, it sometimes appears that bloggers care only about statistics because that's all they're ever talking about. You won't find many blogs (if any at all) out there that specialize in scouting, but there are tons of them on sabermetrics. Scouting information is nearly impossible to get a hold of and it's information that's tough to duplicate on your own. Not everyone has the in depth knowledge about baseball skills and mechanics needed to be a scout, plus even if you did have the knowledge, it takes a significant investment of time and money to get any results. Stats, on the other hand, are freely available in multiple places on the Internet and can be manipulated at will. Blogger are therefore only using the best freely available knowledge that they can to draw their conclusions.

What it all comes down to, at least to me, is critical thinking. Before I make a decision about something, I want to make sure that I have the best possible information that I can. If this includes scouting reports, statistical data, medical records - it's all relevant. I'll listen to everyone's different opinion about a player, but I'm going to take each of those opinions, weigh them myself, consider the information that I have, and then make a decision. To just swallow what the mainstream media says about a player without challenging that with the information I have (which happens to be statistics) seems irresponsible to me. I blame it on my college.

To get back to the "why?" question, then, why is it that the mainstream media trash talks statistics so much? Well, there a couple of reasons. The media is afraid and they're simply lashing back at blogs, which are stealing lots of their business and could run them out of a job. Also, many of the people you'll see on ESPN have either been a player or been around the game for years, which of course would give them a bias towards scouting just as us bloggers have a bias to statistics. And then finally, bloggers, for all that we try and hold the high ground in this debate, haven't exactly helped matters. We're constantly attacking the media over the things they say and write, antagonizing them for not using advanced statistics. What we should be doing is instead reaching out to them, asking for them to be more critical and evaluative in their pieces. It's okay to point out errors, but to rail upon them for having their own understandable biases is just as bad as them railing against bloggers.

Anyway, this is rather hypocritical of me to say since I was always a huge fan of Fire Joe Morgan, but I think we could definitely stand to gain a lot from raising the level of the discussion around baseball statistics. Loving baseball and loving stats can be one and the same thing, and one way or the other, people will come to realize that eventually. The only question is how soon.