Burwell: Art, science meet in Pujols

Why Don’t Count Benigno Wins Anymore?

If baseball actually was the absolute science that some haughty new-age hardball intelligentsia believe it is, then surely someone would have already created another Albert Pujols by now. For even baseball’s new brigade of pseudo-intellectual sabermetricians seem to understand that there are no highfalutin’ formulas that would deny the painfully obvious truth that the Cardinals slugger has become a near-perfect standard of baseball excellence.

The sabermetric clan just love them some Albert. If they could shove all of their ultimate exotic measures like VORP, WHIP, RAR, DIPS, SNW, OPS and WAR into a statistical blender, out would pop Virtual Pujols, a spectacular hitting machine even Keith Law could unconditionally love.

And I say thank goodness for Pujols, because he is the perfect baseball creation who, at least for the moment, has allowed the game’s stubborn old-school traditionalists, new-school deep thinkers and baseball’s statistical moderates, too, to meet on some common ground.

I woke up Tuesday morning with a slight case of uncomfortable dread bubbling in my stomach, wondering who and how someone armed with a Baseball Writers Association of America National League MVP ballot in one hand and a sabermetric crib sheet in another was going to use the rigid language of science to explain why Pujols didn’t deserve to win his third NL MVP.

...Numbers are not an absolute tool like the sabermetric worshipers would have you believe. You do not calculate the baseball genius of any great player solely with a spreadsheet any more than you would judge the musical genius of Chuck Berry or Miles Davis by an elaborate math formula.