I have spent my professional life in the print world, where intelligenceities don’t see the light of day!
But now comes a fellow who is not only going to make O’Connell’s job easier, but he will also eliminate it altogether.
His name is Sean Forman, and he is the creator of the Web site, Baseball-Reference.com. He also has a method of selecting the most valuable players and Cy Young award winners that he believes is far more reliable than the writers’ voting.
...Without getting into details, Forman presents a formula by which m.v.p. and Cy Young candidates can be ranked. The result is a number that is assigned to each player – Robinson Cano 6.3, Evan Longoria 6.2, Miguel Cabrera 6.0, using A.L. m.v.p. as an example.
Integral to those numbers is something called WAR, which stands for wins above replacement. What replacement? A replacement player, of course, but he’s mythical.
Statistics zealots apparently love to deal with mythical or hypothetical players. The problem for those of us who prefer dealing with reality and actual human beings is we can’t buy into the idea of using mathematical formulas instead of real players.
However, given that many BBWAA voters seemed to buy into the formula stuff in the Cy Young voting last year, it may not be long before they vote for all of the awards on the basis of WAR (no intangibles needed). But if they are going to vote on the basis of WAR, who needs voters?
O’Connell can simply ask Forman to e-mail him the final WAR numbers, and then he can stand on the dais at the New York baseball dinner each January and present the m.v.p. and Cy Young awards to a computer.
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Happily, the Times has also dumped dinosaur sports columnists such as Murray Chass as part of the effort to lure younger readers.
Chass is disingenuous at best here. The traditional system he'd prefer to keep also relied heavily on statistics, but in an intellectually lazy fashion. MVP winners were often the RBI leader and Cy Young winners were usually the Wins leader. Why did it make more sense to give awards to individuals based on those statistics that depend greatly on context and the performance of one's teammates?
Of course nobody's really suggesting (I hope) that we go to handing out awards solely on the basis of WAR rankings, but when I read people here arguing fervently that there's such an enormous distinction between a 5.1 and a 3.9 WAR that it means that we can't possibly consider voting for the 3.9, I sometimes have to wonder whether or not this is what some of those people really want.
My personal wish is to retain the current system of voting, but to lock the Chasses of the world into a small, closed room, and not let them out until they at least acknowledge and respect the overall point that Sean and others are trying to get across about value. We don't need to replace voters with computers, but we sometimes need a more intellectually curious subset of voters.
That would be bad for baseball.
I agree. For example, i thought Jimmy Rollins was a perfectly acceptable MVP. Ditto Ichiro in 2001.
Personally, I feel that as long as a player is qualified, as in his value, be it WAR or something else, is in the MVP range, and no one is having an obvious season for the ages, he's an acceptable winner. Thus Rollins (6.1 WAR) is fine, even though Pujols was 8.3.
In other words, you're advocating starving the Chasses of the world to death!
OK, I admit, not such a bad idea.
Why would anyone prefer this to the alternative?
Repoz links the bad Chass articles. But Tango links the good ones.
i'm not a WAR fanboy, and i actually think referring to the stat is intellectually lazy, but if people are criticizing the replacement player aspect of it, why not just name it after a replacement player, and use translations to standardize it? i'm pretty sure i've seen this done before, but wins above bloomquist would be a positive step in the evolution of the concept, imo.
As someone for whom the awards already have virtually no appeal, I think that would be great for baseball. It would only be bad for sportswriters.
Nah. Wins Above Mendoza. We need to be multicultural about mediocrity.
Plus the acronym--WAM--is more memorable to the average cave-dweller.
They used the math of batting averages and the summations of home runs and RBIs. They (mentally) adjusted up or down based on defensive contribution (as best they could estimate it). They talk as if they are qualified to decide teh MVP based on the 160 or so games they attend in person each season. But even moo-RAY realized all the time he was a reporter (and later newspaper columnist) that the games he saw in person were a small fraction of the total games played. So moo-RAY would look up the numbers he thought were important and based his votes on those numbers, that math.
Hence, what this (idiotic) argument is all about is whose math counts and who is in control of that math? Moo-RAY wants others to let him hold on to his a la carte math, because, at least in part, he gets to decide on his own what is and is not important. He loses his sense of control and power if someone else--oddly he BLAMES Sean Forman, when Forman is merely publishing a formula created by someone else and allowing the rest of us to see it on b-ref--decides what math counts.
Further, like most of us, moo-RAY probably does not fully understand the math used in WAR. (I get and embrace the idea, but I could not replicate the calculation.) So, almost like a small child, moo-RAY lashes out against the notion he cannot control and does not really understand.
I do think there is an argument to be made against using something like WAR without any fudge factor, because the numbers, while they look precise, likely have a good deal of margin of error (perhaps 10% up or down per individual). Moreover, some assumptions are just not settled fact yet. Hence we get the divergence in WAR between the b-ref version and the Fangraphs version. ... But just because WAR has its limitations, does not mean anyone should give moo-RAY's piece a chance.
If only. There are awards articles (and subsequent BBTF threads) from March to December.
While I respect your position, bad for Nasty Nate does not equal bad for baseball. Baseball's awards generate more interest/discussion than any of the other professional sports honors, and trail only the Heisman Trophy in the country. Those things are good for the health of the sport. Turning a source of debate into something you could simply track on BBRef would render the awards virtually meaningless to most of the baseball public.
Thus impeding our discussions of soccer, basketball, college football, politics, religion and indie rock.
Most baseball fans aren't fans because they want to hone their mathematical skills. Sports in school are "extracurricular", and that's how the regular average fan looks at it on the pro level, too. They don’t go to a game to sublimate their school studies. They go to get away from that. The promotion of the new "hard and complicated" stats by diehards makes it too much like school or (maybe worse) hard work for the run of the mill fan. The problem with the conventional stats is they are, to varying degrees, imprecise. The problem with WAR and other stat of the art stats is that they aren't intuitive—they aren’t easily; understandable. You got to "swot up" and cram to understand them. And that kind of education smacks too much of the usual kind--of taking courses in college or seminars in job instruction at work. And that's not why most people follow sports. Batting average may be of limited value but it's instinctively understandable, and it doesn't take a thesis to explain it. WAR is not. When you start to explain how it is figured to someone, his eyes start to roll back. Hey, most fans just want to watch and appreciate the game on its surface as a game. All this WAR stuff, to them (not me--I love it), kills the fun. They don't go to baseball games as sublimation for explaining the universe or saving mankind. And awards should validate what they see and understand without being forced to attend a series of autopsies in various level anatomy courses.
I think if they thought about it in this detail, this might be what a Joe Six-pack type fan would say.
I know, this doesn’t satisfy your (or my) interest, but Chass doesn’t represent us. Indeed, as has been made clear time after time, he’s not competent to do that. But, I think the underlying unease with all this “think-tank” baseball is (or has the potential to be) is quite real--and may be hurtful to a major sport that wants to speak to a nation of various people with various intensity levels of interest.
I like and care about baseball. I don't care about what boxes Joe Schmoe from the Capital City Tribune checks off on some ballot. If someone tried to pass themselves off as really interested in music, but then spent half his time discussing the Grammy Awards, I would laugh in his face . . .
But baseball isn't designed solely for folks who are really interested in the game any more than the pop music industry is coveting people really interested in music. Those types of people represent the minority of baseball and music fans.
Not really. Murray used to be a sportswriter for the Times. The Times changed and Murray got fired/let go. He blames his loss of the comfy gig on the Internet. He equates the new stats with the Internet. Sean Just published articles in the Times about the new Internet stats.
Murray is just lashing out at modernity as it leaves him behind. See also "fundamentalists" and "al-Queada."
But isn't BBTF part of that minority? And if so, why constantly participate in what you are painting as an interest-builder for casual fans?
I'm not painting it as only an interest-builder for casual fans. I'm saying it's one of the things associated with baseball that interests the casual fan. I (and many, many other Primates) also have some interest in it. You don't, which is fine.
I don't deny this in any way; I even think "some" interest is underestimating it.
But the huge interest always confuses (and selfishly frustrates) me. I am surprised that people don't notice or care that it is in the self-interest of writers to hype up the awards and their importance by frequently framing baseball dialogue in terms of the awards. "So-and-so is an promising young player - in a few years he might be of the caliber that I could bestow honor upon." People here write a lot of things "against" the BBWAA, and then (with seemingly no awareness of the contradiction) help give them prestige, validity, and importance by constantly participating in the accreditation of their awards.
Well, I for one don't bash the BBWAA, so I really don't care if I'm complicit in giving them prestige. As for the rest, I think there remains interesting discussion around these awards, even if we may disagree with the way the voters approach them. I find the awards threads often serve as the launching point for interesting baseball-related discussion, which, as the sidebar frequently demonstrates, is not always the case around here.
Well, to each his own. From my perspective, it seems more often that interesting baseball-related discussion gets usurped by boring (to me) awards discussion.
No point addressing Murray's silliness other than to note that this is an example of the journalistic sloppiness that Murray often rails against (with the Times as his frequent target). They aren't Sean's numbers anymore than the MVP awards listed on b-r were given out by Sean. And nobody, well nobody serious, thinks a 6.3 WAR is meaningfully different than a 6.2 WAR.
OK I will also note the "hypocrisy" of whining about 6.3 WAR vs. 6.2 WAR while "awarding" batting titles based on .338 vs .337.
Replacement player is a problematic concept but, for MVP and CYA certainly and at a team level for that matter, we can (and probably should) just as easily use average as the baseline. Playing time differences between candidates don't amount to more than a couple of runs for hitters and maybe half-a-win for pitchers -- except I suppose in those nutty years they want to vote a reliever as CYA or MVP -- so it makes no substantive difference in any ranking and you can always use playing time as a tie-breaker if two players are that close in value.
Of course "the average player" doesn't really exist either. Perhaps the way to really appease guys like Murray is to change the pitchers' WAR stat to VBG -- value below Gibson -- and the hitters' to .... hmmmm, who's the right candidate here? VBD (DiMaggio)? VBM (Mantle or Mays)?
You can note it, but it doesn't make any sense.
Most baseball fans aren't fans because they want to hone their mathematical skills. Sports in school are "extracurricular", and that's how the regular average fan looks at it on the pro level, too. They don’t go to a game to sublimate their school studies. They go to get away from that. The promotion of the new "hard and complicated" stats by diehards makes it too much like school or (maybe worse) hard work for the run of the mill fan. The problem with the conventional stats is they are, to varying degrees, imprecise. The problem with WAR and other stat of the art stats is that they aren't intuitive—they aren’t easily; understandable. You got to "swot up" and cram to understand them. And that kind of education smacks too much of the usual kind--of taking courses in college or seminars in job instruction at work. And that's not why most people follow sports. Batting average may be of limited value but it's instinctively understandable, and it doesn't take a thesis to explain it. WAR is not. When you start to explain how it is figured to someone, his eyes start to roll back. Hey, most fans just want to watch and appreciate the game on its surface as a game. All this WAR stuff, to them (not me--I love it), kills the fun. They don't go to baseball games as sublimation for explaining the universe or saving mankind. And awards should validate what they see and understand without being forced to attend a series of autopsies in various level anatomy courses.
I think if they thought about it in this detail, this might be what a Joe Six-pack type fan would say.
I know, this doesn’t satisfy your (or my) interest, but Chass doesn’t represent us. Indeed, as has been made clear time after time, he’s not competent to do that. But, I think the underlying unease with all this “think-tank” baseball is (or has the potential to be) is quite real--and may be hurtful to a major sport that wants to speak to a nation of various people with various intensity levels of interest.
I think these are excellent points. I think the "sabre-purists" make a huge mistake trying to completely de-contextualize stats.
Baseball, and the awards, are not about fully context neutral performance. It is about the narrative of the season, and how performance leads to wins which leads to pennants and world championships.
The idea the whichever hitter or pitcher has the most context-neutral WAR must be the MVP/Cy Young, regardless of things like wins and RBIs and team victories completely ignores the narrative. And the narrative is critical to baseball fandom.
Fair enough. Here we don't really need the excuse. We can cut out the middleman; its possible to discuss the great season of Pujols (or whomever) without always framing it in relation to voted-on awards.
One of the appealing thing about team sports is that outcomes aren't (usually) decided by panels, judges, or voting. For me, the things about baseball that are different from figure skating, boxing, and network TV talent contests are the good things.
To this day, I think Julio Franco got screwed.
This. Sports awards are not significantly different from the sports themselves--they exist to fulfill an emotional need and are usually impervious to reason.
Right, like wins, or RBIs
I think this is a mistake. Sports is about the narrative. Nobody (or very, very few people) care if their team is the "best" in baseball; they want to win a World Series.
Certain posters keep stating that these people exist and if so they are the snipe of BBTF.
It's so important that the best pitcher in the AL is not going to get the award for best pitcher in the AL. Writers will substitute the "narrative" that his efforts are somehow lessened because his team-mates can't hit as well as the Yankees, and his closer can't close as well as Mariano Rivera, costing him made-up "pitchers wins" in a stats category designed in an arbitrary fashion by scorekeepers that apparently reveals his lack of moral courage.
I really don't get the moral outrage over this. The major awards have never been purely about the best season, value wise.
Right, like wins, or RBIs
Like wins or RBIs, or WAR, or ANY single metric. You need to look at everything, including the context of the games and their relative importance. That doesn't mean that you promote a B level pitcher on a pennant winner over a 1972 Steve Carlton, but it does mean that you don't just look at a particular metric and vote accordingly. It's not an either / or situation.
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Pace snapper: I say, narrative, schmarrative. (And I make my living teaching narrative.) Somebody must be the best player / pitcher in the league, independent of who had the great September to help Mudville win the flag. It isn't always clear who, but it's very interesting to try to figure out who.
Who's stopping you? But that doesn't mean that the MVP or the CYA have to automatically be awarded to the winner of your particular rating system.
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I do not know a single member of SABR or any other metric oriented fan who believes in ignoring personal observations as part of the player evaluation process.
Certain posters keep stating that these people exist and if so they are the snipe of BBTF.
Without getting into personalities, I've repeatedly seen people argue the basic irrelevance of personal observations of contemporaries, especially when it concerns topics like "most outrageous" MVP awards of past decades. It's not as if they completely ignore those contemporary opinions, but if those opinions clash with a sabermetric concept of value, then those opinions are summarily dismissed as "subjective."
Try a little experiment, Harvey. The next time there's a discussion centering on players from the first half of the 20th century, introduce the opinion of a player's contemporaries that conflicts with the conventional wisdom of the extreme sabermetric-oriented primates**, and see how far it gets you.
**They're not too hard to identify, since they'll try to reduce every single awards discussion to WAR or whatever the metric flavor du jour happens to be, and will heap condescension on anyone who tries to frame the concept of player value by any other method.
I always think of a real good season some pitcher had in 1985.
The truth is that the Cy Young and MVP awards are usually some sort of imprecise combination of individual stats and team context, weighted in different degrees by voters in different years. The "narrative" concept is certainly part of the mix, but that narrative doesn't always favor the player or pitcher from the better team. If these awards were "team awards," then you'd see nothing but the best player or pitcher on the best team winning them, which clearly hasn't been the case.
I probably come as close as anyone. I accept that (some) professionally-trained scouts can add substantial knowledge through personal observation. I am also reasonably accepting of the notion of the wisdom of the masses when it can be applied.
But we rarely have access to that info and, otherwise, I give little/no credence to personal observation in player evaluation. Put more succinctly, there's only one person here whose personal opinion about players carries weight with me and that's Mike Emeigh (and Carlos Gomez back in the day). I also give HW's opinions the benefit of the doubt.
And, yes, I'm including myself. Sure, I have my opinions and, sure, they influence my personal decisions (in say a fantasy baseball league not that I've played one in ages) but I don't often make an argument here based on personal observation. That is, sure I'll trust my own judgment but I can't see any reason any of you would. Nor can I see any reason for us to trust the personal observations of sportswriters -- if anything, I think (as a class) they regularly give us reasons to distrust their personal observations. (That's not nearly as big an insult to mainstream sportswriters as it might seem, I can't think of a single "sabermetric" writer/blogger I give any credence to either when it comes to personal opinion.)
A big problem of course is that, especially for draft and development evaluation, the numbers are shite too. There's essentially no choice but to rely on personal observation in the draft and early development. But I still pay you guys no mind when you're touting the next Fernando Martinez! :-)
Those are always kids new to the world of analysis. That phase passes.
Some of you are too eager to paint with that broad brush.
And sometimes raw numbers taken out of context can be of relatively little value. AFAIC when the numbers seem to conflict with the near-unanimous opinions of a player's contemporaries (and not just contemporary sportswriters, but his opponents as well), then I'm not going to conclude that those contemporaries don't know what they're talking about. I'm going to be open to the possibility that they saw things that we missed.
Those are always kids new to the world of analysis. That phase passes.
Some of you are too eager to paint with that broad brush.
I fully realize that, Harvey. It's one of the reasons I didn't want to start naming names and getting into personalities. But I think that one of the best cures for that passing phase is for the passing phasers to start reading more of Bill James than just the statistical sections of his books. They should realize that James fully takes contemporary opinions of players into account, even when he doesn't agree with their conclusions. Unlike some of these passing phasers, and of course unlike the world's Murray Chasses, James makes the key insight that the most important part of sabermetrics is to keep asking questions even after you think you know all the answers. It's not about winning debates.
So it may be inevitable that you rely to a pretty big extent on some stats. I would think that WAR would be helpful in this regard. So what if it is mythical. Paul Krugman wrote an article where he said something like making up a simple story can help us understand some economic phenomena. I think WAR falls into that category. It is not perfect. But if I see one guy have a 2.0 or greater advantage than the next best guy, that seems like enough to win the MVP award or WAR is too flawed to use. Here is the link to the Krugman article
http://www.slate.com/id/1916/
(I should also note that there's a pretty heavy amount of sarcasm at play here.)
You do know that strips the flesh off the meat of that joke?
Etymologically speaking:
it wasn't bad. i kinda like the 'how many hits he accumulates per at bat'. i mean, NOBODY writes like that ; )
For each league, there are two voters per team, so 28 voters in the AL and 32 voters in the NL. It used to be that it would be two BBWAA beat writers from each AL or NL city, but that part has changed.
I thought it was good. Well, 59 was good. 61 was a little blunt, but I suppose that was to try to get through to those who missed it the first time.
Well, except for ratio of hits to at bats might be a statistic, I'm not sure.
I don't have a rating system, Andy, and I couldn't devise one that would make any sense if I stayed up nights for a month. I'm talking about a more general concept. Some single player, at the end of each season, will turn out to be the guy who should have been drafted first if everyone had been a free agent in March. Sometimes this is Ted Williams in 1949 and it's so obvious to anybody with a brain cell that even the voters reluctantly agree :) Sometimes it isn't obvious, and therefore poses an interesting analytical question.
Now, I'm not denying that narratives exist, have power, and will continue to sway awards voting forever, and I like Jimmy Rollins, too. C'est la vie. But I think voting is more interesting, and more focused, if it ignores narrative. Everyone agrees that Shannon Stewart finishing fourth in the '03 MVP voting was a case of voters losing their minds in pursuit of narrative. Well, to a lesser degree, every vote that is swayed by narrative is a Shannon Stewart case; we're only talking about how much.
Now, I'm not denying that narratives exist, have power, and will continue to sway awards voting forever, and I like Jimmy Rollins, too. C'est la vie. But I think voting is more interesting, and more focused, if it ignores narrative.
I don't have any problem with any of that, Bob, as long as you call your award "Most Valuable Player According to My Computer." But I don't think that the general question of relative player value can always be resolved quite so neatly as that.
Everyone agrees that Shannon Stewart finishing fourth in the '03 MVP voting was a case of voters losing their minds in pursuit of narrative. Well, to a lesser degree, every vote that is swayed by narrative is a Shannon Stewart case; we're only talking about how much.
Exactly, and in truth I don't think that in most cases we'd really disagree in our choices. It's in the cases where there are two (or maybe more) eminently qualified candidates where I think throwing out the "narrative" might separate us. The problem with narrative comes when the narrative is used to override a candidate who's clearly superior (e.g. Mantle in 1961), and not just by 1.5 win shares. It's far less of a problem for me when you've got a case like Hernandez and Sabathia.
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I consider the WAR lists to be starting points in the award voting process, not the end.
Exactly.
Yeah, seeing a guy make a run at .400 would suck.
Ah, we're talking at cross purposes here, Andy (but we don't deeply disagree). This has nothing to do with computers or single über-numbers. It's playground philosophy. If we're choosing up sides based on what guys did in 2010, who gets picked first? There is a right answer to that, though the disputes (some philosophical, some based on different ways of estimating value) are fascinating to observe and participate in.
What's less fascinating is giving an award to somebody who you wouldn't pick first, but who happened to be in the most dramatic situations in August and September. But I don't think we disagree there. Again, everybody is happy that Jimmy Rollins won his MVP for guaranteeing a breakthrough division title in an exciting race while being the fifth- or sixth-best player in the league in 2007. But anyone who'd have picked him for the season over Albert Pujols or David Wright that March would have been less than smart.
Too much narrative in thinking about the MVP is like picking the kid for Little League who has the hottest mom.
Just to be clear, are you saying that you're OK with Rollins getting that MVP, or are you excluding yourself from that "everybody"? I understand that you wouldn't have picked him first to begin the season, regardless of how hot his Mom was.
Or to bring it to a closer case than Rollins, would you really get bent out of shape if as of today, Sabathia won this year's AL CYA?
Yeah, seeing a guy make a run at .400 would suck.
No it would just be irrelevant. Much less relevant than Bonds runs at .500 OBA.
Of course, there's a not-insignificant chance that Infante could have fewer than 502 PAs and still win the batting title. Imagine how the Chasses of the world would freak out if somebody misses out on the Triple Crown because of that.
My point exactly.
Why is a run at a .500 OBP more relevant than a run at a .400 batting average?
Way to suck the joy out of a leisure activity.
I consider the WAR lists to be starting points in the award voting process, not the end.
Agreed. The awards, are, and should be a combination of individual value, team performance, and narrative.
It's much more fun that way, and great for the sport.
Nobody knows "heap condescension" like this post does. I mean Jeebus.
My man, I can condescend with the best of them, but have you never seen the sort of reaction that I describe?
Why is a run at a .500 OBP more relevant than a run at a .400 batting average?
Because on base average is the percentage of time you reach base. Batting average is on base average with walks and hit by pitches arbitrarily removed from the numerator and denominator and is therefore less relevant if it is relevant at all. The fact that Omar Infante has a chance to lead the league in batting average proves the point. The fact that Ruth led the league in batting average only once proves the point.
Thanks, I had no idea what on base average was.
But why would it be more relevant to follow a run at a .500 OBP than it would be to follow a run at a .400 batting average? Your position with respect to a .400 BA seems to be that it's an arbitrary statistical marker, but so is a .500 OBP. If you're not interested in following the numbers as milestones of greatness, then there's no practical difference between Barry Bonds having a .499 OBP or a .501 OBP. Why should anyone care about the difference of .002 in OBP? What makes that relevant?
We could all have lobotomies and then we would believe in batting average and all the rest of the nonsense sportswriters believe. In fact, we could even be sportswriters. As long as we have functioning brains perhaps we should use them.
Proves what? That batting average is not the most telling statistic about player value. We know that, and the MSM guys know that too. It's role in determining value has been steadily declining among all baseball fans for a long time.
But there's nothing wrong with BA. In reality, unlike things like WAR, it's pretty damn immune to legitimate criticism as a stat (if I could change it in any way, it would be to count sac flies as ABs. But that's a pretty minor complaint). Otherwise, it does exactly what it's intended to do - meausures the rate of hits a batter gets against the number of times he was attempting to get a hit). That folks have sometimes overrated the importance of that statistic is a problem with people, not the stat. The solution is to fix the people (which has been going on rather successfully), not kill the stat.
And that ignores the point snapper was making. Baseball is not stricly an academic pursuit for the small set of eggheads that populate BTF and other stat friendly sites. It's supposed to be fun for all types of baseball fans. And a run at .400 would be a hell of a lot more fun than a run at a .500 OBP or just about any other pursuit of more valuable but less straightforward statistical milestone.
I think I'm saying (not very clearly, I know) that the disposition of the award itself doesn't warrant manning the barricades and fighting to the death. Nice guy, got his gong, was in fact very good that year, let's watch football now.
But it is clear that Rollins was not the best player in the league, or provided the most value, or whatever other way one wants to put it. All he did was provide the best story line.
Are you saying that BA is nonsense? Would you please point out the .400 or .375 hitter that didn't have a good season?
BA isn't the be-all and end-all of course, but it still a valid stats that convey valid info. Just b/c some people mis-use(d) it, doesn't mean it has no value.
Actually, Matt Holliday did, but the writers were stupidly told they had to vote before the regular season was over.
I think OBP is pretty clearly more straightforward th
an AVG. Its only its usage history which makes AVG seem more straightforward.
I think I'm saying (not very clearly, I know) that the disposition of the award itself doesn't warrant manning the barricades and fighting to the death. Nice guy, got his gong, was in fact very good that year, let's watch football now.
Since that pretty much summarizes my view of all individual awards, I'll give you the last word. AFAIC the only seasonal awards that really matter are the ones presented to teams.
And here's one more cheer for the Edit function, eh, Banta?
EDIT: I see you caught it pretty quickly. We've all been there many times.
Not quickly enough! But I'm still proud of myself, today is the first day I've ever used the quote feature while typing from my blackberry.
OBP also has a minor flaw as BA in not counting ROE, so I'd say they're similarly straightforward. They both effectively measure what it is they're trying to measure in a rather simple formula. But I didn't mean to call OBP a less straightforward statistic, rather that was a decription of the more comprehensive types of measurements such as WAR.
I was going to make this kind of comment. The only reason weight is attached to BA is because it was one of the metrics used first, not because there's something inherently more interesting to it. If OBP was used in baseball's infancy, you'd be a lot more interested in a run at .500 OBP than .400 BA.
Then why even have individual awards if a you want to reward team performance? Or put another way, why the big charade that these awards are honoring individuals when they are rewards for the performance of a group of people?
First of all, even if that's true, so what? The fact that baseball has a 100-plus year history isn't a mark against it. Few of us have seen a .400 hitter in our lifetime, and if a run at that mark wouldn't excite you because of people historically overvaluing that metric, that's your loss. I think it would be one of the more exciting things to follow as a baseball fan.
Second, if I'm watching a ballgame on the last day of the season, and a guy has a chance to get a hit to reach .400, while another guy could reach .500 OBP with a walk, I'm favoring the situation that would require a base hit on the interest scale. Hell, we watched Barry Bonds top .600 one season, but forgive me if the 120 IBBs kind of cut into the excitement.
We've had easy access to OBP for quite a long time now. For whatever reason, the annual OBP race doesn't seem to spur a lot of discussion around here.
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