The League of Ordinary Gentlemen: sports metrics and the problem with unconventional wisdom

or…“If most people think you should punt, you probably shouldn’t.”

The more that I think about it, the more that I think the “metrics” school of sports analysis is the perfect example for understanding the limitations of insurgent intellectual movements. I have never known any ideology, group or position so likely to throw the baby out with the bathwater than the movement often (and unhelpfully) referred to as the “Moneyball” tendency.

That sucks, because I find the new metrics in sports, and particularly in baseball, to have an awful lot of useful, generative ideas about strategy, about talent evaluation, and about sports appreciation. But it’s sometimes so buried in such absurd, over-the-top “us-vs.-them”-ism that it becomes very difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. It is indeed true that OBP was for a long time a criminally underrated stat; it is not true that “a walk is as good as a hit”. (Just ask the coach with a man on third and two outs playing a team with a great double play combo.) It is true that Joe Morgan says a lot of stupid things about baseball; it is not true that the Fire Joe Morgan crew “knows more” about baseball than Joe Morgan. Who we should choose to listen to about effective baseball strategy is a different question. But who knows more? The guy who played and coached and lived baseball for decades. That’s who. Sorry.

...Ultimately, the problem with these new metrics is that their apostles are so consumed with the desire to buck the conventional wisdom that they cloud their own ability to reasonably evaluate sports. The tendency to reflexively contradict the conventional wisdom is just as distorting as the tendency to reflexively support it. More so, I would argue; the conventional wisdom is often conventional because it is banally true. Which is exactly why we should take the valid and valuable criticisms and minor revolutions that go on in insurgent intellectual movements to heart, and use them to our advantage, but to also approach them with a healthy amount of skepticism.