from Amazon
Friday, February 03, 2012
Illusion of numbers
It’s not that RBIs are ”wrong”, it’s that the context is missing. Wins for pitchers aren’t wrong. But, the attribution pretends that the hitters, bullpen, and fielding is absorbed by the pitcher.
Sabermetrics is about the hidden game of numbers. It’s trying to give context, meaning to those numbers.
Numbers, that stand there by themselves, are meaningless, as surely as words strung together have no meaning without understanding the rules.
When I read that blog post above, I see someone who looks at the surface, sees some heads bobbing out of the water. But how can you tell which is Jessica Alba and which is not? You need to dive into the water, and that’s what sabermetrics does. You can swin along and not drown, or you can just wait for us to drain the water out of the pool.