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Saturday, September 25, 2010
Making strides
Will Carroll:
I’m much more interested in a useful, descriptive, considered measure. WARP has been surpassed by WAR, but WAR can’t agree on methodology, making it very tough to sell to the ESPN crowd.
99% of baseball fans still don’t use OPS, let alone a more advanced measure. How about statheads take some baby steps, or better, take some lessons from Moneyball. Moneyball told a good story and brought some advanced measures to a wider audience. In the shadow of that book, statheads lacked a Michael Lewis to carry their message, and worse, didn’t understand why the book was popular. Until statheads stop worrying about decimal places, litmus tests, and passive-aggressive stands against the status quo, they’ll lose out to good stories, marketing, and simplicity.
Statheads need to “stop making sense” and start making strides. Until then, they’ll be like the indie rock they all seem to listen to.
Where to begin? Let’s take Will point by point:
I’m much more interested in a useful, descriptive, considered measure.
Yes, that’s what WAR is.
WARP has been surpassed by WAR, but WAR can’t agree on methodology,
WAR is a framework, one that we have agreed to. People who follow this blog anyway. It’s a 6-string guitar. How WAR is used, by Fangraphs or by Baseball-Reference (through Baseball Projection), is like asking how Clapton and Van Halen use the guitar.
making it very tough to sell to the ESPN crowd.
Who cares? Not me. Well, I’ll sell it, but I don’t care if the crowd buys it. I’m giving away the fishing rod, not selling the fish.
99% of baseball fans still don’t use OPS, let alone a more advanced measure.
Good! Bad? I don’t care. It’s irrelevant, isn’t it?
How about statheads take some baby steps, or better, take some lessons from Moneyball. Moneyball told a good story and brought some advanced measures to a wider audience. In the shadow of that book, statheads lacked a Michael Lewis to carry their message, and worse, didn’t understand why the book was popular.
We have Bill James and we have Joe Posnanski and we have Rob Neyer. If that’s not good enough, then who cares?
Until statheads stop worrying about decimal places, litmus tests, and passive-aggressive stands against the status quo, they’ll lose out to good stories, marketing, and simplicity.
Good!
Statheads need to “stop making sense” and start making strides. Until then, they’ll be like the indie rock they all seem to listen to.
We are making strides. Who says we’re not? And we are making strides because we are making sense. But more importantly, the objective is to breed a loyal following to the ideas, because those ideas will live on forever. That’s how you measure success. You don’t measure success by the number of people you can get to buy your fish. You measure success by the number of people willing to sell your fishing rods.
From where I sit, we are hugely successful.