from Amazon
Monday, August 08, 2011
Sabermetrics as a religion?
In a rather good article regarding politics as religion (i.e., faith-based decisions), was this baseball analogy thrown in:
Want baseball dominance? In the early half of the last decade, the sport became obsessed with “sabermetrics,” an entirely fresh way of analyzing player statistics to predict future performance. It’s the subject of the Michael Lewis best seller “Moneyball,” a movie version of which, starring Brad Pitt, is expected this fall. Sabermetrics survives and is used today, but it lost the holy-grail aura once accorded it. Tellingly, its zenith coincided with a time of much angst in baseball over the disparate financial resources of big-city and small-city teams. It was supposed to make the latter more competitive. It was supposed to proffer the prescriptive.
Sabermetrics is a process, a tool. It is not an ideology. Sabermetrics would say that a player’s RBI adds no new information, once you know all these other things. Sabermetrics would say that a pitcher’s wins, losses and saves adds no new information, once you know all these other things. This is not an ideology.
What sabermetrics says is: IF (that’s the start of a conditional clause) you are intent on using numbers, THEN (that’s the start of a main clause, dependent on the condition) you should use the numbers this way and that way but don’t use it the other way.
Sabermetrics is about interpreting numbers in the best way, in order to answer specific questions. And there’s basically no question you can have that would require me to use RBIs, wins, or saves in order for me to give you that answer. Sometimes sabermetrics is jack hammer, and sometimes it’s a screw driver. It’s always a tool or a methodology. It’s never an ideology.
Sabermetics takes no position if you choose to make decisions outside of numbers. If you have a reason to make a decision on someone, and you do NOT rely on numbers, then that’s perfectly fine.
Glove-slap: Josh.
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