# MLB Spring Training 2009 **URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mlb-spring-training-2009/485405 **Category:** The Game Room **Created:** [February 11, 2009, 6:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mlb-spring-training-2009/485405 "2009-02-11T18:51:01Z") **Posts on this page:** 1 **Showing post:** 57
### Author: ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo) #### Post date: [March 5, 2009, 1:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mlb-spring-training-2009/485405/57 "2009-03-05T01:05:59Z")
> [@ElvisL1ves](#): > > As a Boston fan, I’m glad Beane didn’t come here, anyway - his first act was going to be to dump Jason Varitek because of his OBP.😛 Now does anyone seriously think they’d have two Series titles without 'Tek handling and stabilizing the staff? Well, counterfactuals are, by their very nature, impossible to determine, but if the only change was losing Varietak, and all the other players remained the same, i would be quite comfortable saying, “Yes, i think they could have won those same two championships.” > [@ElvisL1ves](#): > > Handling a pitching staff, in that demanding environment, and providing leadership don’t matter to stat geeks, since they’re not quantifiable, just as defense at other positions, or pitching itself, or especially intangibles, doesn’t matter to them either. Sure, Bill James provides an occasional interesting insight here, but he’s kept in his place - he has to be. Fortunately, the Boston ownership knows _on-the-field_ baseball too, not just fantasy-league silliness. Why do you always feel the need to misrepresent the ideas and the motivations of stat people when you talk about baseball? You do it almost every time, and it gets really old. It is simply not true to say that providing leadership “does not matter” to stat people. It cannot be quantified, but that doesn’t mean that stat people feel it’s completely irrelevant. What they generally argue is that, in a team full of professionals making millions of dollars a year, nebulous qualities such as “leadership” and “chemistry” are nowhere near as reliable predictors of success as players’ actual performance. And to say that defense doesn’t matter to them demonstrates nothing except that you must not ever have read single thing produced by people like Bill James, the folks at Baseball Prospectus, etc. Hell, the BP people have written long articles about the best ways to evaluate defense, and have put hundreds of hours into finding ways to correct for things like park, position, age, and a whole bunch of other factors when determining a player’s defensive contribution. **Hobostew** , it’s one of **ElvisL1ves** ’s little peccadilloes that he loves to take any opportunity he can to shit all over stats people in baseball threads. Every time he does it, all he demonstrates is that he actually doesn’t understand the people he’s criticizing. Here’s one of his more egregious recent examples: > [@Statistical Analysis, Baseball, and Unbridled Hostility](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/statistical-analysis-baseball-and-unbridled-hostility/444886/22): > > Because it so often seems that statheads are simply, obtusely, missing what the game is all about. “We do not always measure what we value, but we value what we measure”, as the management consultants say. Having figures available for crunching can lead to a mindset where the crunched numbers are seen as actually reflecting what is happening on the field, where not having them leads the unmeasured things to be dismissed or ignored. > > The game is both fun and beautiful to watch, adn that should be its purpose - but where are the stats for fun and beauty? Statheads get derided so often, including by me, for seemingly lacking the perspective to appreciate what matters most about being a fan of the game, in fact for seemingly deriding it themselves. > “Baseball is not statistics. Baseball is DiMaggio rounding second.” - Jimmy Breslin Don’t you see? Statheads, according to **Elvis** , aren’t even interested in watching the game! They’re all probably sitting in their mothers’ basements with multiple Excel spreadsheets open, masturbating over OBP and sticking pins into the Intangibles doll. I think **RickJay** offered one of the funniest critiques of **Elvis** ’s position in that same thread: > [@Statistical Analysis, Baseball, and Unbridled Hostility](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/statistical-analysis-baseball-and-unbridled-hostility/444886/52): > > Whaddyaknow, he ran away. Again. > > ElvisL1ves has a RAFT, or Ran Away From Thread Percentage, of .782 when challenged on an unsupported, insulting generalization; it climbs to .941 when involving baseball. The board average is only .446 (if you limit the sample size to regular posters, defined as posters with 1000 or more posts; the number is significantly higher if replacement-level posters are included.) It’s a record percentage, though you have to bear mind mind that he supports a team in a DH league, which raises the baseline RAFT by about 25 points, and then you’ve got the possibility of PEDs (Post-Enchancing Drugs.) > > If we extrapolate his RAFT across his TNPACRP (Total Non-Poll, Affirmation, or Contest-Related Posts) he has the fourth highest TDP (Thread Dump Percentage) in the modern SDMB era. I can’t name the top three, that would be a flame. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mlb-spring-training-2009/485405)._