There’s no such rule.
Re: “Wins” as a stat.
To build on what others have said, the problem isn’t that Wins and Losses don’t tell you anything useful per se. The problem is that they don’t tell you anything useful if you have access to other common pitching stats: once you know IP, Runs Allowed, and whether the pitcher is a starter or a reliever, you’ve already gone beyond the point at which Wins tells you anything about the player himself. Since everyone has access to those three pieces of information (in addition to dozens of others), why would you ever use Wins and Losses except to add flavor and history? Yes, baseball teams are ultimately after wins, but “Wins” doesn’t do diddly-shit to help you predict who will actually contribute wins in the future if you know ERA, IP, WHIP, SO/9, etc.
Perhaps, but if so it’s a dumb reason for hostility. We rely on someone else for all stats. Yeah, if you give me At Bats and Hits I can figure out Batting Average for myself, but I still need someone to give me At Bats and Hits, because I’m not watching every game and keeping my own records.
I think it would be more accurate to say that some of the hostility stems from the fact that much of the establishment doesn’t understand the “best” stats. In the worst cases this is a really damning criticism. There are detractors – such as the one referenced in the OP – who don’t understand what certain stats seek to measure, how they’re compiled, or in what ways they’re useful, and, due to a natural but regrettable human impulse, respond not by filling the gaps in their knowledge, but by mocking said stats and (frequently) the people who use them. Then they boast of their ignorance.
No doubt there are some, as Parthol suggests, who are turned off by the fact that they can’t verify the accuracy of stats like WARP and VORP (and I mean literally can’t: those and many other such stats are proprietary). Nor are they even close to having the inclination to verify their utility through the use of, say, correlation coefficients. The thing is that I’m not sensing any hostility from the sort of person who has this objection to sabermetrics – apathy is more like it. Rather, the hostility seems to come from people who scoff at the very notion that some ‘nerd who lives in his mother’s basement’ could actually understand things about the game of baseball which are beyond the grasp of ex-ballplayers, professional sports columnists, and “real” baseball fans.
Anyway, this is all pretty subjective, and I could be wrong. In any event, there are a dozen other factors I’m neglecting to mention, so I don’t know how useful this post is.
Not in those specific words no, but the rule states that the ball must reach the base BEFORE the batter does. If the ball and the runner get there at the same time, the runner is safe. So, in essence, a tie does goes to the runner.
From the MLB Rulebook:
That reading doesn’t have any bearing on how the game is really played, in my opinion. The umpire rules that either the ball got there first or the runner did.
But the point stands, while the phrase “the tie goes to the runner” is not in the rule, that’s what the rule says.
The hostility stems from announcers and front offices. Baseball and football believe that in order to discuss the game ,you must have played it. Paying does not require you to be particularly bright or able to analyze statistics. It is acceptable in most public life to say you do not understand numbers and math. Scoffing at numbers men in sports is applauded.
Baseball is a game of tradition. It changes slowly. In time,numbers will win out.
Great point. If we all just sit back and look at baseball in 20 years, the vast majority of people deriding sabermetrics will be dead or retired and a healthy portion of decision makers on all teams will have come of age during the growth of deeper statistical analysis.
Let the people mocking stats have their short-sighted fun now Because, as stat geeks, we get to have the current joy of dismantling their short-sightedness on a site like FireJoeMorgan.com and the knowledge that the long, slow tide of history greatly favors the widespread acceptance of that which is now somewhat derided.
God, he’s on now. So painful to listen to.
You’re right – it doesn’t matter. I’ve grown so accustomed to those two factors – run support and park effects – being overlooked when evaluating Blyleven’s career, that I tend to lump them together instintcively. I retract that portion of my point.
Perhaps it is more accurate to say that he was saddled with teams that wouldn’t score runs for him. And I wouldn’t say “exceptionally overstated” in any case – those Twins teams tended to be just about at the league average in runs scored. Then the Indians teams were just plain bad, and in his second go around with the Twins, they were 8th, 8th and 5th in runs scored in the A.L. In his last full season, his Angels were 11th in the league.
And on those teams whose offenses were, in total, slightly below average, his run support on those teams was even worse. I recall reading a Michael Wolverton (formerly of BP) piece that suggested Bert’s luck, when comparing support-neutral wins to actual wins, was among the 10 worst of all time.
Anyhow, I don’t want to derail this thread into another argument about Bert Blyleven; I was just using him as an object lesson for the weakness of Wins as a stat even across a player’s whole career.
This post exemplifies what is, in my opinion, both the most prevalent and the most ignorant criticism leveled against baseball statisticians–the idea that they don’t appreciate the beauty and the fun of baseball, and that they’d prefer to crunch a spreadsheet than actually watch a game.
It’s complete and utter bullshit, little more than a desperate grasping at straws by people who know (even if they’ll never admit) that a proper use of statistics is a useful tool for understanding the game, but who feel a desperate need to portray stat people as little more than geeks and losers. People who dismiss stats outright can simply be categorized as anti-intellectuals, but people who make this type of “don’t appreciate the game” argument are simply making shit up.
The fact is that every baseball fan i know who appreciates stats is also a huge fan of the unquantifiable aspects of the game–the pleasure of drinking a beer in the stands on a Sunday afternoon, the brilliance of a diving play at shortstop, the excitement of a bases clearing double, the tension of a close game in the late innings, the frustration of a fielding error at a critical moment.
The fact that someone believes that Derek Jeter is not an above-average fielding shortstop does not mean that person doesn’t appreciate Jeter’s occasional balletic spinning throws from the hole, or his commitment in diving into the stands to make an out, or his excellent batting average. The fact that someone believes that OBP is an important factor in judging a player’s value does not mean that person wants to see a whole bunch of walks when he goes to the ballpark. Calling David Eckstein “scrappy” or “a gamer” doesn’t make Eckstein a great hitter, but that doesn’t mean that stat people hate David Eckstein, or want him to fail. And while errors might not be not the best indication of fielding ability, stat people still pull their hair out when players on their favorite team make errors.
This is not some binary system, whereby you’re a baseball person or a stat person. If you don’t like stats, and you just want to watch and enjoy the game, that’s absolutely fine. But i don’t understand why your enjoyment of the game is somehow lessened because other people like to talk about stats. And just because those people are interested in stats does not make them oblivious to the non-numerical, unquantifiable, emotional, visceral qualities that make baseball so much fun to watch.
The notion that stats are somehow antithetical to an appreciation of “fun and beauty” is all in your head. You need to get over it, because it’s simply false.
The things is, ElvisL1ves has expressed this attitude before, and when called on it like you do here, he simply melts away from the thread, only to say the exact same thing in another subsequent thread.
In this thread he refers to “…the precious numbers you stat geeks think are both the be-all and the end-all.” But when I responded with: “…your weird desire to segregate all baseball fans into either soulless “stat geeks” or people who truly love and understand baseball is woefully misguided and, frankly, insulting,” he never returned to the thread.
Longer ago, he never responded to my final post in this thread, in which he’s peddling the same attitude
And now, when he’s still claiming that “stat geeks” don’t or can’t understand the beauty of baseball, and RickJay offers a much more concise rebuttal than ever I could, and then you offer this elegant and accurate riposte…
Well, I wish he’d come back and either address your points, or admit his error, or offer something new to the debate, because otherwise I just fear he’ll show up in another baseball thread in July with the same insulting “stat-heads don’t appreciate the true beauty of baseball” arguments presented as truth.
And Elvis, if you can show that I’m misrepresenting your posting patterns on these topics, I’ll apologize. But it’s frustrating debating with someone who disappears right after his claims have seemingly been debunked.
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.
That was awesome, and made my whole Friday.
All of that really only goes to show that you don’t appreciate the beauty of unsupported and insulting generalizations. I’ll bet you don’t even read them – you just hide in your parents’ basement, parsing post content with an automated executable and teasing out meaningless stats like RAFT and TDP. The fact is, trying to objectively analyze posting behavior sucks the soul right out of this message board.
The SDMB is a wonderful, elegant, and enjoyable place to read and write great wisdom; when you try to analyze individual posters and their habits with your artificial measuring sticks, you miss the whole point of coming here.
But, seriously, this is why you’re one of my favorite posters.
Yes, excellent stuff. And i’m sitting here watching the Cubs and the Pirates right now, so it was a perfect time to open the thread again.
RickJay always has a very high Value Over Replacement Poster. That’s why I’m picking him in the SDMB Fantasy League this year.
But what about his intangibles? He may have the gaudy stats, but does he get his keyboard dirty?
I say yes. He posts late, comes up with big cites in clutch spots, and rarely hits into thread-killing double posts.
Yeah, where’s the grit? 
Sometimes we may over analyze. I look at CC Sabathia and he is 0-3. I then see his era is 13.57. Do I really have to go deeper to understand.?