Well Said, Jim

As a guy whose passion is baseball and occupation is quantitative analysis, you would think that I would be head-over-heels in love with Sabermetrics.  Now, I do like it.  But, there is just so much complexity for the sheer sake of being complex involved in what we know, today, as “Sabermetrics,” that I find myself turned off by VORP and OPS for sheer fact that sabermetrics have become so elitist, without really grasping what they are trying to accomplish.  And, the two things that I always point to when making this point is the immediacy of the sabermatrician to scoff at statistics like Runs Scored for hitters and Wins for pitchers.  Ask your typical sabermatrician how (s)he values the Run Scored or Win and you will probably get an elitist answer marginalizing these stats that, quite simply, measure the desired end results of all their overly-complex (and, oftentimes, mathematically foolish, like the OPS) statistics.

Jim Caple, in his column on ESPN.com, eloquently defends the Run as the most underappreciated offensive statistic in baseball, and I could not agree more.  Now, if only someone had the cajones to do the same for the Win (the anathema of the Sabermetric statistical community), I would be overjoyed.

NOTE:  Maybe one day, I’ll get fired up enough to put in a long post about my true feelings about Sabermetrics and the “Statistical Revolution” that has overtaken baseball in the early stages of the game’s third century…