Wednesday Astros, etc. Round Up

I read through the snarky SABR link, and I gotta say it irked me a bit. I like the advent of statistical analysis in baseball, but what bothers me about a lot of these number crunchers and what is at the root of what drives a lot of “baseball people” to turn their nose up at the whole lot, is this notion that by just looking at numbers, you can explain everything there is to know about baseball and neatly categorize every inidividual and exclaim with a bony index finger held aloft that “the numbers don’t lie!”

Sure, I’ll agree that RBI is a relatively meaningless stat when it comes to evaluating a player’s ability. RELATIVELY meaningless, not meaningless. Taken as a lone stat, it tells you nothing definitive about a player, not even that he was simply at the right place at the right time. I’ll also agree that OBP and these fancy wOBP concoctions are much better statisics for evaluating a players offensive ability. There’s a leap in there that I didn’t quite fully grasp, which is how runs created is somehow weighted with wOBP, but it doesn’t stop me from resenting the fact that words like “over-rated” get tossed around to define players when the whole article seems to imply that certain statistics used in this analysis shouldn’t be used to define players..

Admittedly, my feathers didn’t really get ruffled until I saw Carlos Lee’s name. That’s the homer in me bleeding through. Certain guys get put in RBI situations for good reason. Certain abilities that would pump up your wOBP, like being able to leg out an infield single or draw a walk, have nothing to do with being able to put the ball in play to score a run with a man on thrid and less than two outs. I’m not saying that every guy at the top of their list has some innate ability to drive in runs in certain situations that people further down the list don’t, but the fact that such things are not accounted for and not acknowledged, yet the authors still portend to draw clear and unrefutable conclusions from their precious calculations, just rubs me the wrong way.

Okay, rant over. Thanks for the links. I like it when these spark some conversation. Work can be boring, and nobody here likes to talk about baseball.