Question of the Week: Should sabermetrics have a place on TV broadcasts?

Good thing I got up early this morning! There was a fascinating discussion going that started about Bill James winning his third World Series ring last night. Let me cut to Rany Jazayerli.

Okay, I can't get the tweets to embed. There's a lot of them and they're still growing. But, I also wanted to have the discussion here. The basic gist of it is this: Should sabermetrics have more of a place on TV baseball broadcasts? Twitter loves to jump on guys like Tim McCarver, but do we need more Mike Fasts on TV instead?

As Mike mentioned on Twitter, I'm sure most Astros fans would probably rather have him working to make the team better than improving a TV broadcast with his knowledge. Right?

I know not all of you are stat-heads on here and probably would prefer it if Alan Ashby never mentions WAR or wRC+ on TV ever. I get that. TV is for a broad audience and not everyone knows what new and different stats mean. But, what I do think should change is for broadcasters to move away from saying wrong things.

Don't tell me how important pitcher wins are. They're not. Don't tell me how great a hitter is because he has a bunch of RBIs. That's wrong. RBIs don't tell us anything about talent. They might tell us about where he batted in the order and who got on base in front of him, but that's all.

I don't need broadcasts to get smarter, just don't propagate baseball myths. As for clutch hitting, that's another story.

Oh, and this doesn't just go for TV and radio broadcasts. I mean, did you know that the Cardinals have a Mickey Mouse offense?

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Jose de Jesus Ortiz‏@OrtizKicks

You have to believe the Dodgers would have been a better match against the Red Sox than the Cardinals' Mickey Mouse offense.

SMDH