Quote:
Originally posted by Red Blow
If baseball, players or managers (that is what started this string) could be quantified like Bill James and the rest wish they could be then baseball would not be the great sport it is. It is the human side that makes baseball great. That side will never fit into a neat little equation.
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The human side of baseball is incredibly important when it comes to judging players (heck, read the Baseball Abstract, less than 50% of what James writes involves stats). The problem I see with baseball, as opposed to sports like Football or Hockey, is that so much of the game is based around individual performance in a team context, and is easily accountable for by statistics.
Just as an example, you and I both know that Jose Canseco was an amazing power hitter. Anyone who saw the 600 foot bomb he hit in the Skydome in the playoffs knows it. I'm sure Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Frank Robinson, etc were all had their jaw gaping at some of the bombs he hit in his career.
But, at the same time, enough statistics are tracked in baseball that we can see pretty clearly that in terms of his teams winning ballgames, he was less of a factor than most of us give him credit for. We can take the human side, the huge bombs, the off field distractions, the iron glove, and see those traits reflected in his statistics. It sucks that a player's contributions to his team can be so easily quantified, but that's one of the beautiful things about baseball IMHO. Baseball scorekeeping is so far ahead of other sports that it is possible to hold every player accountable for every thing they do on the baseball field.
That doesn't mean that we should stop talking about the game in human terms. The human side is ultimately what draws people, myself included, to the game. Sure maybe Nolan Ryan was overrated as a pitcher in terms of what he actually accomplished, but geeze did have a great fastball. Stats play a big role in baseball because you can hold people accountable for everything, but at the same time it's entertainment and you can't lose sight of that. I'm all for putting guys in the hall of fame who don't put up huge numbers but are out there hustling and giving their all 100% of the time. I'm all for putting the entertaining guys in there, and the guys who grab the headlines, however undeserving they may be based on their performance.
I guess the way I see it, stats are just a means of measuring how well a player or field manager or executive is performing his job in terms of producing wins. However the joy of the game is still watching Lenny Dykstra get his uniform dirty before the game even starts. Or watching Larry Bowa, as bad of a manager as he is, scream obscenities at a bewildered umpire.
Jason