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Originally Posted by Charley575
Actually, the above statement was "humor", used to make the point that the overwhelming majority of people don't know what all these formulas mean and don't want to. That's their right. I mentioned previously that I have some scientific training myself, and I understand the usefulness of these formulas. Numbers don't lie. When properly analyzed, the numbers can dissect past performance and in many cases predict future outcomes to a high level of reliability. Whether the subject is baseball statistics, or the existence of black holes, THE MATH DOESN'T LIE. That having been said, my point that I'm trying to drive home in this thread is this... the majority of baseball fans are not fascinated with Sabermetrics. Most of them have never heard of it, and if you try to convert them, they'll either walk away from you or punch you in the face, or at least threaten to. Maybe it's an idea that just hasn't caught on yet. I tend to think, however, that the reason it hasn't caught on, and most likely won't ever be popular, is because it sort of takes the fun out of the game. It IS still a GAME, after all. People just want to enjoy it. Most of them don't want to dig that deep. So, you Sabermetric folks out there are technically correct. Sabermetrics tell the story in the stats much better than traditional stats. It's just not something that Joe Average, with his 80-100 I.Q. can relate to in a tangible way. In a country that still stubbornly refuses to adopt the metric system after everyone else has done so, your battle will be even tougher. Sorry.
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I agree with Charley 100% here, and Jestre is a perfect example:
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baseball is simply a matter of which team scores the most runs. VORP is completely divorced from that equation. You don't walk away from a game saying wow we outvorped them 7-3 we kicked their butt.
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Some people just don't want to get it, and they obviously have the right to enjoy the game however they choose. I think in the specific context of the MVP discussion, and I think L_L_N made this point, the brilliance of OOTP in this and other regards is its customizability. As long as there's an option to give out year-end awards based on traditional stats OR on more advanced metrics, everybody wins. It's technically realistic to use RBI as the primary stat for determining the MVP, because in real life that's pretty much what the BBWAA does. On the other hand, it's more satisfying to many OOTPers to use better methods of determining a player's value. I think this discussion mirrors in an interesting way some of the real-world debates about how exactly we should define 'valuable' (the dustup over the Rodriguez/Ortiz decision, and the real issue of how much to value a player's defensive contribution, masked by AL East partisanship, springs immediately to mind as a good parallel to this thread).