Yankees vs. Phillies - Let's play "Who would you rather have?"

Yes, he only played 124 games this year. Fewer than I’d thought. His counting stats projected out over an extra thirty games would have been 37 HR, 97 R, 124 RBI. Still not exactly the best of A-Rod years, but he’s still great.

…although in fairness, I said “Charlie Manuel doesn’t like stats, and that’s why I love him,” not “I don’t like counting stats.”

I don’t know this guy from a can of paint. But I guess I now know what I can expect.

No worries, bud… Didn’t read it that way.

It’s really hard to get Vlad to argue balls and strikes.

Lets just take a quick look at the OBP’s hitting in front of Cano and Utley in 2009.

Utley
Pitcher ?
Rollins .296 , 31SB
Victorino .358, 25 SB

Cano
Matsui .367 0 SB
Posada .363 1 SB
Arod .402 14 SB

Ok so basically Cano had a MUCH higher chance of having people on base and when they were on base they were slow as hell. Utley however, had the opposite. Not alot of OBP ahead of him but, when guys did get on base they were of the speedy variety and more likely to either break up a DP or advance to 2b on a fielders choice.

Not saying Cano is better, Utley is world class and prob a Top 5 player in MLB right now. Just sayin that using GIDP as a measure of player value is stupid. Kind of like RBI’s if Utley hit behind Howard and Werth he’d probably have about 120 or 130.

Well, I don’t doubt that, but most of the front-page posts here are excellent.

Honestly, I thought your approach in this thread was completely wrongheaded. Don’t take that as an insult; take it in the spirit in which it’s intended. Yes, counting stats are problematic, but that doesn’t mean you had a good reason to flip your lid. I appreciate that that’s part of your persona here, but I thought it went over the line in this thread.

In my view, vehement or even snarky argumentation is warranted when someone says something ignorant in an aggressive and hostile manner. For instance, in the baseball context, when Buzz Bissinger attempts to discredit modern statistical analysis using a condescending, mocking tone, then it’s justified to go on the counterattack.

But ignorance, standing alone, doesn’t justify that kind of response. We’re all ignorant about some things in life, and most of them are a lot more significant than baseball. And that’s all the OP was here – ignorant. He didn’t write his post in an attempt to discredit sabermetrics. He wrote it the way he did probably because he doesn’t know much about statistics. That isn’t a crime. The proper response, as someone said above, would have been to politely explain to him how he should have done his analysis, to educate him. Instead, you called him “dishonest” right out of the chute, which was totally unjustiifed, and basically made the thread an exercise in trying to prove how much smarter you are than he is instead of actually trying to persuade anyone. So great, you won the argument. Woo hoo. That isn’t something to be proud of when your opponent wasn’t looking for a fight.

And heck, the piece he wrote wasn’t even that bad. Counting stats are problematic and we all know that, but it isn’t because they’re “meaningless.” It’s because they’re imprecise and can be distorted by all kinds of noise. Given a very large sample size, the deviation between the middle of the bell curve for counting stats and the middle of the bell curve for more rigorous stats will tend to decrease. And as it turns out, most of his conclusions are actually reasonable, even if the methodology was wrong.