The guys at Baseball Prospectus are geniuses
ESPN Page 2 posted some fascinating excerpts from Baseball Prospectus' "Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game is Wrong."
I've been into sabermetrics for a few years now thanks to the nerds at Sons of Sam Horn, and BP is definitely a daily must-read for me.
For years, sabermetricians have argued that there is no such thing as clutch hitting. They simply argue that good hitters are clutch hitters... with the exception of A-Rod, who couldn't make a clutch play/hit if his life depended on it. Okay, I made that up, but one day I will do a study proving that A-Rod is the worst clutch hitter in the history of baseball. Besides Rob Neyer's Insider columns, ESPN doesn't show a lot of love to sabermetrics. Just look at Joe Morgan, who vehemently opposes all of the work that Billy Beane has done in Oakland. Hell, Morgan still thinks that Billy Beane actually wrote Moneyball. It's not like sabermetrics is difficult stuff to comprehend. Bill James couldn't lay it out any simpler in his Baseball Abstracts. I wish ESPN and media outlets in general would switch over to OBP, OPS, Runs Created, etc, instead of Batting Average, which is pretty much a worthless statistic.
Anyway, I enjoyed Nate Silver's piece on David Ortiz and Clutch Hitting, and you will too if you read it:
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=betweenthenumbers/ortiz/060405
And in other news: Bronson Arroyo just hit a home run in his Cincinnati Reds debut. Can we get that trade retracted? I have a bad feeling we're going to need Bronson this season when Wells and Schilling start to show their age.
Nomar Garciaparra was put on the DL... again. Is there any doubt in ANYONE's mind that that guy was on some serious steroids cerca 1998-2000.
I've been into sabermetrics for a few years now thanks to the nerds at Sons of Sam Horn, and BP is definitely a daily must-read for me.
For years, sabermetricians have argued that there is no such thing as clutch hitting. They simply argue that good hitters are clutch hitters... with the exception of A-Rod, who couldn't make a clutch play/hit if his life depended on it. Okay, I made that up, but one day I will do a study proving that A-Rod is the worst clutch hitter in the history of baseball. Besides Rob Neyer's Insider columns, ESPN doesn't show a lot of love to sabermetrics. Just look at Joe Morgan, who vehemently opposes all of the work that Billy Beane has done in Oakland. Hell, Morgan still thinks that Billy Beane actually wrote Moneyball. It's not like sabermetrics is difficult stuff to comprehend. Bill James couldn't lay it out any simpler in his Baseball Abstracts. I wish ESPN and media outlets in general would switch over to OBP, OPS, Runs Created, etc, instead of Batting Average, which is pretty much a worthless statistic.
Anyway, I enjoyed Nate Silver's piece on David Ortiz and Clutch Hitting, and you will too if you read it:
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=betweenthenumbers/ortiz/060405
And in other news: Bronson Arroyo just hit a home run in his Cincinnati Reds debut. Can we get that trade retracted? I have a bad feeling we're going to need Bronson this season when Wells and Schilling start to show their age.
Nomar Garciaparra was put on the DL... again. Is there any doubt in ANYONE's mind that that guy was on some serious steroids cerca 1998-2000.
posted by Jennifer at 12:01 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home