Since it’s baseball season, almost every day some willfully ignorant sportswriter will write something about modern baseball analysis celebrating said willful ignorance as if it’s something to be proud of. And almost every day, the good folks at Fire Joe Morgan are there, administering glorious, satisfying justice by clubbing these sportswriters with their own dumbness.
FJM is already on this site’s blogroll, but I wanted to particularly recommend to you Thursday’s entry, titled “Heady Days.” It’s one of those that I very much wish I’d written myself. In the excerpt below, the simp’s work is in bold, FJM’s in italic.
When I was a kid hustling autographs at Wrigley Field, the game was all about W’s and L’s. Now it’s about WHIP and VORP and OPS and BABIP.
Anyone who writes anything for a living should avoid cliché. I think we can all agree on that. This thought is now officially the #1 cliché about the baseball statistics debate. When I was a kid, people only cared about wins and losses. Now everyone is a nerd who loves weird stats and hates baseball. Please, all of you who have this thought, listen to me. Please. Here we go.
There have always been statistics in baseball. Always. Statistics like WHIP and VORP and OPS are better than the old statistics, because they give you more actual pertinent information. This is not up for debate. If you don’t like these stats, don’t use them. But don’t tell me that they aren’t interesting or good.
I just don’t get it, man. No one ever said: “When I was a kid, if we were going to cut off your leg we’d give you a shot of whiskey and a rope to bite down on, and we’d just take a dirty hacksaw and just hack away, outside, on the ground. Why do all these nerds keep talking about ‘anaesthesia’ and ’sterilization?!’”
Yes. That’s it. That’s it exactly.
Here, the subject is the guy who invented VORP:
The guy spends every waking moment of every day on his computer. And his only correspondence with the outside world is with fellow self-absorbed numbers crunchers who spend every waking moment of every day in dogged pursuit of the next esoteric pseudostat.
Keith Woolner is his name. He currently works for the Cleveland Indians. I guarantee he has watched more baseball games in the past ten years than you have. Also: they’re not “pseudostats.” They’re just: stats. (They’re not even really that esoteric, though I suppose what’s straightforward to some might be “esoteric” to someone who never reads anything, or cares to, or has any intellectual curiosity at all.) (When did having zero intellectual curiosity about the world — and a corresponding sneering contempt for those who have any — become a positive character trait instead of a flashing warning signal that this person is a stubborn dummy?) (Oh — right.)
Gentlemen of FJM, I salute you. Keep on keepin’ on.
