Sabermetrics are an absolute abomination of the game of baseball.
Bill James is the worst thing to ever happen to baseball. The second-worst thing: the breathless fanboys who can’t stop hyperventilating every time a new statistic comes out.
This week, there was another breakthrough with BHTLFOAOTAOTWCOALHP. This is also known as Balls Hit To Left Field On An Overcast Tuesday Afternoon On The West Coast Off A Left Handed Pitcher. This new-found statistic is every bit as helpful as VORP, and FIP and xFIP, and all the other nonsense that has come to light over the past two decades or so.
Baseball is an extremely complex yet simple game. People have been trying to quantify anything and everything in an attempt to make sense of this beautiful sport, yet it results in little more than yelling and failure. At the core of baseball, all that matters is scoring runs and preventing them. Sabermetrics have tried to quantify that, but it falls woefully short.
Sabermetrics tell you what should happen in a perfectly fair game. There is nothing fair – or perfect – about baseball. Luck will always play a massive role. There is nothing to quantify whether a screaming line drive in Game 7 of the World Series will hit the chalk or go three inches foul. Baseball is about getting timely hits and working out of jams. You don’t need a bunch of silly statistics to tell you who is good at that, and who isn’t.
When did baseball become a mix between a science class and advanced math? It’s a freaking sport. Watch the game, record the obvious, and talk to your friends about what happened. Sabermatricians love to look down their noses at people who “don’t understand” and “don’t get” the game. In reality, they are the ones being duped, fake titles and all.
Baseball can’t be put into these tiny little boxes. For example, Batting Average on Balls in Play. The seamheads love to point at this and deduce that a player is either going to improve or regress, depending on whether said player is below or above the league average.
NEWSFLASH: Mike Trout and Miguel Cabrera aren’t regressing any time soon. Meanwhile, your favorite atrocious second baseman that pops up 40 percent of the time and grounds out weakly to short another 30 percent of the time isn’t improving. He blows. And another newsflash: nobody needs sabermetrics to figure out that the second baseman stinks. Pretty sure his .240 average with a .258 slugging percentage is going to clue me in. Hell, my EYES are going to clue me in.
Baseball used to be so much fun to talk about. Now, you are an idiot if you don’t know everything about all these insane, useless acronyms.
Remember when you were a kid, and you solved a math problem without showing the work? You only got partial credit. Meanwhile, that clown three desks down had an answer off by 1,475,948 but showed his or her incorrect work and got the same grade? Infuriating. All that matters is that you got the right answer.
Sabermetrics is that kid three desks down. Never right, always annoying.