The False Choice
Are you a stat guy (or gal) or a “feel” guy (or gal)?
You can ask that question of almost every baseball fan, and they’ll know what you’re talking about. The number-crunching methods of the last decade: do you use them to evaluate players? Do you think the “clutch” hitter is a myth? Or are you like your dad, looking for “heart” and hustle in your winners? Do you think the invisible parts of team baseball are driving forces in what you’re seeing?
Almost everyone you ask will have an answer. And almost everyone who gives you an answer will be wrong, because it’s a false choice. The correct answer is: Mind your own business.
From the simple to the SNLVAR, there’s no one way to look at the game, and I hate it when people act like there is. If someone says they have the answers, you can stop listening to them. They’re wrong. The “feel” guys are good at analyzing tiny moments, while the stat guys are good at looking long-term. The stat guys can tell you what should happen, and the “feel” guys can tell you why the people who won a game are better than those who lost. But when the stat guys say that any given game is subject to “luck”—well, that’s a term we don’t use around these parts. Forgive us if we believe that term is used as a catch-all for things they don’t understand—the same way we don’t excuse the “feel” guys’ tendency to use double-standards. If this doesn’t make sense now, I promise it will eventually.
There’s no one answer. There are many answers. Things happen. There are reasons. We’re going to try and figure out what they are.
Baseball has always been a sport where you fill in the gaps. That’s what’s made it the best sport to write about, but the statistical revolution made those gaps a lot smaller. That which we don’t understand about baseball has dwindled, while that which we do understand about everything else has increased beyond exponentially because of the internet—it’s all at the tip of your fingers. What we want to do is fit as much as possible into those gaps. No restrictions. If baseball writing has been defined by hewing to tradition, we aim to break that mold.
We don’t belong to any camps. We just love the game. Give us the heart guys and the VORP guys. Give us all of it
Click here for a graphic illustration of these principles and a Vietnamese sandwich “recipe.”
