I recently had an "exchange" with another baseball blogger who took some offense at my use of the term "saber-nerd." I know, it's certainly not as nice as calling them a sabermetrician, but hey, I'm not that nice.
I have a love-hate relationship with sabermetrics on the whole. There are stats like OPS that have come up in the saber-era, and they are very useful. BABIP is also a useful stat to me, if you don't over-value it (some guys pitch to contact and make hitters make bad contact, which is good pitching). Then there are stats like "xfip," which clearly was made up by someone who never pitched an inning in little league. There is no such thing as "fielding indifferent pitching" for pitchers. "Ground ball" pitchers pitch to contact, and usually thrive on good defensive teams. Some guys adjust to pitch more to contact on good defensive teams who aren't ground ballers. Brett Myers had great success in the second half of 2008, and openly spoke of pitching to contact that September (especially when he threw on short rest), in no small part because he had a very, very good defensive team behind him. You don't pitch in a "fielding indifferent" game.
I also think it's worth talking about WAR for a minute. Here is the basic problem for me, from the Wikipedia page for WAR:
There is no clearly established formula for WAR. Sites that provide the statistic, such as Baseball Prospectus, Fangraphs, and Baseball Reference, all calculate it differently; however, all of these sites calculate the value of WAR using these principles, and each site publicly acknowledges their methods for calculating their individual WAR values.
And there lies the problem. What is it? What is a replacement player? Is the replacement level player a AAA guy, a bench player, the worst guy at the position in the league, the median guy in the league, or what? How the hell does James Loney come out ahead of Ryan Howard in some rankings? I'm sorry, any real GM would rather have Howard on their team.
I don't find sabermetrics useless, I find them to be overly thought out. Some work great in measuring a player's overall ability. If a pitcher is putting up huge numbers, but doesn't strike out many guys, doesn't have a great ground ball rate, and also has a freakishly low BABIP, you should expect them to regress as the season goes. You also shouldn't totally dismiss them though just because they're not a strikeout guy, and have a low BABIP. Some of the sabermetricians (there, I was nice) would say stranding runners in scoring position is luck for a starter. We use the same standard though to judge relievers. It's not consistent with pitchers, nor does it have to be, but you certainly need full context. We don't need new stats like xFIP though. That takes the baseball out of baseball, and tries to assign the success of some to some form of mathematics, when that's not how the game is played on the field.
Sabermetrics have their place. They're useful. When they're used though to make statements like "Ryan Howard's contract is the worst contract ever" though, over and over again, those of us that are baseball fans and not statisticians just shake our heads at them. Howard's contract may suck, and you may hate it, however, you tell me which better first baseman was going to take a five year commitment or less than $125 million? Pujols, Gonzalez, Fielder, and Votto all got more years, and more guaranteed dollars. So if you didn't want to commit that much to a first baseman, and you didn't want to commit this to Howard, you either had to give more and commit longer for a better player, or you had to take a downgrade. Sabermetricians give themselves a bad name when they make statements like that, or when they tell you a player that is clearly inferior is better than a different player, and when they tell you absolutely stupid statements, like RBI's are a stupid stat. Really? It takes no skill to hit with runners in scoring position? Explain Jayson Werth's 2010, or Hunter Pence's 2012 then? Explain why a better overall hitter like Prince Fielder, on a similar 2011 offense to Howard's Phillies, drives in about the same number of runs, despite a much higher average, similar to better home run numbers, and better stats otherwise, across the board. Anyone who's ever played baseball and was any good at all will tell you: it's a lot harder to hit with guys on second or third base than it is to hit with a guy on first, or no one on at all. For the last time, RBI's are a very, very good stat to keep.
Now, all of this may seem like I'm ripping sabermetrics on the whole. I'm not. I've cited some that I think are good already, and there are others like SIERA that I just don't know enough about to even make a judgment. I'm certainly not making the argument that we should go back to the "how many wins does he have" days of judging a pitcher, and write off a guy like Cliff Lee this year who wasn't winning games, but hasn't nearly been as bad as some fans think. I'm simply stating the "saber-nerd" tag is fair. Very fair. Those of us who have been watching for years often times find ourselves shaking our heads at some of the statistical breakdowns done by these folks, to try and tell us things that we know are false. Ryan Howard is central to the Phillies winning? We went 37-50 in the opening half with him not around, we're 28-20 in the second half, with him back. Meanwhile, you can say the opposite for supposedly superior Hunter Pence and Shane Victorino types, who are gone as we play our best ball of the season.
In short, don't take "saber-nerds" as an insult. You see the game your way, and sometimes it's very useful and insightful. Sometimes a caller on WIP is too, though less often. Sometimes though, like we usually do for the WIP caller, the rest of us shake our heads at you too. Don't worry though, we don't think you're bad fans. Just different.
