Caught in the Middle

Note: Starting with this post, I'm going to restructure this blog. I'm now going to be focusing on short essay type posts about baseball, mostly about the Mets. I generally won't be providing game recaps and the such anymore, as that became very difficult and didn't work with my schedule well.

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It seems that nowadays, there's two categories of baseball fans: the fan that will swear by sabermetrics, who knows all the stat acronyms like the back of his hand, who idolizes Bill James and Billy Beane; and the fan that acts like sabermetric advances are a plague on our pastime, who trusts his eyes a bit too much, who would rather go back to the "good old days" when the game wasn't all about numbers.

Well, it appears I'm caught right in the middle.

I used to be dead set against sabermetrics, the exact prototype of the latter fan from above. I wouldn't go past the easy stats. I'd swear by wins, saves, RBIs, and things like that. Hell, I wasn't even familiar with on-base percentage. As I look back on those years, I feel that part of my wariness of sabermetrics came out of fear and confusion. I saw all of these complex formulas and worried. I have many awful memories of geometry tests where I'd simply forget all of the formulas when I needed them most. It seemed I was worried about that happening here too.

Eventually, after becoming the laughing stock quite often for not having any decent stats to bring up in arguments, I decided to learn a few advanced ones. I talked with a sabermetrically-inclined friend of mine, and it quickly dawned on me that I didn't need to know the formulas at all to have a grasp on the stats. With the help of my friend (and some of my own research), I quickly became familiar with UZR, ERA+, FIP, WPA, and +/-, among others.

This is no way means though that I am permanently limiting myself, that would be foolish and would make me no better than I used to be. I will continue to look to become comfortable with different advanced metrics at my own pace. As this period of enlightenment inches on, though, I am stuck in limbo.

When I argue with those that use more advanced statistics, my arguments feel weak. When I argue with those that are, let's say, more "old-fashioned", it feels as if I am going right over their head.

It's a tricky area that I'm going to need to learn to balance, and one day, I hope to be able to argue with both the best of them and the...not so best of them.