Thirty-three Years Behind and Counting

“It won’t be long before we get the first wave of nonsense from stat-crazed dunces claiming there’s nothing to be learned from a batting average, won-loss record or RBI total. Listen, just go back to bed, OK? Strip down to those fourth-day undies, head downstairs (to “your mother’s basement and your mother’s computer,” as Chipper Jones so aptly describes it) and churn out some more crap. For more than a century, .220 meant something. So did .278, .301, .350, an 18-4 record, or 118 RBIs. Now it all means nothing because a bunch of nonathletes are trying to reinvent the game?”
– San Francisco Chronicle columnist Bruce Jenkins

Whenever someone fires off ad hominem attacks it's a sure sign they're out of rhetorical ammunition. What's especially regrettable is how hackneyed is this particular shibboleth about stat guys. I'd like to assume that in order to achieve columnist status at a major newspaper like the San Francisco Chronicle, Bruce Jenkins must occasionally evince some intellect and creativity. It's striking then that he could find no more clever, insightful or florid metaphors to describe seamheads than the old cliches of homelessness, poor hygiene and geekdom.

I haven't read this particular gentleman before, but I'm guessing, from this small sample size, that  crooked politicians, hoodlum basketball players and accountants with green eye-shades also comprise his diatribe repertoire. Oh, and Mother Teresa was good. What novel ideas, and so revealing!

That's besides the point, of course, because what's really so daft about his blog post in particular and the many daily expressions of similar sentiments from around the horsehide universe in general is the way he (and everyone he's representing) uses statistics to complain about the use of statistics. It's as if opponents of capital punishment objected to lethal injection by preferring firing squad.

Clearly, Jenkins doesn't object to using statistics to describe baseball, he objects only to the upgrade that better statistics provide. This is a pretty thinly-veiled plea to stop making a guy think. He's got a tenuous grasp on batting average, won-loss record and RBIs and doesn't want to have to learn something new, even if it's vastly superior. That his understanding of those statistics often mislead him into believing untruths is of no consequence to him as long as they provided ballast for certainty without possibility of contradiction.

"For more than a century," a horse drawn carriage "meant something," until cars came along and improved transportation. The 19th century Bruce Jenkins and his ilk would be lambasting non-equestrians for their insistence on replacing horse power with horsepower, and like the modern-day version, would be on the wrong side of technology, the free market and history. The free market's funny about better ideas: it prefers them.

If you're reading this blog, you already know the specifics about those stats, but here's a thumbnail sketch. First, all three mean something, just not very much. RBIs are a team event. Win-loss record is a function of many things having nothing to do with pitching ability. One man's .250 batting average can be far more valuable than another man's .300 batting average. Smart people doing real research have discovered shortcomings in these measurements and proposed vast upgrades to quantify the same thing. These new creations are objectively superior: they correlate more highly with individual performance, better predict future events, more fully describe a body of work. There really isn't any room for debate on those points.

Here's another interesting development: Bruce Jenkins stated his case in a blog. On a website. Using a computer. These were all upgrades from the world as it existed when he began his journalism career, and yet he seems to have embraced that change. Perhaps that embrace was reluctant but required by his desire to continue collecting a paycheck.

It would advance the craft of sports journalism if his employers at the Chronicle demanded the same willingness to change and grow from his baseball coverage. They should not accept from him, nor any other writer on their staff, a level of ignorance about the game that he has not just revealed, but flaunted. They certainly would not allow their White House correspondent to continue discussing the latest developments involving President Taft. They wouldn't allow their health reporter to refuse to discuss arthroscopy because cutting people open worked perfectly well for decades. Why is this retrograde attitude tolerated on the sports pages?

Bruce Jenkins has done a marvelous service to the baseball world. He has given full-throat to the many voices of unreason -- the scared, the hidebound, the illogical -- and accidentally shined a light on their shortcomings. There has already been significant blowback in the blogosphere, and I hope it all works out for the reformation of sports journalism. Because ultimately, Bruce Jenkins' tirade against sabermetrics isn't about baseball, or statistics, or even Bruce Jenkins; it's about the narrow, sclerotic minds that control much of sports journalism today.

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