Statistics Are Evil!
Joe Posnanski is a fantastic baseball writer and a brilliant student of the game. But that’s not why I love Joe today. The reason I love Joe today is that he has brought the awesomeness of a new dastardly villain into my life.
Quake in fear, friends, as you behold the evil of… DR. STAT!
Apparently, the Devil Rays decided that the biggest scourge facing baseball today isn’t steroids, or inflated salaries, or the designated hitter, or even Joe Morgan. The horror against which the Rays and their manager must fight is statistics. BOO, numbers! And rational thought! And logic! And the absence of hyperbole!
Naturally, they made a cartoon about it. Of course they did.
[I]t’s a cartoon where the Tampa Bay Rays are superheroes. Yeah. I wasn’t able to get the entire plot line, but apparently Joe Maddon is some sort of superhero mastermind, kind of like a baseball superhero Charlie, and he has the power to turn his Rays players into superheroes. One becomes really fast — so fast his feet look like a tornado. One I guess can throw stuff at bad guys — sort of a Roger Clemens for kids. The other one seems to be able to destroy bad guys by hitting them with a bat. Good lesson for the kids.
But, believe it or not, that’s not the hilarious part. No, the hilarious part is this: The villain they were trying to catch was someone named “Dr. Stat.” No, really. It seems that Dr. Stat — and I’m quoting from the cartoon now — wants to “use his knowledge of useless statistics to destroy the game.” [...] He says as punishment he will point his stat ray direction at Tropicana Field in order to make it impossible for people to enjoy the games.
OK, timeout here — what is a stat ray? How would that work? I should ask the guys at Baseball Prospectus if they have one. A stat ray. How great is that? I wonder what would happen if we would point the stat ray at some of my baseball writing friends. I’d love to aim it at my buddy Rick Morrissey up in Chicago, just to see what happened. Would he explode? Would he start talking about VORP and Eqa? I need to get me one of them
I think one of the reasons for the anti-stat attitude is the worry about authority. Why does Joe Morgan call games? (not a rhetorical question.) As a former player, he’s an “expert”, and so qualified to tell us about stuff. But as everybody else knows, he doesn’t know jack. It seems a terrible irony that numbers geeks- the sort stereotypically picked on by jocks- should have more authoritative knowledge of the game, and this is a threat. Plus, there’s the whole ‘they don’t play the games on paper’ thing, which is another way of the players’ wresting control from the numbers…
Interesting take. I think it’s a lot of “we’re frightened of these new and fancy ways of doing things” — because it’s certainly not STATS they’re frightened of. They love stats, just the wrong ones – wins/losses, saves, BA. Even OBP is ok. It’s the new ones – OPS, VORP, EqA, etc. – that give them the willies.
And also, the “we’re jocks and don’t like geeks” factor. Except you don’t have to be a geek to understand the value of OPS, VORP, et al – just logical.