[vhawk01]

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I love the annual bashing of the MVP winner by stat-heads who would prefer they just hand the trophy to the guy with the highest WARP or VORP or whatever statistical baseline they prefer

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Not whatever statistical baseline they prefer. Thats what the actual voters are doing. What the statheads would like is for them to hand the award to whichever guy maxes out the statistical baseline(s) that are objectively best as per correlation to winning.

Its a pretty significant difference.

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meh.. I kind of think statheads take it a bit far when you come to above-replacement-level stat usage. I don't think the fans really give a damn about scarcity of position. Think of an extreme example where 14 teams have Eckstein-like players at SS and the minors are littered with crappy SSs, and one team has someone Jeter-like. On the flip side, 14 teams have strong 3rd basemen, and the minors are filled with great 3Bs, and one team has A-Rod. Fans would be pissed if ARod's season got snubbed because his WARP/VORP.

Of course, my knowledge of SABR stuff is pretty low, so I could be missing something big here.

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Right, except they DO care, they just dont know enough about it. The statheads and the non-statheads are both trying to figure out the exact same things: what attributes and stats and skills lead to either winning or to more enjoyment (and mostly this is still winning). They both want the same things. They both use EXACTLY the same basic principles to determine those same things: they record what happens and try to draw conclusions from that.

The difference is that the statheads record EVERYTHING that happens and they test their conclusions, trying to see if BA correlates better than RBI or OBP or whatever.

Its kind of sad that people think this takes AWAY from the fun of the game. I enjoy baseball every bit as much as I ever did before I read Moneyball...far more so, in fact. I dont know if this is just a campaign to try to smear the unknown or if people really think that statheads are just miserable and dont enjoy what they've turned baseball into.