Sabermetrics Is Winning

This is a run expectancy matrix from the Cubs broadcast on Sunday. Cubs broadcaster Len Kasper has started a series featuring new advanced stats each Sunday, having already introduced the triple slash and BABIP.

This is the jumbotron at Minute Maid Park (glove slap to the Crawfishies). Pitch F/x mastermind and now Houston Astros employee Mike Fast alerted the universe to that lower left right item — an active run expectancy output.

The Astros now have a Twitter account dedicated to advanced analysis.

In April, the Rays broadcasters became the first broadcast team — according to the collective knowledge of the FanGraphs writers — to both present a WAR leaderboard as well as to define WAR and replacement level:

Sabermetrics is winning. It is beating the old, tired and untested notions of pre-1900 baseball — the bullying faith of fluctuations, of RBI and batting average, of wins, losses, and clutch.

You had a fair run, Old School, and you once meant everything to me and to broadcasters and to stadium scoreboards. So I dedicate this lovingly selected excerpt from John Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” to you, sweet old friend, as I say goodbye, possibly for a final time:

A VALEDICTION FORBIDDING MOURNING.
by John Donne

AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
    And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
    “Now his breath goes,” and some say, “No.”

So let us melt, and make no noise,
    No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
‘Twere profanation of our joys
    To tell the laity our love.