Winning the SABR Debate, Part I

Part I of an infinity part series dedicated to dissecting the bad ideas of SABR-bashers.

We’ve all reached that point in the discussion. The point when, say, you are debating the merits of a given player and you have just cited xFIP, or wOBA, or WAR.

“What!??” your opponent replies incredulously. “What the hell is xFIP/wOBA/WAR?”

“Well, it’s an advanced metric that measures such and such,” you explain.

Your opponent scoffs. “I don’t have time for these made-up stats. They take all the fun out of the game for me.”

It is at this moment that the discussion has usually reached the point of no return. It’s like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books; you can either escalate things by snarking the living shit out of your opponent or you can extricate yourself from the discussion and risk looking weak. Either way, there can be no “winner”.

Not too long ago, the release of the book The Beauty of Short Hops: How Chance and Circumstance Confound the Moneyball Approach to Baseball by Alan and Sheldon Hirsch touched off a minor controversy in the world of baseball commentary. Among other things, their book takes up the “sabermetrics takes all the fun out of the game” position:

[T]he saber-obsession with numbers occludes a major aspect of baseball’s beauty – its narrative richness and relentless capacity to surprise. Baseball, thank goodness, transcends and often defies quantitative analysis. Games are decided by bad hops and bad calls, broken bats, sun and wind, pigeons in the outfield, and fans who obstruct players, among other unforeseeable contingencies. That may seem obvious (apart from the pigeons), but not to the folks who increasingly run the show. Rather than celebrating baseball’s delightfully spontaneous quality, sabermetricians deny it or rebel against it.

Let us leave aside for a moment that this sentiment is commonly expressed by people who are unable or unwilling to grapple with new statistics with which they are unfamiliar. Of course these people too use statistics to make sense of what happens on the baseball field, just less insightful statistics. In fact, a large portion of the Hirsches’ book is devoted to a feeble attempt at debunking specific advanced stats. Others have already done a fine job of critiquing the Hirsch brothers’ book and I do not wish to retread too much old ground. Rather, here I want to engage on its own terms the all too common argument that advanced statistics obscure the game’s beauty.

Rejecting this claim only requires making the seemingly common-sense observation that baseball is not art. That is, it is wrong to say that baseball must be appreciated in the same ways that art is — as something we admire for its beauty, for the emotions it provokes in us, or for what it tells us about the world — because, unlike art, when the game of baseball is played, a large amount of essentially objective, numeric data is produced.  Where there is an element of subjectivity is in how we arrange the data, how we interpret the data, which data we keep, and which data we throw away. With art, there is no equivalent. While we can agree that some art is better than other art, there is no data that emerges from the art itself that can serve as a basis for stating objectively which art is good and which art is bad.

Moreover, it makes no sense to say that “the obsession with numbers in baseball detracts from the game’s beauty” because numbers are far more intrinsic to baseball than beauty is. Baseball is a game. Ultimately, the goal of playing baseball (as with any game) is not to produce something beautiful, but to win. At the most fundamental level, the purpose of watching it is to see who wins.*

*It is here that I should note that our own Carson America Cistulli has been on the cutting edge of the effort to bridge the gap between beauty and numbers by quantifying aesthetic value in baseball with NERD.

You may indeed find watching people play poker to be like taking a stroll through the Museo Reina Sofía, and there would be nothing wrong with that. But to suggest that the obsession with numbers in poker (odds, for instance) detracts from the game’s intrinsic beauty would, for obvious reasons, be patently absurd. Baseball has far more in common with poker than it does Picasso’s Guernica.

All of this is not to say that it is wrong to watch baseball because you find wacky plays beautiful. If you want to view the game as some sort of quasi-performance art, that is fine. We all enjoy baseball for slightly different reasons. Who cares if other people are using stats to gain a better understanding of what is going on on the field? You are free to ignore the stats and continue viewing baseball in a way that makes you happy — hopefully no sabermetrician would begrudge you for this.

In this sense, Murray Chass is right when he says that:

There is no right or wrong. The critics say we are wrong, and they know what they are talking about, right? They urge me to consider the statistics, and I have. I do not find that they enhance my enjoyment of the game I have watched for many more years than they have breathed on this earth.

I will enjoy the game the way I want to. If I am missing something, so be it, but I don’t think WAR, VORP and UZR are going to do anything for me.

Where people like Chass and the Hirsches go wrong is in wanting to have it both ways. “The obsession with numbers occludes a major aspect of baseball’s beauty” should be a way of signaling your lack of interest in — ineligibility for, even — participating in a discussion about what it takes to win baseball games. Yet we often find the same people who say this interjecting in debates about the relative value of players. This is of course because when many people say that “stats detract from beauty,” they are being disingenuous. What they mean to say is “I do not understand certain stats and therefore I will reject them out of hand.” In reality, very few people actually reject all statistics in favor of appreciating the game’s beauty.

Nevertheless, if, as we have seen, the reasons you enjoy baseball must be primarily personal, then it makes no logical sense to insist other people also appreciate what you see as the game’s beauty at the expense of statistics. Not everyone finds baseball beautiful for the reasons you do — some don’t find it beautiful at all. Likewise, it doesn’t make sense to insist that people accept advanced statistics in order to appreciate baseball. But you will find that the vast majority of things that happen on the baseball field can be expressed numerically, whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.