DMN's Evan Grant votes for Michael Young as AL MVP

Funny, a ton of people complained in the day of the AL MVP announcement about the people who didn't vote for Verlander, and a ton of people complained about the ones who did.

I am a BBWAA member who votes for annual awards and the HOf and it pisses me off so much when fans at a computer are so smug insisting that they are right and the voters are idiots.

It's an opinion.

As long as you can back it up with reasoning that makes some kind of sense, as Evan, has done, you are entitled to it.

 

It happens every year in every vote. The year one guy didn't vote for Lincecum, he got crushed -- it's ironic that the new stats, which are supposed to be great for independent analysis, have instead created such an insistence about groupthink. College football voters get it even worse.

Evan made a compelling case particularly on the late and clutch point.

 

I strongly disagree that the rise in "the new stats" are to blame for the rise in "groupthink" attacks on sports writers.

ITIS: It's the Internet, stupid. You can find Internet commenters to "attack" anything and everything these days. Hence BB Bobcat's point about hearing a ton of people complaining about voting for Verlander AND not voting for Verlander. That's not sabermetric groupthink -- that's millions of idiots who now have a forum. Same as it ever was, only now we all can hear them. Unfortunately.

But while there's plenty of snark to go around about Murray Chass and other writers who remain intentionally ignorant about advanced metrics, I disagree that there's much groupthink when it comes to actual sabermetric theories. If you read FanGraphs or BP or Tango's blog or Baseball Think Factory or any other respected sabermetrics source, it's obvious there are myriad opinions about just about every subject discussed. It's why we don't have a single WAR formula that everyone can agree upon, it's why every site uses a different defensive metric.

There's a lot of discussion and opinions are constantly changing as new data comes to light. For instance, as soon as Voros McCracken published his groundbreaking theory of defense-independent pitching in 2001, it was instantly picked and poked apart. What most respected sabermetricians believe about DIPS today bears little resemblance to McCracken's original work. So it goes.

(For the record, I don't have any problem whatsoever with Evan's vote. I don't think Young deserved to win the MVP, but he made a strong case for his clearly thoughtful vote and I can respect that.)

 

Buck -- noted and acknowledged that the Internet spreads the venom and is the primary reason for all this. But on plenty of threads there are people arguing that Young couldn't be as valuable because OPS or WAR says so. All over the place this is some kin of factual evidence.

Pretend the Internet existed and those metrics didn't. Very few people would feel justified in blasting Grant, because Young's traditional stats are pretty good and his team won. The stats give the rippers what they believe to be the logical basis for the conclusion that they're dealing with a homer who doesn't take his vote seriously.

 

Has anyone on this thread argued using sabermetrics? The specific OP (by me) said my issue wasn't one of sabermetrics.

 

I can't be sure (I am on my phone and it doesn't track back well) but I believe there was a citation of Ellsbury's and Bautista's OPS, and Young's rank in those categories, from some of the more strident posters.

 

Please Dooley that couldn't be farther from the truth. I don't give a shit if it's a name writer or not. Her reasoning is ridiculous. Yes I do believe in OPS just like every organization in baseball does. I have never once in any of my post defended WAR, I don't dismiss it but I have never used it.

 

Slight tangent, but I don't consider OPS to be a modern metric. It's just a combination of numbers that have existed forever. Carry on.

(Edit: I guess all the stats are just combinations of traditional stats, so what I really mean is I don't consider OPS a modern metric because I understand how to calculate it )

 

Yeah, as long as we're being all ivory-tower here, I think OPS is considered very simplistic and that wOBA (or of course WAR) is preferred.

But I respect Evan's argument. Although I disagreed with his vote I think the reaction was way out of proportion to the alleged offense. I imagine it was magnified by the fact that he covers the Rangers and people assume homerism.

I don't think it's just advanced stats that are the culprit here. I voted as part of a small panel in a far less important award category for which advanced stats weren't really an issue. We had to vote for five players and through my research I found probably 15 that any reasonable person would say were very well qualified to be part of the group. However one player that I left off prompted a visceral reaction from fans/bloggers that was well out of proportion to the alleged slight. It was like I had run over their puppy.

Kudos to Evan for posting here.

 

And when he has lines like "My eyes told me Michael Young meant more to the Rangers than any other player in the American League," should we not assume a degree of homerism, even if it's unintentional homerism?

 

Homerism is exactly what it is.

 

Have to agree. And in his defense here, he started making comparisons of things Young did to past years. Sorry, if you can't stick to 2011 when making the argument, you might want to re-examine your decision.