Jason Whitlock's column. Anyone else disagree?

http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/sabermetrics-moneyball-stat-geeks-are-ruining-sports-092211

I love how he wants people to debate with him about why stats aren't a relevant way to judge players but not use stats as their argument. Huh?

 

Re: Jason Whitlock is dumb

Outing alert -- Jason Whitlock is a time traveler who filed this column from 2005.

 

Re: Jason Whitlock is dumb

Yes, but ...

He certainly doesn't make his point very eloquently, but Whitlock is onto something here: Football and basketball cannot be measured the way baseball can, and it is really annoying when someone tries to do it. There's too much interdependency. It works in baseball because everything is basically a one-on-one confrontation with some variation (but not a ton) for how good/fast the defenders are. I have come around a lot on that.

But it's lunacy to take PER, or that Lenovo plus/minus, or whatever other stat is being used in basketball, to conclude that one player is better than another. There are dozens of legitimate variables to every situation. Even moreso with the NFL.

 

Re: Jason Whitlock is dumb

His complaint about football is that ESPN is introducing a QB rating stat ... which they want to replace a QB rating stat which dates back 40 years, is harder to calculate than any baseball metric, and which doesn't accurately measure a QB's contributions. And which already rates his hero Elway as 60th best of all time, with Aaron Rodgers and Philip Rivers as the best two QBs of all time.

Really? The statheads are ruining sports, when the accepted 40-year practice rates players like this?

 

Re: Jason Whitlock is dumb

You're presuming I value the current passer rating, which I don't. I never even look at it. I think it's being horribly misused in today's game especially, because of the overweight of an interception among 25-30 pass attempts. It was designed to look at the rate over 300 or more pass attempts. But it still isn't a good system.

The idea that ESPN, or Football Outsiders, has built a better mousetrap is equally ridiculous.

 

Re: Jason Whitlock is dumb

This argument sends me through the roof every single time:

"They unwittingly conspired to remove much of the magic and mystery from baseball."

 

Re: Jason Whitlock is dumb

Jonas Salk removed much of the magic and mystery from germs.

 

Re: Jason Whitlock is dumb

Francis Crick removed the magic and mystery from DNA.

 

Re: Jason Whitlock is dumb

I'm presuming that Whitlock is either ignorant of it or forgot about it, as this is the example he uses to back his argument that stat geeks are ruining football. Your view of it has no bearing on its overall use or Whitlock's premise. It's an official NFL statistic that is regularly cited on television broadcasts and in game articles. It is also 40 years old. So why are stat geeks just now ruining football if this has been in use for almost half a decade?

 

Re: Jason Whitlock is dumb

Thomas Edison took all the magic and mystery out of light.

 

Re: Jason Whitlock is dumb

OOP removed all the magic and mystery from NFL threads.

 

Re: Jason Whitlock is dumb

I don't know that passer rating has ever been embraced by fandom or even by media -- this is from my own circle of course, but at no point have I ever heard it argued that Steve Young was better than Joe Montana because he had a better passer rating. It's acknowledged, but it is not looked at as conclusive of anything. BA (now OPS), on the other hand, has been used as the basis for thousands of arguments for over a century of baseball.

Football numbers just aren't used that way, because I think most people understand numbers don't mean all that much in football.