Murray Chass on those newfangled numbers

Very true, but that doesn't explain this:

CAREER PASSER RATING LEADERS ENTERING 2006
------------------------------------------------
5 DAUNTE CULPEPPER 91.5
6 MARC BULGER + 90.6
7 TOM BRADY 88.5
8 TRENT GREEN 88.3
9 MATT HASSELBECK 86.64


Those are all contemporary QBs, but would anyone really rate them in that order?

 

Fuckabuncha saber-dweebs.

I agree with Chass. The Saber-idiots would reduce everything about baseball into a nice tidy formula.

What's the formula for Steve Bartman? E equals MC you're fucked?

There is so much of baseball that cannot be captured in a formula. Saber-dorks plus agents plus mediation equals no soul.

 

passer rating is an accurate measure of four key passing categories

this isn't that complicated

is it an accurate measure of leadership or rushing ability or pocket awareness? of course not, but nobody ever claimed it was. still a very good way to compare the passing ability of guys from the same era

here is current list

Steve Young 96.8
Peyton Manning * 94.4
Kurt Warner * 93.8
Joe Montana 92.3
Marc Bulger * 91.3
Daunte Culpepper * 90.8
Chad Pennington * 89.3
Tom Brady * 88.4
Trent Green * 87.5
Drew Brees * 87.5
Otto Graham 86.6
Jeff Garcia * 86.4
Dan Marino 86.4
Donovan McNabb * 85.2
Brett Favre * 85.1
Matt Hasselbeck * 85.1
Rich Gannon 84.7
Brian Griese * 84.5
Jim Kelly 84.4
Mark Brunell * 84.2

 

OK, so Kurt Warner is a better quarterback than Joe Montana.

Yep, damn good way of measuring quarterbacks.

 

It's an extremely complicated formula. Sure, you can list the components that go into it, but list the formula and you'll have a chalkboard filled with formulas that would make Einstein's head spin.

And beyond that, any ranking system that says Daunte Culpepper and Chad Pennington are better than Tom Brady is garbage. But go ahead, crack on VORP and sabergeeks all you want.

 

One thing to keep in mind: Don't confuse distate with the messengers for a lack of merit of the numbers.

A lot of the sabermetrics geeks are very, very obnoxious and condescending. The tone of "Moneyball" was very much in line with this, which is why as many people were turned off by it as were drawn in.

The numbers aren't an end-all, be-all and the real founding fathers of the game, like Bill James, never intended them to be. It's just another way of looking at the game, a way to test whether old mantras really check out under scrutiny. And with all the money being thrown around these days, who wouldn't want to be well-armed?

There's no surefire secret, within numbers or outside of them. The numbers are just one factor, an attempt to get past the smoke screen of some of the more traditional stats.

 

Passer rating means very little to me.

First off, it's only four categories. That would be like deciding the 10 best sports sections based on something like four sections that were sent in to a contest.

Oops.

Second, passer rating absolutely hates interceptions.

Sounds good on the surface, but interceptions aren't equal. Some interceptions aren't the fault of the quarterback. Others were Hail Mary passes where an interception was no worse than an incompletion, and others were long heaves on 3rd-and-long that turn out to be no worse than a punt. Still others (returned for a TD) are horrible. And passer rating treats them all the same.

Third, passer rating absolutely loves TD passes.

Sounds good on the surface, but the QB who completes a beautiful pass to a receiver who steps out of bounds on the 1 gets no credit for the eventual touchdown. And a QB who throws a 5-yard TD pass after the running back gained 60 of the 80 yards in the drive is given too much credit.

Fourth, passer rating hates incompletions.

Sounds good on the surface, but in many situations with no open receiver (or no time) the QB is faced with three choices: Take a sack, throw into coverage or throw the ball away.

If he chooses the right option (throwing the ball away), passer rating penalizes him for it.

 

Those two sentences are not mutually exclusive, you know.

You CAN measure a lot of things, almost anything, by statistics. That's what the "sabergeeks" do. But most of them know that you CAN'T measure a player's worth strictly by a single statistic, which is why no one is touting VORP or OPS+ or Win Shares as a be-all, end-all of player performance.

It's just one measure, and you can combine it with a lot of other measures to get a pretty damn accurate appraisal of a player's value. That's all.

 

Two points on baseball, one common sense, one dogmatic ...

1. The truth is ALWAYS somewhere between. Are some of these saber-stats bullshit? God yes. Are some of them enlightening? Very much so. Are some so-called seamheads sometimes luddites to the point of ignorance? Yes. Do some so-called seamheads enlighten everyone -- baseball cognescenti and fans in general -- with non-statistical knowledge of the game? By all means. Can't we have both? As a baseball fan, I appreciate contributions from both camps.

2. Neyer should always be spelled NEYER on SJ. If for nothing else than probably creating a saber-formula to measure the circumference of Cecil Cooper's scrotum. He has those kinds of super powers.

Now to football ...

I bought the ESPN Pro Football Encyclopedia back in October. And though it is rife with all kinds of editing errors (they must have had some major spell-check malfunction in its year-to-year leaders, for example) among the things that are amazingly enlightening is that it lists the league-wide average statistic in every category.

For example, yearly league average yards-per-carry has barely fluctuated over time. From the 50s onward, I don't think YPC has moved lower than 3.8 or higher than 4.2. At least when it comes to rushing effectiveness only, it makes comparing running backs over different eras relatively painless.

Passers are a totally different story. As the ever-estute Michael Gee pointed out, passing philosophy has changed dramatically. The league average completion percentage in 1966 was 51.6 percent in the NFL and 46.3 in the AFL -- which is God awful by today's standards, in 2005 the average was 59.5. The average passer rating in '66 was 67.4 NFL, 62.9 AFL. In 2005, it was 80.1.

So the only way to truly assess how good a QB really was to compare his numbers to the average of his own era. Bart Starr '66 had a passer rating 105 -- great by today's standards, absolutely phenomenal by '66 standards. His completion percentage was 62.2 percent, 11 over the league average.

In this respect football -- which has changed the most over time -- needs sabermetrics more than baseball does. Football needs comparative statistics to recognize the evolution of the game. Raw numbers really don't tell any kind of story, especially when the amount of games played has changed a lot, etc.

 

Chass offers Times readers unique insights, and he is still at the top when it comes to writing about the business of baseball. I have always felt the New York Times never promoted him enough.

Boom, all of his columns are not about labor-management issues, but he is the absolute best in history on the subject. If you want to remember the good old days of the late Dick Young, go ahead but I will be satisfied I will be more knowledgable on the subject.