"Steve Moyer < 1%"

I am a big fan of the annual Bill James baseball handbook. It is a terrific companion to the season, and not because it's a sabermetrics polemic like some might expect. Instead, I love some of the stats that you wouldn't get anywhere else, stats that even skeptics like Azrael and the late, great spnited would embrace. For example, there are base running stats - you can quickly look up how frequently a runner moves from first to third or second to home on a single. It also has the average fastball velocity by pitchers - as well as how frequently they throw each pitch.

Anyway, in one section, James has a series of charts giving the percentage chance of various players reaching milestones. For example, there is a chart of what pitchers are most likely to reach 300 wins (Halladay and Sabathia are at the top), and who is most likely to reach 500, 600, 763 home runs (Pujols - remember, this is published before the season).

The longest chart is the 3,000 hits probability chart. The usual names are on there. Johnny Damon. A-Rod. Miguel Cabrera. The last name on the list, however, gave me some pause: "Steve Moyer <1%."

I had never heard of Steve Moyer, so I flipped to the player section, wondering if this was some prospect I had overlooked. Then I wondered if perhaps they meant Jamie Moyer, and were making some joke about his longevity.

I took to Google. It turns out that Steve Moyer is the CEO of Baseball Info Solutions, James's stats and publishing partner.

My question: I know this is not exactly journalism, but is it still inappropriate to throw that kind of inside joke into a guide like this? Does it sacrifice credibility when people are looking for a reason to discount sabermetrics as it is?

Thoughts? I'm on the fence.

 

He clearly has a 2% chance of making it.

 

I think it's hilarious.

 

Bill James has always had tongue-in-cheek remarks about various things in his Abstracts / Annuals.

 

I think it's funny too. And it's not factually wrong.

I don't think anyone will be turned against sabermetrics because of a little joke like this.

 

Yeah, I'm not really seeing the issue here.

 

Maybe it means he's prospecting with an outlaw motorcycle club.

 

Well, if we did this in newspaper agate, that would be a problem, right?

 

Seems like the book has a price tag on it, and enough people vote nay by not paying the price, the joke was a bad idea. If not, it was fine.

But truth is an absolute defense.

 

This. Moyer DOES have a less than one percent chance of doing it.

If you put in agate that your friend hit a home run for the Reds, that's wrong because he didn't do it.

 

Steve Moyer's walks count as .8 hits

 

I notice the weirdest shit.

For example, I noticed that on all Topps baseball cards this year, the "2B" heading is repeated twice (so no triple heading - or maybe it's the other way around. Either way, both extra base-hit headings are the same). And I noticed that this is only for standard vertical cards, and that the horizontal cards are printed correctly.