Stat-friendly and stat-unfriendly baseball writers

[Dick Whitman]

The sabermetric "debate" plays out a lot around here - and on Web sites and newspapers around the country.

But I'm not sure we've had a single repository for talking about which writers have embraced new metrics, which have unabashedly rejected them, and which are somewhere in the middle. Looking for mainstream guys here, not writers like Nate Silver or Rob Neyer who are essentially sabermetrics writers.

Top of my head to get things going:

Rejected
Bill Plaschke
Mitch Albom
Murray Chass
Buster Olney (right?)

Accepted
Jeff Passan
Joe Posnanski

 

[Versatile]

You making a hit list?

 

[Dick Whitman]

You making a hit list?

What's funny is that, although I'm known around here as this stat geek, I'm really not nearly in-the-know on this stuff as many others. I think it's interesting, and useful, but I certainly don't closely follow all the cutting-edge developments. Some of the pretty basic categories of sabermetrics - like EQA or Weighted OBP - are lost on me.

More interesting to me are how sports are covered and how the industry adjusts to change in the business/sport that it covers, whether bloggers and other independent voices have an effect on mainstream coverage, etc., etc.

 

[Versatile]

That's not a "no."

Anyway, off the top of my head, Tyler Kepner, Adam Kilgore and Albert Chen can go on one list, and Jon Heyman on the other.

 

[3OctaveFart]

Jonah Keri has embraced the movement.
Bill Conlin was one of the more vocal haters.

 

[Dick Whitman]

That's not a "no."

Ha, well consider this a "no" then.

Olney, for example, wrote one of my favorite baseball books of all time in "Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty." An absolute gem.

 

[LongTimeListener]

Can't you just go to the AL MVP balloting and start with the 22 sorry ****heads who dared to vote for Cabrera?

 

[Versatile]

Many baseball beat reporters avoid the statistics argument. My guess is this tactic serves to avoid polarizing readers and because they know readers who want them can go elsewhere and readers who don't would prefer not to see them.

 

[Dick Whitman]

Many baseball beat reporters avoid the statistics argument. My guess is this tactic serves to avoid polarizing readers and because they know readers who want them can go elsewhere and readers who don't would prefer not to see them.

Sounds similar to college beat guys and recruiting.

 

[Versatile]

Many baseball beat reporters avoid the statistics argument. My guess is this tactic serves to avoid polarizing readers and because they know readers who want them can go elsewhere and readers who don't would prefer not to see them.

Sounds similar to college beat guys and recruiting.

I think that's more an issue of manpower. Covering college football does not lend itself to covering college football recruiting. You have to put separate guys on the separate beats.

 

[boundforboston]

Many baseball beat reporters avoid the statistics argument. My guess is this tactic serves to avoid polarizing readers and because they know readers who want them can go elsewhere and readers who don't would prefer not to see them.

I think a beat reporter who isn't familiar with advanced statistics and doesn't present them is doing his/her reader a disservice. It's a way to better explain what's happening on the field, making your reporting much more thorough. Should be the goal of anyone.

 

[CD Boogie]

The sabermetric "debate" plays out a lot around here - and on Web sites and newspapers around the country.

But I'm not sure we've had a single repository for talking about which writers have embraced new metrics, which have unabashedly rejected them, and which are somewhere in the middle. Looking for mainstream guys here, not writers like Nate Silver or Rob Neyer who are essentially sabermetrics writers.

Top of my head to get things going:

Rejected
Bill Plaschke
Mitch Albom
Murray Chass
Buster Olney (right?)

Accepted
Jeff Passan
Joe Posnanski

Why would you say Olney is anti? He seems very indifferent on the topic, but not pro or con either way.

BTW, I too enjoyed his book on the Yankees.

 

[sprtswrtr10]

Not that I'm trying to be peacemaker here, but is it really a case of yay or nay. For instance, nobody reveres the history and romance of the game more than Posnanski; he simply doesn't keep that reference in a vacuum.

Further, those who reject sabermetrics — I mean truly reject them as though they don't tell us anything — are no different than a flat-earther. And while I don't keep up with it well enough, is your list of sabermetric naysayers truly made up of rejectionists? I mean, they're not all Joe Morgan are they?

I don't know. This has bothered me for a long time.

I would say that any sabermetrician who believes baseball can be reduced to a strat-o-matic game, or that human competition can be reduced entirely to metrics is an idiot. Also, anybody who rejects something out of hand that not only makes statistical sense in the present, but has served able to prove the past is also an idiot.

Is the divide that stark?
Maybe we should have more than two categories.

 

[SoCalDude]

We're striving for good writing. It's not good writing if you present a statistical acronym that 90 percent of your readers won't understand, then have to spend the next two paragraphs explaining what that is and then explaining why you think it's relevant to this situation.
We're writing for readers, not for each other.

 

[JC]

We're striving for good writing. It's not good writing if you present a statistical acronym that 90 percent of your readers won't understand, then have to spend the next two paragraphs explaining what that is and then explaining why you think it's relevant to this situation.
We're writing for readers, not for each other.

That's not really giving your readers to much credit in this day and age.

 

[Versatile]

I think the best mass-audience baseball writing applies modern analysis without bogging readers down with numbers they don't grasp or care about. Most of these things can be simplified out, and in most stories for a mass audience, exact numbers are unnecessary.

Basically, understand the concepts and apply them to your analysis, but there's no reason to specifically point out that you're doing it. Like it or not, you will lose readers with one mention of BABIP or WAR.

 

[3OctaveFart]

We're writing for readers, not for each other.

Tell that to the longform crowd.

 

[dooley_womack1]

I think you could go all your career without once mentioning WAR and still be a good baseball writer. Also, good baseball writers, in dealing with pitching over the years, have fairly often dealt with WHIP without calling it that, or, regarding batters, have balanced stolen bases against not getting on base much, or whether a batter who hits mostly singles have strengths to counter that fact.

If it all comes down to sabermetrics with you as a writer, you're not a balanced writer, and chances are you're missing giving readers about players that they may want to know. I read Kepner's stuff regularly, and he gracefully intersperses newer stats into his narratives.

 

[buckweaver]

I think the best mass-audience baseball writing applies modern analysis without bogging readers down with numbers they don't grasp or care about. Most of these things can be simplified out, and in most stories for a mass audience, exact numbers are unnecessary.

Basically, understand the concepts and apply them to your analysis, but there's no reason to specifically point out that you're doing it. Like it or not, you will lose readers with one mention of BABIP or WAR.

Rob Neyer is one of the best at that. He has strongly advocated against using obscure statistical acronyms in writing, and when he does happen to do it himself, he tries to explain what he's talking about in plain English first.

 

[Songbird]

I've wondered if the SABR diehards watch baseball for the fun of it anymore or if every miniscule detail about the game has become stat-oriented to them. Or were they always wired to be stat-obsessive?