From the “Pen is mightier than the Saber” department…
Did writers bully other writers? Does math+baseball=bandwagon? I don’t know the pressures faced by a writer at a newspaper, but I do know that the great thing about math is that it is an open-door party with no velvet ropes. Come on in and have a seat, or a pulpit. No rope. There is a caveat: you have to accept that a lot of people do a lot of work to bring you those numbers. It’s the same barrier you accept when you start writing analyses of games you aren’t playing (or watching) in the first place. It is physically impossible for any one person to watch every pitch of every game played. It can’t be done. Instead, we have lots of people that put results together and use math to try to make those numbers relevant. What are you going to do with this bounty?
Take note of the use of the word “trendy”, in Phil Rogers’ quote, as if some day this “trend” of open, peer-reviewed statistical analysis and inclusive debate about the evaluation of talent will abate. I pine for those days as a young baseball fan when I eagerly awaited for the Times-Union final edition because the morning paper didn’t have the west coast games’ box scores. I assumed that there was a network of trust regarding reporting and that “top people” were delivering this information via the papers. That’s the only way that until the invention of cable, games west of Chicago were not considered a complete fabrication. Gimme some more of that, and less information, and less conversation. And turn off the lights at Wrigley.
And every time someone links to Murray Chass’ not-a-blog, a kitten gets eaten by a weasel.
