Old School, New School

Pick up any baseball book written within the last 4 years and you'd be hard-pressed to avoid encountering a mention of the current war raging inside baseball. In an overly simplified statement, its the scouts versus the nerds, and the battle is being fought inside and outside the baseball's inner circles.

One of the leading faces of the numbers-driven Nouvelle Vague is Baseball Prospectus, publishers of an annual league review and preview. They recently released a book entitled Baseball Between The Numbers, which I picked up in an effort to gain a better understanding of the work and formulae that go into the numbers and ridiculous acronyms these guys spit out. (LMLVW anyone?)

Up to this point, I've been leaning towards traditional, visceral assessments of players while using the new numbers when needed. OBP (on-base percentage), SLG (slugging percentage), and OPS (on-base percentage + slugging percentage) are fantastic stats, and really provide a more complete picture of a batter's success than the traditional AVG alone. Though I haven't quite finished the book, it is incredibly interesting. Want to know who's really the best player of all times? There are numbers to help you with that. Clutch hitting? Yea, we can quantify that. The things that one can do with numbers are amazing.

Unfortunately, what also stands out in this book (and in much of these techniques d'avant garde being used to evaluate players) is that there are things that can't be quantified. Sure you can come up with the numbers, but in the end, the numbers can be ruled as completely arbitrary. A true scientist will readily admit that in reality, we don't know anything. We have suspicions, we have good ideas, heck, even pretty good ideas, but we really don't know. Too often you find the extreme statistician, the guy who can cut the numbers away and view them as the only source of accuracy. In much the same manner, you find baseball men who couldn't say the word "polysyllabic" if their lives depended on it, much less calculate OPS or VORP.

The problem in baseball is that people too often go too far to one side or the other, when in fact, the best and most reasonable course of action would be to use the styles of the Old and New School equally. There is no question that the advances by SABR and independent number-crunchers are necessary and innovative, but at the same time there are things you can't quantify, or that become arbitrary upon any attempt to quantify them. If you're curious about the use of these numbers, or just want to be able to back up your barroom arguments, this is a great place to start. Just don't forget that not all of it is in the numbers.