Check this out.

This blogger decided to take my piece as though I were delivering the Sabermetrics manifesto, the be all end all to Sabermetrics when I was only trying to outline the very most basic tenets – that an individual’s contribution to winning baseball can be extracted with reasonable accuracy.

My favorite quote of the piece is when he declares that Sabermetrics is “horribly flawed”. It’s funny because he is trying so hard to portray me as one of the unwashed masses late to the Sabermetric party that blindly accepts common misconceptions like that on-base is the only important stat in baseball. But given that Bill James has defined Sabermetrics as “the search for objective knowledge about baseball”, I would love Julien to delve a little deeper than he/she took the time to in order to describe specifically how “the search for objective knowledge about baseball” is flawed.

Julien then goes into an entirely unsupported diatribe about the value of contact hitters and defense and how SABR overrates power hitting. Julien the mathemetician makes some sense here but he seems to forget two things: first, that he probably ought to provide some numbers to show that it would behoove one to eschew power hitting in favor of defense and contact hitting and second, that the team that struck out more than any team in the American League just won the World Series.

So go check Julien out. He’s much smarter than you and not afraid to fall flat on his face trying to show it.

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