Sabermetrics goes to college:
Sabermetrics: The Dissertation!
(HT: Steve Sailer)
Interesting how sabermetricians differ from journalists when the subject is steroids. Great line: "at least for this crowd, the body is of little consequence."
I wonder, though, wasn’t this baked into sabertmetrics from its birth?
I read once that Bill James started crunching baseball statistics so he could beat his buddies at Strat-o-matic. (It was on the internet so it must be true.)
S-O-M is a great game, but it does reduce the athlete to a card full of statistical probabilities.
I think that Sabermetrics might owe some of its popularity to the rise of ESPN. The WWL fills the air (both radio and TV) with talk by people whose knowledge is a mile wide and an inch deep. Quoting statistics makes these superficial talking heads sound more expert.
Saying “Ryan Howard is really struggling” sounds obvious. Saying, “since the All Star break Howrd’s OPS is only 0.625” sounds like hard science.
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