The two most discussed issues so far in baseball’s off-season have been the dismantling of the Miami Marlins roster after just one year in their new ballpark, and who should be the American League MVP.

The old school thought was triple crown winner Miguel Cabrera of the Tigers, while the Sabermetric viewpoint was that the Angels’ Mike Trout should receive the award.

As a matter of full disclosure, we read all of Bill James’ Baseball Abstracts when they came out, and learned a different way of thinking about the game from James.

In the mid 80’s, when his book first game out, he was the first guy talking about the importance of slugging percentage and on-base percentage, and having a player who gets on base in the leadoff spot is much better than having someone with speed that can’t get on base.

We use OPS (on base percentage plus slugging percentage) a lot in talking about baseball.

James changed the way fans thought about the game.

But Miguel Cabrera still deserved the AL MVP.

He led the league in batting average, a statistic devalued by the stat people, but it wasn’t like the Tiger third baseman didn’t have a good on base percentage or slugging percentage.  He most certainly did.

The stat based people say Cabrera didn’t have a good enough WAR.

WAR is wins over replacement player, and is an interesting number to look at.  However, it is a calculated number.

Yes, yes, batting average is too, but it is determined by dividing hits by times at bat.  Those numbers come right out of your nightly boxscore.

WAR and its cousin VORP (value over replacement player) are not.  Here is the definition of WAR from Fangraphs.com:

Wins Above Replacement (WAR) is an attempt by the sabermetric baseball community to summarize a player’s total contributions to their team in one statistic.

The key word there is “attempt”.

Who knows?  You could look at a few different numbers and determine that Jack Hannahan should be the MVP.

Not really, but you get my point.  WAR and VORP are nice numbers to look at, but they don’t have the same validity as someone’s slugging percentage.

That isn’t to say they aren’t useful at times, in fact, we used VORP to show how terrible Casey Kotchman was for the Indians this year.  He had a negative value, which meant you could call up someone from the minors and they would be better.

But the factors used to calculate the numbers are arbitrary.  They were arrived at with a great deal of research and matched up with historically great players so they make sense, but they are still arbitrary.

Mike Trout had a tremendous season, and barring injury will have a tremendous career.  That said, Miguel Cabrera was the rightful winner of the MVP.

The other problem is the attitude of the some of the statistic supporters.  They act like people in a political debate.  They are right, “traditional” baseball people are wrong.

That’s it.  There is no room for discussion, and why can’t people see that batting average is overrated.

The stat people rave about guys like Adam Dunn because they hit home runs and walk a lot.  However, he also strikes out a unbelieveable amount of times and batted .208.

Think about how White Sox fans feel when Dunn whiffs with a man on third and less than two outs.

Dunn has value, no question about that, but he’s not a great hitter.  Even if batting average doesn’t mean much, .208 still isn’t very good.

Some of the information generated by the stat people today are useful.  However, the game is still won by whoever scores more runs.

Not by which lineup has a better WAR.

MW