WAR, the baseball statistic, is one of the great discoveries of the past 30 years. And Mike Trout is its greatest beneficiary.
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Replying to @EPoe187
Sabermetricians congratulate themselves for noticing in retrospect what fans in the stands noticed at the time. E.g., Advanced Analytics has determined that the greatest baseball player of all time was ... Babe Ruth! Who was also the most popular player ever.
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Replying to @Steve_Sailer @EPoe187
Similarly, WAR proves in hindsight that Mike Trout's predecessor Mickey Mantle was a great, great baseball player, a statistical insight known in 1957 only to every single nine-year-old boy in America.
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Replying to @Steve_Sailer @EPoe187
So I think what you're saying is SABRmetrics is better at evaluating ordinary rather than extraordinary players.
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Replying to @Skubalon2 @EPoe187
What I'm saying is that the all-around baseball contributions tabulated formally by Wins Above Replacement were usually successfully tabulated informally by fans for generations before SABRmetrics came along. As Yogi Berra said, "You can observe a lot just by watching."
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Replying to @Steve_Sailer @EPoe187
A lot of stat induced blindness. Why did it take teams so long to figure out that getting on base via walks was not luck? But walks for decades were unappreciated because batting average did not consider them.
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Replying to @Skubalon2 @EPoe187
Who was the most famous and popular baseball player of all time? Babe Ruth. And who set the record that Barry Bonds eventually broke with 170 bases on balls in 1923? Babe Ruth. SABRmetricians have rewritten a lot of baseball history to make themselves look more valuable.
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I was taught at 8 that, especially when leading off, a walk is as good as a base hit. And, even with runners on base, only swing at strikes. Make the zone slightly larger with 2 strikes. Be patient, make the pitcher throw strikes.
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But the majors with the preoccupation with batting average devalued the base on balls, even though some players could draw walks consistently at much higher rates than others. BA qua stat implicitly assumed that the walk was epiphenomemal to batter's ability.
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And yet, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams, and Mickey Mantle got huge numbers of walks and were superstars to average fans despite SABRmetric not existing yet. A lot of SABRmetrics is arguing with irrelevant old baseball intellectuals who preferred smart Cobb to vulgar Ruth.
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You picked 3 examples of players who all batted for high average - the test cases are guys who slugged for a lot, walked frequently but didn't hit for high average - and those guys were indeed underrated. The converse applies as well to overrated players.
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