What I’ve Learned So Far

Chass it the senior baseball writer at the New York Times, and while he’s still a pro’s pro in covering the business side of the game, he has grown increasingly tiresome over the past few years as his curmudgeon-ish-ness has grown.

Read his current notes column — I’ll wait here.

Okay, I agree with Chass about the overheated media coverage of Roger Clemens, Bernie Williams, and the Jeter/Rodriguez spat.  It’s all just gossip that has very little to do with anything going on the field.  So, I’m with him on these points:  the collective baseball media can spare me any more stories on these “issues”.

But then we get to the silly comments of his last blurb, where he launches into an ill-informed ad hominem attack on Baseball Prospectus and its use of statistics. If Chass doesn’t want to learn anything new about baseball, that’s fine.  But his commentary on the VORP statistic is arrant and stupid — stupid because he takes such pride in his ignorance.  Why reject something just because it doesn’t appeal to you?  Especially when the point of that particular statistic is to simplify the calculation of how good a player is over the proverbial guy-named-Ed at the position?  It’s a simple, useful number that tells you a particular thing in a particular way — and it’s a hell of a lot more useful than batting average or OPS (on base-plus-slugging) to tell you how good a guy is, because it’s specific to the particular position and because it combines offense and defense.

“I suppose that if stats mongers want to sit at their computers and play with these things all day long, that’s their prerogative. But their attempt to introduce these new-age statistics into the game threatens to undermine most fans’ enjoyment of baseball and the human factor therein.”

I guarantee you that Joe Sheehan and Will Carroll, the top daily writers at Baseball Prospectus, watch more baseball than Murray Chass.  I guarantee it.  They love baseball — the game on the field and the numerical patterns that reflect how it is played and how it might be played better.  Now, those guys are half Chass’s age, so I’m not saying they know more about baseball than he does — but they’re using every single tool at their disposal to find out . . . which apparently Chass no longer needs to do.

Give me Peter Gammons any day.  He’s eligible for his AARP discount too but, unlike Chass, his mind is still young.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 at 8:36 am and is filed under Sports.