Old Man Baseball Writer Irritates, Saddens

As the token member of the Call to the Pen staff who leans way too much on snark and humor to overcompensate for a lack of intelligence and creativity, I feel like it’s my duty by way of mediocrity to comment on Old Man Baseball Writer Jerry Green’s recent article railing against the dispassionate inhumanity of sabermetrics. I’ll do it if for no other reason than the aforementioned lack of creativity (seriously, slow news day in baseball, am I right?) but please understand that it does not make me particularly happy. No, it kind of bums me out a little bit, to be honest. But let’s table my infinite sadness for a moment (in the business, we call this a tease) and examine the unfortunate article first.

You’ve seen this one before. It’s actually kind of boring. I’ll admit, when I first started reading Green’s nonsense, I had more than half mind to get the CAPS LOCK warmed up, and go line-by-line-indignation Fire Joe Morgan style all over the clumsy prose. I eventually calmed down and stopped myself. First, because that would be some real low-level sacrilege, and second, because I’ve already used the S word a few times recently on these pages and I don’t want to go pushing my luck with a bunch of rage-fueled F’s and GD’s.

Green’s stance is pretty well traveled territory, and the lowest of low hanging fruit. His article is entitled “To baseball fans, statistical analyses can’t obscure true magic of the game,” which is an adorably false premise to start with right off the bat (unintentional baseball pun alert). I wouldn’t so much consider myself a “statistical analyst;” more like “half-assed plagiarist of FanGraphs player pages,” but I’m definitely way more Bill James than I am Tim McCarver. That being said, I can assure you that when Dan Johnson, down to the final strike of the season, hit his famous Game 162 home run, I wasn’t sat on my couch staring at a win probability chart, paralyzed with nerd-outrage over the statistical injustice of the event. No, I was screaming and jumping and then running through every room of my apartment, scaring the hell out of my wife and cats and overcome with surprise and happiness. I was living the magic, baby. My understanding of leverage index and WPA didn’t have one single thing to do with how I was feeling in that moment.

Aside from the major flaw of his thesis (no big deal), Green hits the typical curmudgeonly talking points with an ignorant zest that’s almost admirable. He misunderstands WAR (when dealing with matters of the heart and intestines as Green is here , there’s no need to research and understand the very thing you’re attempting to disprove), and then doubles-down by mischaracterizing our old favorite VORP. The guy is posting his thoughts live and in high-definition on the information super highway, but apparently hasn’t quite yet mastered the finer nuances of such complicated technical maneuvers such as “Googling Something” and “Cut and Paste.” I’m getting kind of mean now (more on that soon), so let’s wrap up the trash talking. There’s more, of course—there’s a little ERA and RBI talk (just for fun, try comparing the formulas of ERA and FIP sometime), there’s some mention of Errors and Wins and the charming gamesmanship of deliberately hurling a baseball 90 miles per hour at an unsuspecting batter. There’s even a Casey Stengel cameo, which I think fulfills all the requirements laid out in the original “How to Properly Complain with Condescension and Willful Ignorance About Sabermetrics Handbook.” Not without his redeeming moments, Green does bust out some slick usage of the word “claptrap,” a rhetorical flourish I’m not even close to making fun of.

I mentioned that all this kind of makes me sad. It does. Jerry Green is just some old guy. He could probably teach me a thing or two about life and how to live it. I mean look at him, he looks like a perfectly pleasant gentleman. He’s probably somebody’s grandfather. His family probably loves him. He could very well be a gracious and generous tipper. I have no doubt that under different circumstances, or in a different life, I could take in a ballgame with Jerry and buy the old-timer a beer. We could sit under the sun and measure the green of the infield grass and wax poetic about the beauty of the game until the lights came on. We could find common ground on some universal truths of baseball, the method by which we arrived at such understanding of little consequence. We could talk about great players both past and present, with nary a mention of statistics neither traditional nor advanced. We could both be baseball fans, in our own way, finding the magic wherever it presents itself. But arguing, and insults and ignorance are all a lot more fun, and a lot easier to manufacture and digest, so I guess we’ll just stick with that.

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Kyle writes baseball nonsense at The Trance of Waiting. You can follow him on Twitter @AgainstKyle.