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GLS's picture

I get a bit frustrated at times with the hostility of some to advanced statistics. I get equally frustrated with people that go so far down the rabbit hole of sabermetric thinking that they think that there isn't any other knowledge worth knowing.
Metrics are measurements. That's all they are. In baseball, what we're mostly measuring is performance of one kind or another, i.e. what actually happened. When we aggregate those measurements and start looking at the patterns statistically, we gain certain kinds of knowledge about what works and what doesn't; what winning teams really look like, etc. When we start adding in adjustments like park factors, we can add even more refinement to those numbers, so that we start to understand the context under which a certain player or group of players performed.
The numbers are a good thing. They help us understand what's really happening because that's what they measure - what really happened.
On the subject of hitting, the numbers can tell us a great deal about what a good hitter looks like, or what various types of good hitters look like, as characterized by their performances. What I don't think they help us with so much is understanding where good hitters come from, which is what I think this whole dustup is about. We don't really have a solid understanding of how a player becomes a good hitter. We know selectivity is helpful, in that it's generally better to not swing at pitches outside the strike zone. We know having good contact skills is helpful. We know that swing mechanics and reflexes are important. But we also know that within the set of hitters that are successful in MLB, that some are more selective than others and that some have better contact skills than others and some have better swing mechanics and reflexes than others. The formula that works for any individual hitter seems to be some combination of all of these, but since all players are different, that formula won't be the same for everyone.

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