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Which was most assuredly NOT "shut the deuce up"...it was "yep...we see that problem...everyone working in the big leagues knows that most of the stats on the baseball card have a rare-events problem...so we've moved beyond all of that uber-stat stuff and have started looking for large-sample relationships between the stats we're all familiar with and events in baseball that are not rare."
In other words...
We can't count on XBH rate because XB are rare...and this week's sample may not be relevant to next week's games. That's fine...but we CAN measure the REAL skills using statistics that are not rare. Batted balls are not rare...so measuring how often a player puts the ball in play in fair territory is reliable and a real indicator of skill. We can't count on the HR part of DIPS because HR are rare...but we can measure the average velociy of batted balls off a pitcher...since...again...batted balls are not rare...and get a real-world fast-twitch look at how a picher is performing THIS WEEK that has predictive value. We can't judge defense by UZR...that's OK...we can look at a player's jumps on each chance he gets (again...not rare) and measure the difficulty of eahc play he makes and make better predictions that way.
We shouldn't use OPS because it's heavily biased by rare events like HR? Cool...measure the htiter's BB rate, K rate, batted ball velocity, swing and miss rate, and flyball rate...none of which are rare events.
Do you see what I'm getting at?