A baseball peace offering

Since the debate started over whether Miguel Cabrera or Mike Trout would be the American League MVP, I've always felt it was more than the standard debate over who was the league's best player this season, but perhaps the climactic battle between old and new ways of looking at the game.

The American League Cy Young Award selections of Zack Greinke and his 16-8 record and especially Felix Hernandez and his 13-12 record in 2010 were major achievements for the sabermetrics crowd (the type I usually call "stat-geeks," but I'm not here for reasons that will be clear below), in that one of the major points is that wins are a lousy way to judge how good a pitcher is.

But if Trout had won the MVP, it would have been their crowning glory, as the guy who won the first Triple Crown in 45 years would have lost largely because of statistically based arguments that Trout's prowess in the field and on the bases outweighed Cabrera's achievements, including leading the league in two of the great scourges of the sabermetrics movement -- batting average and RBI.

However, Cabrera won, which left people like Brian Vaughn of Call to the Pen more than a little disappointed.

 First off, David Price took home the AL Cy Young narrowly over Justin Verlander without actually ever being better than him at anything. Then we have Miguel Cabrera just crushing Mike Trout in the AL MVP voting despite only topping him in one aspect of the game, and narrowly at that. Maybe we’re not quite as advanced as I was starting to think.

And then Mitch Albom got loose.

In a battle of computer analysis versus people who still watch baseball as, you know, a sport, what we saw with our Detroit vision was what most voters saw as well.

Today, every stat matters. There is no end to the appetite for categories -- from OBP to OPS to WAR. I mean, OMG! The number of triples hit while wearing a certain-colored underwear is probably being measured as we speak.

We need to slow down the shoveling of raw data into the "what can we come up with next?" machine. It is actually creating a divide between those who like to watch the game of baseball and those who want to reduce it to binary code.

As you might imagine, his comments did not meet with universal approval.

And King Kaufman was also something less than amused on the Twitter machine.
  

People are going to look back on Trout's 2012 and say, "My gosh, those idiots didn't know what they were watching!"

If you'd told me 30 years ago that one profession would come to embrace ignorance as a virtue, I NEVER would have guessed journalism.  

I bet you wouldn't be able to find me an MLB GM who would trade Trout's 2012 for Cabrera's 2012, age, etc. not considered.

I actually agreed with the main ideas of Albom's column, that Cabrera should have been MVP and that anayltics don't have all the answers, but insulting the people who disagree with you isn't going to help your argument. The same goes for Kaufman, who, to be fair, also said that Cabrera was "stupendous" this year and is headed for the "inner circle Hall of Fame," which apparently is the very best of the best.

It is in this spirit that I would like to make a peace offering to the sabermetrics crowd, including my ambassador to analytics, my guy Poopsie out in Chicago. In the interest of peace, here are the things I'd be willing to concede:

1. Batting average and RBI aren't the be-all and end-all -- If the point of the game is not making outs, on-base percentage is a more-precise way of measuring that, and RBI require having men on base in front of you, unless you hit more solo home runs than anyone else has ever hit home runs.

2. You don't have to win a lot of games to be a great pitcher -- If Felix Hernandez played for a team that had even an average offense, he might never lose.

3. Fielding percentage and errors aren't the best ways to measure defense -- We can also call this the "Yes, I know Derek Jeter doesn't have great range" concession.

4. No, I don't know exactly what "clutch" is, or even if it exists.

5. Just because I don't know how to calculate VORP, WAR and endless other statistics doesn't necessarily mean they're worthless.

And these are the concessions I want in exchange:

1 Adam Dunn is no better than a decent hitter, and often a terrible one -- It's great that he has a great eye, and when he hits balls, they stay hit, but with a lifetime batting average of .240, if a pitcher can manage to throw the ball over the plate, Dunn will make outs more than 75 percent of the time. He hit .204 this year, meaning he made outs close to 80 percent of the time in those circumstances. Dunn is an extreme example, but it shows that batting average has some value, in that it does measure what someone does when a pitcher throws strikes.

1a. If RBI are a team stat, so are runs -- If you're going to say that driving in runs is a function of men getting on base in front of a hitter, you also have to say that scoring runs is a function of the hitters behind a baserunner, unless he steals home a lot.

2. Good pitchers tend to win a lot -- There have always been Greinkes and Hernandezes, pitchers who pitch better than their records on terrible teams. Take a look at Nolan Ryan's 1987, for instance. In general, however, if a pitcher wins a lot of games, he had a good year.

3. Range is great, but so is making the plays you should make -- Call it the "At least Derek Jeter isn't giving teams four outs an inning" concession. If you can't stomach saying that, watch Eduardo Nunez play shortstop; you'll be crying for Jeter in no time.

4. If "clutch" doesn't exist, explain your first thought when David Ortiz or Alex Rodriguez come up in a big spot.

5. People are always going to be skeptical of any statistic they don't understand.

But even beyond the way we look at baseball, there's one more trade-off I'm willing to make.

I won't call sabermetric types geeks, if they don't call skeptics stupid.

Deal?