Quants and nerds bring science and reason to the dark fortress of superstition


Alison Gopnik, The Wall Street Journal’s “Mind & Matter” columnist, goes a bit over the top today while paying homage to baseball’s statisticians.  But one must be mindful that she teaches at U Cal Berkeley—less than 15 miles from the home field of the Oakland Athletics and “Moneyball” wizard Billy Beane.  At the other end of the country the Boston Red Sox rule supreme in Major League Baseball in large part to calculations by their adviser Bill James—inventor of sabermetrics: the empirical analysis of baseball, especially statistics that measure in-game activity.

However,  BoSox hero (one of many!) Jonny Gomes, who got a lot of disrespect for his measures—yet came through in the clutch, came back with this shot in an on-field interview with FOX Sports’ Ken Rosenthal after the clincher at Fenway Park:

“There’s a lot of sabermetrics, there’s a lot of numbers and stuff.  The whole WAR stat.  But when you go to playoffs, you want me to go to war with.”

WAR stands for Wins Above Replacement.  The Red Sox led MLB on this statistic as shown here.  Gomes only rated a bit over 1 on WAR.  A “solid starter” should achieve a WAR of 2 or more according to this white paper by Boston’s Yawkey Report.

It’s hard to argue with success, but take that Jonny!

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