So, I realize now how my post looks. I meant for it to call casual baseball fans dumb. And to say some people can't get past batting average. Hence the "slash" between the comments. But in hindsight, I just called everyone who likes batting average dumb. Sorry. That was rude and insulting and uncalled for .bschr682 wrote:It’s missing some data which does matter. It’s a half assed hypothetical situation which can never exist designed solely to get responses such as your original reply where you called people dumb for liking a higher batter average. Stat snobbery. So like I said, useless.Ted wrote:I disagree. He's asking you in a situation where not other factors differ, with the same position, same speed, defense, etc, which is the best batting line. It's a fundamental question about what is most likely to lead to runs scored. It's also funny that the leading answer at this point is the most wrong one.bschr682 wrote:This is useless without context.
But I do stand by the fact everyone needs to get over batting average. Out of the traditional batting stats, it's the one that keeps sticking around. I think it's even worse than RBI sometimes. You can have a pretty useless season with a "good batting average". It's hard to say a guy with 120 RBI had a useless season (but it is easy to say that maybe the RBI are more of a result of the lineup he played in). Singles just aren't that important, except that they get you on base. But if your entire profile to get on base by never hitting for any kind of power, then yes, a high batting average is a bunch of junk, because all that stuff about them moving runners over, etc, pales in comparison to the fact that these types of players don't hit doubles or homeruns. If you don't want to agree that homers and doubles are significantly more valuable than singles, then we can't have any sort of conversation about baseball. A real conversion requires logic and reason. If you want to steadfastly refuse that a homerun is easily more than four times as valuable than a single (which is why slugging percentage undervalues power, and OPS is flawed because it values SLG too much), then we can't talk about baseball, because that is a denial of an absolute fact. A homer guarantees at least one run, whereas a single more times than not is of no value in the end result. Guys who walk take more pitches which tires a starter. They tend to be more selective. They tend to hit pitches harder when they do swing. So if I can replace a bunch of singles with a bunch of walks and get a similar OBP, but keep a ton of power, I take that every single time. This is why the guy who hits for a good average and walks, and has power is so rare and special. It is very difficult to do all three. This isn't some crazy cult of nerd snobbery. Its math. Plain old math. Plain old numbers. Batting average is overrated. It correlates less significant with runs scored than OBP, or iso power, or slugging, or any number of metric that can be measured to runs scored. Its just math. Period. End of story.
Your calling this "stat snobbery" is frankly in my mind just as insulting as me (unintentionally, but I did it so I'll own up to it, and I fired the first salvo) calling people who like batting average dumb. It is part of the trend in our country over the last twenty years to devalue the contributions of intelligent educated people in favor of "common sense" and "common knowledge" which are in fact often simply tradition, rather than any truth of real value.
Calling this a half assed hypothetical situation is strange. I can, if you wanted me too that badly, find you 100 players that meet these batting lines (+/- 3 to 5 points). Just because you don't care to consider a thought exercise, doesn't make it not worth anyone else's time.
There is a "wrong answer" to this. If you took a team of all player 1, and played him against a team of all player 3, with identical pitchers, player 1's team would win more games if we ran things 1000's of times. Player 1's team would have more players on base, and would hit more doubles and home runs to drive them in. It's not really that much of an argument. Yes player three's team would hit a few singles that would score a runner from second when player 1's team just got a walk, but most of those singles are going to come with the bases empty. Player 1's team won't win very game, and sometimes you'll wish player 1 made contact more, so you could move runners over and get sac fly's, but in the end, his team will win more. 25 more home runs is a LOT. It's a marked difference in run scoring potential between these two players.
