Alright I realize that picking on Mets fans is sort of low hanging fruit here, but this article. Oh this article. It's entitled "Are Advanced Stats Hurting or Helping the Game?", so you knew it was going to be good. My favorite gem is below.
For example, is a lefty specialist really necessary in a team’s bullpen? According to advanced statistics they are. But when it’s all said and done a bullpen pitcher is simply a pitcher who could not make it as a starting pitcher. Very few pitchers are groomed to be in the bullpen. In other words, why would I bring a pitcher into a game, and take out my better pitcher, simply because statistics show that one guy is better at getting left-handed batters out?
It doesn’t make sense. The best players should be on the field.
So not even touching the hilariously screwy logic of "a bullpen pitcher is simply a pitcher who could not make it as a starting pitcher" and thus leaving your starter in is ALWAYS preferable to going to a reliever, all of the scenarios that this article presents as examples of stats being dangerous hinge on, well, managers being gotdamn morons. Now I can see how if you were a Mets fan you'd maybe be inclined to believe that (as well as being inclined to live in terror of going to the bullpen), but successful big league managers are capable of knowing things like whether their starter is close to needing to be pulled, whether they're likely to need a lefty specialist later in the game, how extreme their starter's platoon splits are, etc., not to mention having some sense of how high leverage the situation is. It's not as if managers are sprinting for the nearest LOOGY when a light hitting left handed shortstop comes up in the top of the fifth inning or something. If they are, it's because they're morons, not because they've been hoodwinked by evil stats voodoo.
Also if we didn't have LOOGYs, I wouldn't have things like gifs of Javier Lopez making Joey Votto or Ryan Howard look like an idiot, and things like that are priceless, okay? If Ryan Howard isn't, somewhere on the internet, swinging wildly over the top of a Night Train slider, the communists have truly won.
If someone is playing with stats in order to make their equation work, how is that more accurate in telling me which player is better than if I used the old school statistics (OBP, AVG, ERA, etc.) which have been used for the past 100-plus years, and my eyes, used to watch the players play?
LOOK! LOOK WITH YOUR SPECIAL EYES!
/cough Sorry, but seriously. ~Playing with stats~ is not exactly what happens, okay? I understand that Sabermetrics can be daunting to the uninitiated, especially if you're not mathematically inclined, but could we maybe stop acting like statistical models are big conspiracies to prove a point rather than an attempt to understand the trends that you can't see with the naked eye? If you want to talk about "playing with stats to make an equation work", let's talk about how batting average doesn't take into account non-hit methods of getting on base or make a distinction in value between a single and a home run, or how ERA doesn't take into account things like a pitcher's efficiency or how their ballpark or the defense behind them influences their success or failure. If advanced stats have led to overspecialization in bullpen roles (which you could certainly make an argument is true), then traditional stats have led to things like Jeff Keppinger and his vaunted shallow right field power having a job for as long as he has because he can put up a BA that looks good if you don't notice the lack of power or relative lack of patience (and if you ignore his defensive patheticness, but that's neither here nor there).
Look, I'm not saying you need to be a believer in advanced stats above all else. Scouting is still a thing for a reason, and sometimes the traditional stats do an okay job if you're not looking for a particularly deep analysis. But if you really think ~your eyes~ do a better job at evaluating a player than a model based on a MASSIVE quantity of data, you had better be Rain Man levels of dedicated to remembering every little bit you see and you had better be watching an ASTOUNDING quantity of games. Either that or you had better be taking lots of notes and looking at those notes carefully for trends and commonalities and then, hey, guess what? That's how advanced stats came about in the first place.
