Couldn't have said it any better.
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Then you simply haven't looked very hard. This site is chock full of baseball and Reds history, lore and as was said above, poetry. There are tons of posters who never talk advanced stats, and are always ready, willing and able to talk good old fashioned hardball, and Reds history.
I enjoy reading the threads that discuss and argue(!) stats, and learn from them, but am not as well versed as others and tend to just observe those.
No I mean it, go find another board, there isn't a single person on this board that relies solely on what their calculator tells them. Not one. You can't name one. This subject has become the constant drone in the background. Stop the madness. All "advanced" baseball stats do is to quantify what otherwise would be subjective. EX. People go round and round complaining and arguing about how certain teams should bunt more. When shown the math that sacrifice bunts on the whole, inhibit run production, the response shouldn't be "Shut up nerd", it should be "Hmm, Maybe I should reevaluate my position?"
The OP brought up OPS and WAR. This board has had endless debates about WAR, how it is calculated, how it applies to the construct of the team, who has the best formula, why it can be flawed, why people don't understand it, etc, etc. OPS is a straight forward stat that is figured by basic addition, of two percentages. What is so difficult to understand? If he doesn't like having a quantitative statistic to compare players, does he want a bunch of "My dad could beat up your dad" arguments? Because I am sure everyone would love reading that.
How much poetry of baseball, is there in a message board discussion? Really? How many more superlatives can be uttered about an acrobatic play of Brandon Phillips, aside from the usual "wows"? What are you looking for?
On a personal note, I have never seen Raisor wax poetic on the symphony of baseball acuity that is inspired by the breathtaking cornucopia of pitchers' fielding practice.
spring breeze
the green field
tempts me to play catch
(1890, translated by the Shiki-Kinen Museum English Volunteers)
~Masaoka Shiki, 19th-century Japanese haiku master
“Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things".
~Robert Frost
"Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting
and baseball is like writing.
You can never tell with either
how it will go
or what you will do"
~ George Plimpton
“Baseball is fathers and sons playing catch, the long arc of the years between.”
~Donald Hall
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/180149Quote:
That suspension of time is one of poetry’s greatest gifts. (As Donald Justice puts it, “Certain moments will never change nor stop being.”) Poetry and baseball encourage us to concentrate on singular moments, and that concentration creates preservation. A pitch, a pause, a pitch, followed by frenetic action—a glowing white baseball disappearing into the night over the Green Monster; Archibald MacLeish’s “sole, clean, clear / Leap of the salmon that has disappeared.” Baseball’s very rhythms are those of poetry, acknowledging that if everything can change in a moment, then attention to those moments is an essential duty.
Yeah! We get to have the same discussions again that are already in the archives thirteen times over!
Maybe this time all the geeks that use stats will actually be convinced to start watching games even though, obviously having never played the game past kindergarten, they can never truly understand much about it.
The OS (Original Sabermetrician)
A troll is an infrequent visitor who swoops in for the sole purpose of stirring up s****. I'm neither an infrequent visitor (been here for years), nor was my SOLE (key word) purpose to stir up s****. I like the point that an actual baseball player disagrees with the nerds' anti-clutch theories.
So, try again.
What's the over/under before this gets locked?