A “Keeping Score” column in The New York Times last week caught my attention with this start to a sentence: “While batting average may no longer hold much sway…”
Written by Benjamin Hoffman, the piece was about Yoenis Cespedes, the New York Mets’ surprising sensation, and his chances of winning the National League most valuable player award.
Curious about that “batting average” phrase, I called Hoffman Tuesday night and asked him about it.
I don’t know Hoffman, never met him, never had spoken with him. However, simply by taking my call, he showed a lot more class than his superiors in the Times sports department.
“I think there’s been a pretty widespread move to emphasize other statistics, with organizations, even with fans,” Hoffman said.
And with Metrics Monsters. Don’t forget them. They concoct new metrics – I don’t like even the sound of that word – and in their arrogant way expect everyone to accept them as the Ten Commandments of baseball. You know, Thou shalt use WAR to vote for MVP and the Hall of Fame.
What has taken the place of batting average? “People have gone all over the place with it,” Hoffman said, “with some emphasizing on-base, slugging, adjusted figures that account for different parks and eras.”
I cannot tell you what magical letters denote those adjusted figures. I don’t want to know what they are. They are meaningless to me.
Baseball has been played for more than 100 years in parks of many different sizes. My parents were great baseball fans. They never gave a second’s thought to the difference between home run distances at Forbes Field and Wrigley Field. No matter where Ralph Kiner hit a home run; it was a home run, and they didn’t care how he compared with Johnny Mize or Hank Sauer.
When Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams played as contemporaries, the Yankees and the Red Sox briefly considered swapping them because Fenway Park and its Green Monster would have benefitted the right-hand hitting DiMaggio while Yankee Stadium with its short right field porch would have been great for Williams.
The players, however, were fan favorites and entrenched where they were, and the teams never made the trade. It didn’t matter. DiMaggio and Williams were two of the greatest players in baseball history, and their playing location didn’t detract from their careers or the fans’ appreciation of them.
Meanwhile, if batting average has lost its sway, you can’t tell from the daily statistics, whether they’re in newspapers, on websites or on lists of league leaders in all MLB press boxes.
Batting averages appear in every box score, they are the first category listed in NL and AL leaders, team batting averages are the first column in team statistics and in listings of individual statistics, batting average is listed ahead of on-base and slugging percentages and OPS, which combines on-base and slugging. If and when newspapers run league leaders, batting average leaders are the first listed.
Why, then, is batting average so prevalent?
“I may not believe there is much predictive nature in r.b.i.,” Hoffman said, “but I still look at it.”
The supposed diminished significance of batting average is reminiscent of something I “learned” a couple of years ago when I was told and then read that wins for pitchers no longer mattered and never really did matter.
The Metrics Monsters and their allies decided that too many variables and factors entered into pitching’ decisions, and it therefore made no sense to credit a pitcher with a win just because he started a game, lasted at least five innings and his team won the game.
Just think. All those years we talked about 20-game winners, and now we had to discard all of that information and those records. It was bad enough when an MLB committee in 1992 defined or redefined what a no-hitter was. I didn’t agree with the committee’s decisions, and I don’t agree with all of this WAR and VORP business, though as a writer friend pointed out the other day we don’t hear much about VORP these days.
When the Times created the Keeping Score column, I was a baseball columnist for the paper and I told the sports editor I thought it was a bad idea. It was mostly used to open the paper’s sports pages to statistical nonsense in which most readers had no interest.
The sports editor didn’t heed my warning and look at the Times sports section now. Soccer has become the sport of the Times. Baseball has become a minor league sport.
It has been part of a desperate effort to attract new readers and new advertisers for the paper and its web site. I don’t know if it has succeeded, but it has ruined the sports section for those of us who have been long-time readers.
The New York Daily News is suffering the same plight. On Wednesday, after the owner had failed in his effort to sell the paper, it dismissed about a third of the sports staff, including the sports editor, Teri Thompson, and the long-time baseball writer, Bill Madden, who is a fellow winner of the J.G. Taylor Spink award from the Baseball Writers Association.
The columnist Mike Lupica was on the hit list but was said to be continuing his effort to negotiate a new contract to replace the one that expires at the end of this month.
In 2008, the Times initiated a series of buyouts that prompted many senior staff members to leave the paper. I took the buyout and left the paper on the same day as Linda Greenhouse, who did a fantastic job covering the United States Supreme Court, and Dr. Lawrence Altman, the excellent medical writer.
At the time, the Times’ move reminded me of the Florida Marlins’ slashing their payroll after they won the 1997 World Series. The Times, like the Marlins, was slashing payroll, offering attractive buyouts to induce its highest-paid employees to leave. Just as the Marlins traded away its best players to shed their salaries, the Times willingly let many of its best and most experienced people leave to reduce its payroll.
Contributing to my decision to take the buyout and leave was a series of lies told to me by the then sports editor, Tom Jolly.
He subsequently was moved to the news side as a night editor. Times people said it was a delayed punishment of his direction a few years earlier of the Times’ aggressive coverage of the Duke University lacrosse scandal, in which three players were accused of sexually assaulting a stripper who had performed at a team party.
The case turned into a fiasco, and the players were subsequently cleared when police determined that the woman had lied.
Jolly, incidentally, was the sports editor who started the “Keeping Score” column.