It’s certainly true to say that it’s not all in the statistics, but what many of the people saying that don’t seem to accept is that some of it has to be. And this is why we see the likes of Neifi Perez getting multi-year contracts every winter - for all their hustle and being great clubhouse guys they’re killing the team with their actual performance.

I’m with you on that – I’m all for better stats, I just don’t think that Joe or I need to be able to work them out ourselves, or accept them unconditionally.

See, this is where I can’t go along with the post-Jamesians: assembling a (real rather than fantasy) team is not like (say) licensing medicine, where you certainly should be incredibly wary of things you can’t measure. Running a sports team, like putting together a pop group, is all about juggling personalities. Going against that leads to the situation like the one at the Los Angeles Dodgers during the reign of Paul Depodesta, where he brought Jeff Kent, a player who – rightly or wrongly – has been accused of not getting on with African-Americans, into a team that contained Milton Bradley, who can be one very angry black man, with the inevitable result that the two of them had a massive bust-up. Now, the statistics might not have predicted that, but the tiniest bit of attention to human behaviour would have…

That’s not strictly true - what they believe isn’t so much that they don’t exist, but that they can’t be usefully measured, and have no particular predictive value so that their use in roster contruction is minimal at best.

the extremes of post-Jamesian stat freakery have rejected … the idea that the order in which players bats matter.

Not strictly true - it’s simply that studies have shown that the difference the batting order makes is so small as to be effectively pointless alongside the inevitable random variations from expected performance over the course of a season.

This whole stat-fan vs old school thinking seems bizarre to me. I started watching baseball in October 1999 when my work sent me to New York during the playoffs, and I got engrossed in the Mets’ playoff games, particualrly the fantastic NLCS against Atlanta. On returning to England I wanted to find out more, so naturally turned to the internet to read about baseball. It seemed odd that sabermetric people were having to be so defensive about what they said, as not having grown up with old school thinking, it seemed like nothing more than common sense that a batter shouldn’t be judged by his RBI totals, or a pitcher judged by his W-L record as these figures were as much a result of his teammates’ performance as his own.

The Cardinals’ WS triumph could be cited in evidence by the stats dogmatists: Tony La Russa constantly changed things around according to the percentages, while the Tigers’ Jim Leyland largely kept faith with individuals who in the end came up short. But I agree with you that the stats can only get you so far.

(I know this wasn’t your main point, but I don’t think the cricket parallels hold up simply because batsmen and bowlers just can’t perform consistently to the degree that baseball players can. For one thing, cricketers can’t really “warm up” in the way that e.g. pitchers do. And these days, cricketers rarely play day in, day out. There is also that regular transition from county level to test match level and back, which - within a season anyway - most US baseball players don’t experience. In short, I don’t think cricket averages are as useful a barometer as baseball stats tend to be.)

I’ve heard it said that baseball is fundamentally a machine for generating stats, and that it’s in stats that the pleasure in baseball derives. But the only game I ever saw was a huge pile of fun, with the exception of the moment when I was put right out of temper by the appearance near my seat of that hideous freak, Mr. Mets.