John Harper, in today’s Daily News, channels Murray Chass to show how relying on numbers ruined the Red Sox last night.

Harper’s point is that Terry Francona elected to have Jonathan Papelbon walk Torii Hunter to get to Vlad Guerrero because Hunter had more success against Papelbon this season, and obviously Guerrero made the Sox pay.

I can’t speak for Francona or why he made the decision. It baffled the crap out of me at the time. But I can point to the great Joe Posnanski, who uses numbers to show why the decision was a terrible one.

Harper concludes:

And while Francona was just managing by the numbers the Red Sox love so much, you wonder if his gut would have made the same call.

Ugh. I wanted to put together a well-reasoned response to Harper’s column but I don’t have the patience right now.

Look: Francona made a bad decision, and he paid for it. When he was asked to justify it afterwards, he cited a stat based on a terribly, pitifully small sample size, and John Harper went to town.

But what Harper entirely misses is that the Red Sox likely wouldn’t have even been in the playoffs without loving those numbers so much, and wouldn’t have won two World Series in the past five years.

I have no beef with people who choose not to view the game the same way I do. When they’re smart about it, I love nothing more than engaging them in respectful debate about how to put together a team or fill out a lineup card. It’s fun, and I’m certainly willing to recognize that the numbers I trust are not the be-all and end-all of baseball analysis.

But nothing bothers me more than how anytime someone with some ties to the so-called “Moneyball” school of thought does something dumb, stodgy columnists come out of the woodwork to bash the entire concept. It’s cherry-picking at its worst, and it’s the same type of polarizing discourse that makes me hate politics.

Tito Francona makes a bad decision and John Harper wants to know, essentially, “where are your precious numbers now?”

But the numbers I hold precious show me that baseball is a hilariously random spectacle, and that a single at-bat is never, ever, ever reasonable grounds upon which to make blanket statements.