Today my sabermetric writing lies behind me rather than ahead, and I think I am about ready to say, “Farewell to Stats.”

For a whole generation of fans and fantasy players, stats have begun to outstrip story and that seems to me a sad thing. Even the unverifiable hogwash that passed for fact or informed opinion in baseball circles not so long ago seems today wistfully enticing, for its energy if nothing else.

– John Thorn, MLB Official Historian.

I don’t get it. Why does understanding the way we quantify baseball necessarily strip the sport of its good stories? I’ll amount that I find a good deal (but certainly not all) of the extremely stat-heavy baseball writing boring. But it seems lazy, to me, to turn to “unverifiable hogwash” just because it makes for a more enjoyable story.

I generally avoid mission statements, but on this site I try to write about the things that actually happen and matter in baseball, and present them in an entertaining fashion. It is a challenge and I don’t always succeed, I know. But I would rather strive for that ideal and fail — knowing that at the very least I’m not filling readers’ heads up with fallacious nonsense — than write pretty, fluffy stories attached to nothing substantive.

Is this a sabermetric blog? I’ve never called it that, but I’ve been accused of it on Twitter for sure. And I don’t really care one way or the other, because I’m not even sure what that means. The baseball writing on this site is informed by the way I watch baseball, which is in turn informed by the stats I sometimes look up on the Internet.