Mike Silva of NY Baseball Digest spoke to a “high-ranking official with one of the 30 big-league clubs” about the concepts stated in the book Moneyball (sort of), and the executive said this:

Moneyball geniuses have flopped like DePodesta, Ricciardi, and even the infamous Billy Beane whose exploits have all lacked a World Series trophy. It is all a tool to be used by the uninitiated. I’ll take a good scout and player development people anytime; the statistics are very secondary. How do you account a .220 hitter for being the hero of the World Series or a guy who hits three home runs a year wins the pennant clincher with a home run?

With all due respect to this high-ranking official, this high-ranking official is a dunce.

I do not pretend to have “all the answers,” as Silva suggests many sabermetricians do. I have far more questions than answers, and I’ve never said otherwise.

I know this for sure, though: If you don’t understand why a .220 hitter could be the hero of the World Series or a guy who hits three home runs a year can win the pennant-clincher with a home run, you do not deserve to be a high-ranking official with one of the 30 big-league clubs.

And to him, I’d ask the same question so frequently lobbed at sabermetricians from sanctimonious and misguided old-school baseball minds:

Do you even watch the game?

Or are you suggesting to me that a seeing-eye single is somehow the product of a player’s skill or will? Are you saying that a hard-struck line drive hit right at the shortstop is bad form, not bad luck? Do you really mean to tell me that some .220 hitter — some guy who can’t hit better than .220 in the regular season — can actually magically make himself a better player when it counts more? Good lord, if someone had the ability to make himself a better player when it counted, why wouldn’t he do it all the time? Is there somehow really not enough pressure in a regular-season for that .220 hitter to morph into Albert Pujols? And in that case, wouldn’t he be the exact type of player you’d label a headcase and eschew from baseball?

It’s random. It’s a random game and a random world and randomness pervades everything. Sometimes things don’t need explanations. They just happen, especially in extremely small sample sizes.

I really don’t even want to fight this battle anymore. I recognize that some people will never agree, and they’ll just think A-Rod magically became clutch this year after being unclutch for three postseasons and clutch in the two before those. I mean, hey, it’s the magic of Kate Hudson!

But I bring it up here because it’s scares the crap out of me that people like the guy Silva quotes — who not only demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what Moneyball was really about, but also a fundamental misunderstanding of the way baseball actually works, not to mention a fundamental misunderstanding of the rules of standard written English — are in positions to make decisions for the baseball teams we all love. It’s a pitch-perfect justification of what I wrote about yesterday, asserting that people in Major League front-offices screw things up all the time.

And holy crap, no one ever said that book was about canning every scout and letting calculators make decisions. It wasn’t called Numbersball. It was about exploiting market inefficiency, and just because Beane hasn’t done a good job of it over the past few years doesn’t mean GAGLWEJHRKJ^@#$. I’m done.

“Dadadadadadadada.” – Marcel Duchamp.

Chris asked for an explanation on a couple of stats in the comments for the last post, and I started responding there, but the post got really long and I figured I’d throw it in the main feed here instead.

Anyway, Fangraphs.com and baseball-reference.com have pretty extensive glossaries, so I urge you to read (way, way) more about the subject there.

I normally use stats to inform my writing more than drive them, but the stats Chris asked for all might very well come up here, so here goes:

Briefly: WAR stands for Wins Above Replacement, and uses both offense and defensive stats in an attempt to determine precisely how many wins a player is worth to his team above the replacement-level player at his position (think Alex Cora).

WAR relies on UZR, or Ultimate Zone Rating, to measure a player’s defense. UZR is a pretty complicated metric, but it essentially tracks how many outs a player converts on balls hit within his “zone of responsibility.” A 7.6 UZR would mean a player saved his team 7.6 runs defensively over the replacement defender at his position over the course of a season.

OPS+ and ERA+ are just versions of OPS and ERA that are scaled a bit differently. Essentially, they’re park- and league-adjusted to better compair players of different eras and ballparks, and they’re weighted so the average is 100 and higher numbers are better. So a player with a 160 OPS+ hit 60 percent better than the average hitter would in his same situation.

The good general point of reference those two stats — and they’re two of my favorites, since they’re quick and easy but still fair for comparisons — are SAT scores, since they’re weighted the same way and the range is usually about the same. The worst players in the league will score around 60 and the best around 160, though there are always a few outliers.

BABIP refers to batting average on balls in play. It is mostly used to measure luck, because a player’s BABIP usually remains around the same level across his career, and years in which it is abnormally high or low might signify good or bad luck. It’s a bit more complex than that, of course, because BABIP corresponds pretty closely to line-drive rate and a player might be getting more hits on balls in play because he’s actually hitting the ball harder.