Nate Silver Turns His Eye To the American League

As a baseball fan, I have read literally dozens of articles and hundreds of message boards rants on this subject. If you're interested, a little wading through Baseball Think Factory [baseballthinkfactory.org] will allow you to relive the endless re-hashings at your leisure. More generally, this sort of statistical talk is very common among a certain segment of baseball fandom, and is (as has been mentioned before) the milieu from which Nate Silver emerged.

What's interesting about this specific issue is that Cabrera vs. Trout has been painted as a traditionalists vs. stat-heads vote, but an argument for Trout can be made with no reference to advance statistics. It goes like this:

Trout's traditional "slash line" (batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage) is very similar to Cabrera's. Cabrera hit for more power, but otherwise they are nearly equal. Trout's home ballpark is harder to hit in than Cabrera's. Trout led the league in stolen bases with 49, Cabrera had 4. Cabrera grounded into 28 double plays, most in the league. Trout grounded into 7. Cabrera is a poor defensive player, Trout is an outstanding defensive player. Trout's team even had a better record than Cabrera's, even though Cabrera's Tigers made the playoffs and Trout's Angels didn't.

Nothing in that argument requires anything more complicated than the division required to work out batting average and the like. The fact that Trout's candidacy has been painted as just the result of statistical mumbo jumbo is ridiculous.

(It should be pointed out that there is a lot of mumbo jumbo in baseball's defensive statistics. They are not at all mature yet, and are heavily influenced by very subjective inputs. This is part of why I prefer the non-statistical argument for Trout. When someone says that Trout's glove was worth 2.1 wins above a replacement player (the number given at Baseball Reference [baseball-reference.com] he is speaking with a false precision. Silver, it should be noted, doesn't fall into this trap, and I should say that Sean Foreman at Baseball Reference doesn't believe that his 2.1 win number is anything more than an educated guess.)

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/pelpMYt6zP8/story01.htm

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