tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36331360.post4290034428890744420..comments2023-10-12T05:09:46.380-04:00Comments on Guilty Displeasures: Miguel Cabrera didn't win the Triple Crownneilshyminskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14745442660488961314noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36331360.post-58484171578580676482012-11-16T22:15:17.555-05:002012-11-16T22:15:17.555-05:00The award is meaningful at least insofar as it tel...The award is meaningful at least insofar as it tells us something about the level of discourse in sports, and how much work still needs to be done.<br /><br />re: AVG vs. OBP. It's certainly an oversimplification - which is why I wrote it in such an absurd way - but I don't think it's wrong. Commentators are fond of saying that 'the best players fail 7 times out of 10', which is totally wrong, of course, because it assumes that batting average tells us how often a player fails. Surest sign that AVG isn't very useful? You don't need AVG if you have OBP and SLG.<br /><br />And WAR? Well, it *does* encompass an entire player. It's not perfect, sure, but it's better than lining up all the stats, side-by-side, and trying to make sense of them in an unsystematic way. That is, it's pretty damn good.neilshyminskyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14745442660488961314noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36331360.post-22333729783763081702012-11-14T14:59:04.760-05:002012-11-14T14:59:04.760-05:00An arbitrary and meaningless award for achievement...An arbitrary and meaningless award for achievements in an arbitrary set of measures in an entertainment product. Eh. Who really cares?<br /><br />That said, this statement<br /><i>"AVG is demonstrably inferior to on-base percentage at demonstrating what it's supposed to demonstrate"</i> is a big over-simplification of an important statistical argument. The point is that there are measures of baseball that correlate closer to winning than others. But no one number can really encompass an entire player, be it VORP, WAR, wOBA, or whatever.dschonbehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04459722690434474229noreply@blogger.com