Fish or fowl (or When is a blog not a blog)?

The estimable Murray Chass was unceremoniously given the heave-ho when The New York Times decided to cut bait and trim staff. As great a baseball writer as he was, he had come into disfavor with members of the younger demographic for his refusal to get with the times (so to speak) by embracing the new generations of statistics.

According to a survey conducted by the Fantasy Sports Trade Association, “Fantasy sports has a total market impact of $4.48 billion dollars. Consumers spend $800 million directly on fantasy sports products, but also use an additional $3 billion worth of media products related to the hobby (such as DirecTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket and XM Radio’s coverage of all MLB baseball games).”

And sites such as Baseball Prospectus, which got this whole mess started for Chass.

In a column dated Feb. 27, 2007, he wrote:

I receive a daily e-mail message from Baseball Prospectus, an electronic publication filled with articles and information about statistics, mostly statistics that only stats mongers can love.

To me, VORP epitomized the new-age nonsense. For the longest time, I had no idea what VORP meant and didn’t care enough to go to any great lengths to find out. I asked some colleagues whose work I respect, and they didn’t know what it meant either.

Finally, not long ago, I came across VORP spelled out. It stands for value over replacement player. How thrilling. How absurd. Value over replacement player. Don’t ask what it means. I don’t know.

I suppose that if stats mongers want to sit at their computers and play with these things all day long, that’s their prerogative. But their attempt to introduce these new-age statistics into the game threatens to undermine most fans’ enjoyment of baseball and the human factor therein.

People play baseball. Numbers don’t.

FYI, Baseball Prospectus defines VORP as “the number of runs contributed beyond what a replacement-level player at the same position would contribute if given the same percentage of team plate appearances. VORP scores do not consider the quality of a player’s defense.”

And that’s not the only 21st century stat out there. Here’s a whole bunch of terms I certainly never heard of as a kid growing up in the shadows of Ebbets Field (the apartment complex, not the ballpark). When I was a little shaver I used to by nickel-packs of cards at “Cheap Charlie’s on Nostrand Avenue that proclaimed a hitter’s batting average, home runs, and runs batted in. That was “the big three,” the numbers used to measure the quality of a player. (For pitchers it was wins, strikeouts, and earned run average.) Joe Posnanski, columnist for the Kansas City Star, contributed this thought-provoking piece to Sports Illustrated on just this subject.

The “Keeping Score” column In this past Sunday’s Times considers whether the recently-retired Mike Mussina deserves to be enshrined into the Hall of Fame. Using calculations that weren’t even on the blackboard a generation ago, writer Dan Rosenheck compares the former Yankee hurler favorably with the likes of Don Drysdale, Whitey Ford, and Juan Marichal. One of the concepts he employs in coming to his conclusion is “The Three True Outcomes,” which sounds a good title for a new-age self-help book or a garage band.

When I was about 10, I came across a book titled Percentage Baseball. It was full of formulas that is still beyond my ken, but I bought it anyway. Maybe I figured I would learn all this stuff by osmosis. And this was a book 15 years before Bill James came along and changed the course of human events.

Suffice it to say that this isn’t your granddad’s national pastime (EXTREME LANGUAGE WARNING!!).

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But I digress…

Chass was roasted by numerous baseball fans, websites, and bloggers for his refusal to embrace the modern, calling him a dinosaur..and tne they got mean. Chass, in turn and like many of his fellow newspaper folk, lashed out against the bloggers.

After leaving the Times, Chass launched his eponymous website, which contains the same topics he covered as a print journalist. He goes to great pains, however, to tell visitors in no uncertain terms that his is decidedly not a blog:

This is a site for baseball columns, not for baseball blogs. The proprietor of the site is not a fan of blogs. He made that abundantly clear on a radio show with Charley Steiner when Steiner asked him what he thought of blogs and he replied, “I hate blogs.” He later heartily applauded Buzz Bissinger when the best-selling author denounced bloggers on a Bob Costas HBO show.

Bloggers, however, are welcome to visit this site; so are stats freaks, fantasy leaguers and Red Sox fans. How else will they know what is being said about them by a columnist they love to hate?

But, in a sense, what is the difference between a columnist and a good (i.e., responsible) blogger? Both offer opinion (as opposed to straight facts by a a regular reporter); both produce material on a regular basis (Chass puts out a column about every other day). Methinks he doth protest too much, a blogger by any other name…

Regardless of what he chooses to call his latest project, I offer Chass a “Well done and thank you, sir,” for this space where literate baseball fans can go and not feel embarrassed by being mathematically challenged.

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Kaplan’s Korner on Jews and Sports © 2008 New Jersey Jewish News

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