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Thursday, March 27, 2008

I really don't like "sabermetrics"

Dave Studeman posted his first column of the season today. Let's all take a moment to do a happy dance. :) Tom Tango has called his Studeman's "10 Things I Didn't Know Last Week" column the "Best Column in Sports," and I think he's right. Studeman always has insightful comments on baseball news and research from around the web, and does some excellent work in his own right. He's a fantastic communicator and a tremendous asset to our community.

The first thing that Dave talks about in this new column is the identity and meaning of the term "sabermetrics." I think he's right that it's about the search for truth...or, as I like to put it, understanding. Bill James once defined it as "the search for objective knowledge about baseball," which I think is a great definition. That search involves both process (the context with which we search), and the products (our findings). I have no disagreement with anything in Dave's article.

However, I do have a beef with the use of the term "sabermetrics." We talked about this a bit in the comments of this post, but I think it's a terrible, counterproductive term that should be flat-out dropped. Here is my comment about this in response to Studeman's article, posted on ballhype:
While I know this is probably a minority opinion, I really dislike--almost despise--the term "sabermetrics." Maybe it's just because I didn't grow up with Bill James. But that term has always sounded both pompous and half-baked to me--like we're trying to claim some kind of grand authority or officiality by coming up with an official-sounding name for what we do.

I think at least part of the backlash against "sabermetrics" has as much to do with that name as anything else. I've occasionally interacted with a local reporter in Cincinnati for some stat-inspired articles on the Reds over the past year, and one thing I've tried to stress (as have the other folks like me who have contributed to these articles) is to try to avoid calling us sabermetricians. I don't want to give people that as a reason for ignoring some of the ideas we advocate.

I'd much prefer it if everyone just called what we do what it is--baseball research. There's nothing really special about it...we're just searching for better understanding of how the game works. -j
Anyway, there you have it.

8 comments:

  1. Frankly, I think Sabermetrics is the better term if only for the fact that "baseball-ology" does things to my tongue that I'd rather not have it do.

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  2. I agree with you. I'd much rather grow up to be a baseball researcher than a sabermetrician.

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  3. Nah, sabermetrics is much more fun. It comes from SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research, and metric, meaning to measure. It gives you something to explain. It's a conversation piece. How much fun is being a "baseball researcher?" It's just not cool.

    And says David Pinto: http://www.baseballmusings.com/archives/025468.php

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  4. Dave Pinto at Baseball Musings wants to keep his sabermetrician label Justin. Looks like you ruffled a feather or two.

    I must say I agree to a certain extent. One of the primary ad hominem attacks is that "sabermetrician" have their heads stuck in spreadsheets and don't watch the game, don't enjoy the game, and certainly don't understand qualitative assessment.

    I prefer the term baseball analyst to baseball researcher though. It's not accurate to put Nate Silver in one group and John Kruk in another. They are both attempting to do the same thing, namely, figure out how to win baseball games and evaluate players. They (attempt to) think critically about how the game works and how we can do it better.

    Now, there are many tools at our disposal to perform analysis. You can observe with your eyes and with video. You can analyze numbers. What we're trying to do doesn't differ; It's just that some people tend to use a wider variety of tools of differing sophistication than others.

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  5. For my money, "Baseball research" is way too broad, and it will also ruffle the feathers of a lot of people who do non-statistical baseball research. I would point out one example in particular, but I don't want to be accused of attacking those who can't respond in their own defense.

    Take SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research. Everyone who has written for a SABR publications or committee newsletter has a legitimate claim to calling themselves a "baseball researcher". But the differences between the articles I have written and the articles that appear in the newsletter of the Women in Baseball committee are nothing alike, other than that they are about some aspect of baseball.

    Redmanrick's point about analyst is well-taken, but I disagree with his conclusion. To me, the fact that Silver and Pinto would be lumped together shows a need to further specialize the terms. Silver might be a "performance baseball analyst" or something, and Kruk might be an "observational baseball analyst". And by the time you start calling yourself a "performance analyst", you may as well be a sabermetrician.

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  6. Thanks for all the feedback folks.

    I think my primary point, put another way, is that my feeling is that the term sabermetrics does more to isolate us and our work than to serve as a promotional tool.

    @PC - I see that point...and it is true that I consider myself, for example, a biologist, more than a biology researcher. So I do see the need for another term. But at the same time, at least in my discipline, we tend to try to make our work as "blue collar" as possible. I often refer to other biologists as "workers" in my papers, for example.

    @Shawn, I'm aware of the origins of the term. To me, but "fun" or "cool" is exactly what's wrong with using the term. I know a lot of us do this for fun, but I think we're at the point that it's important to be taken seriously. If nothing else, lots of people from our community are being hired by MLB teams, so it is a professional pursuit now (at least in part). I think the term is a little counterproductive to that goal.

    With respect to David Pinto, while I have tremendous respect for him and rely on a lot of his work (especially PMR), I disagree with him on this point. :)

    @RMR, I have no problem with the use of analyst. I use analyst and researcher with some frequency to describe myself.

    @Patriot, I see your points, but at the same time I don't know if I'm convinced by them. There may be another term out there that we could come to agreement on. But I still think "sabermetrics" and "sabermetrician" does more harm than good.

    As I said, though, I do expect my opinion is a minority opinion within our community. And I don't expect the term to go away just because I said in a blog post that I don't like it. But this is something I've been thinking about for a while, and I decided it was time to put my opinion out there...for whatever it's worth.
    -j

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  7. There's another small discussion about this post (and Pinto's comments) on Tango's blog.
    -j

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  8. Perhaps my fondness for the term "sabermetrics" is that I have absolutely no interest in this type of work being taken seriously. It's just a game, after all.

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