The ubiquitous nature of the internet and social networks in modern society has created an unprecedented level of data and information about life in the year 2015. As a result, one of the defining aspects of the 21st century is efforts to create analytics to make use of these new mountains of data to learn new things about our world. With professional sports being more popular than ever, analytics have become a central part of any discussion of modern day athletics. Whether the sport is baseball, basketball, football, soccer or hockey, the study of data and creation of new metrics to analyze the games is an inescapable aspect of being a sports fan in 2015.
The mainstream acceptance of advanced statistics varies from sport to sport. For whatever reason, basketball seems to be the sport where new stats garner the most mainstream respect from journalists and broadcasters. Football seems to be the sport where advanced stats have the least acceptance, possibly because it is the sport where stats tell you less than any other sport. The great difficulty in football is separating the individual contributions of players from each other, as well as the way scheme can impact the individual stats of players without the players necessarily playing better or worse. Film study is the only way to gain true insight into football and separate the contributions of individual players.
While basketball has the most widespread acceptance of advanced stats, football the least, baseball is the sport where the discussion of the utility of advanced stats engenders the most venom. Proponents of sabermetrics in baseball tend to speak very strongly when preaching the gospel of Bill James, mostly because the individual nature of baseball and the precision of baseball stats has created a sense of absolute certainty among saber-minded fans. Your average stats-minded baseball fan tends to get riled up when people dismiss their perspective because of the rather reasonable belief that many of the core sabermetrics stats greatly enhance the collective knowledge of the game. Weighted runs created plus (wRC+) is such an effective stat, that for those who understand what it means arguing against it is akin to arguing the Earth is 6,000 years old. Hard feelings is the inevitable result when they discuss baseball with someone who has not been initiated into the cult.
On the other side, baseball fans who dislike advanced stats are inevitably turned off by the firebrand nature of sabermetrics proponents. To the traditional minded baseball fan, a large part of what makes sports appealing is their uncertain nature. Arguing the merits of Tom Brady vs Peyton Manning is fun because there is no be-all, end-all statistic to say who is better. There is so much grey and so much interpretation needed to argue about sports and traditional minded fans find the precise nature of many advanced baseball stats to in a lot of ways ruin what makes sports appealing in the first place. For these fans, sports are much more about storytelling and debate than they are about objective truth.
That being said, there is a lot of common ground between sabermetrics baseball fans and those who prefer the more mainstream methods of watching the game. OPS, for example, is a sabermetrics stat in the sense that Abner Doubleday would not have known what it was, but at this point it is so widely accepted that it is basically a mainstream stat. Yes, many fans still use the traditional triple crown stats to judge players, however, someone pointing out the OPS of Freddie Freeman is unlikely to draw the snorts of derision that would come with the mention of, say, xFIP.
OPS is a very useful stat but a saber-minded fan would point out that wRC+ is an improvement because it very precisely measures the different values of the various types of hits. OPS is comparable to an exploding bomb, while wRC+ is more like a sniper rifle. Both are effective; one is a bit more precise.
But if I told your average Braves fan the best offensive players on the 2014 Braves were Freddie Freeman, Justin Upton, Evan Gattis and Jason Heyward in that order, I doubt it would generate much disagreement from anyone. While wRC+ is a scary stat for some, the application of it is pretty non-controversial as long as the actual weird, goofy, acronym is not written out. In my writing I say things like "Jason Heyward was an above-average hitter in 2014, while Freeman was elite" and this is broadly accepted even by those who don't realize I am reaching those conclusions by way of wRC+.
A lot of common ground can be reached among different types of fans by the realization that many advanced stats just quantify things no thinking baseball fan disagrees with. Everyone agrees a pitcher is not at fault if a catchable pop fly drops between two outfielders even if these fans do not understand what FIP is. You don't have to be someone who looks up the BABIP allowed of a pitcher to get the idea that a pitcher can be let down by bad infield dense behind him. Everyone agrees having a player who scores from first on a double is useful, even if some fans don't know about Fangraphs baserunning metrics. No baseball fan would argue that the offensive stats of a Rockies hitter and a Dodgers hitter should be taken at face value, as it is commonly understood that park factors play a role in the numbers a player puts up. In most instances, all sabermetrics do is quantify the kinds of things any intelligent baseball fan understands play a role in how the game is played.
The real disagreements start when sabermetrics tell the traditional minded baseball fan something they hold to be self evident is actually wrong. Most advanced stats simply confirm the conventional wisdom, such as the fact that Babe Ruth was the best baseball player of all time. It is when the conventional wisdom is challenged in ways that seem absurd to the average fan that bile starts getting spewed about these nerds ruining the game with their calculators. When a saber-minded fan says a seemingly average player is elite or vice versa, the disagreement is in almost all instances a product of sabermetrics saying defense is more important than most baseball fans think it is.
No baseball fan would argue that defense doesn't matter. Braves fans love Andrelton Simmons despite his poor offensive numbers because Simmons is almost universally regarded as the best defensive shortstop in baseball. Simmons gets credit for his great defense because he falls into the category of a defensive specialist. That is to say if a player is known as an elite defender, comes into the league bad at offense, and plays either catcher, shortstop, or centerfield he can get credit for being extremely valuable defensively.
If the player plays any other position though, and is decent on offense when he comes into the league, then it becomes more difficult for defense to become a meaningful part of the discussion. Oftentimes, the label of "gold glove defender" is applied to certain good offensive players as some sort of reward for good baseball morality like hustling and being a good leader. When it comes to non-defensive specialists, being valued for good defense is never about defensive metrics, is rarely about scouting, and tends to be more about how much the baseball media likes the guy.
An illustration of this is the way different Braves fans have generally viewed Freddie Freeman and Jason Heyward the past few years. Heyward often struggled to get more than lip service about his defense from traditional minded Braves fans because he was not an obvious defensive specialist like Simmons or Christian Bethancourt. Since Heyward played right field and came into the league known primarily for his hitting, his defense was viewed by many Braves fans as an afterthought. Despite defensive numbers that said his value was nearly equal to Simmons, Heyward was never viewed as a guy who was helping the team when he wasn't hitting. The thing that your traditional minded baseball fan struggles to accept is that defense matters to the evaluation of every player, not just the ones at the obvious extremes of the spectrum.
As I said earlier, almost all Braves fans would agree Freeman was the Braves best offensive player in 2014, with perhaps some fans arguing for Justin Upton. Heyward was the fourth best offensive player by wRC+ and most Braves fans would be comfortable ranking him there. The anger between the two sides of Braves fandom begins when a sabermetrics fan argues Heyward was the Braves most valuable player in 2014. A sabermetrics fan would argue this because Fangraphs rated Heyward as being worth 5.1 wins above replacement, while Freeman was worth 4.2. On the scale of fWAR, a full win is a large margin. The size of the gap between the two players is illustrated by the fact that by fWAR, Heyward was about 25% more valuable than Freeman. If you told your average Braves fan that Heyward was 25 percent more valuable than Freeman in 2014, they would be some combination of incredulous, irate and snidely dismissive.
Based solely on offense, Freeman easily eclipses Heyward. Freeman had a 144 wRC+ in 2014, while Heyward was at 110. That is to say Freeman was 44 percent better than the average offensive player, while Heyward was only 10 percent better than the average offensive player. The gap between them is closed a bit by Heyward being an excellent baserunner and Freeman a generally poor baserunner but the thing that turns Heyward from the clearly lesser player into the superior player is defense.
Fangraphs rates Heyward as the ninth most valuable defensive player in MLB last season. By comparison Freeman is rated as the 122nd best defensive player in 2014. Fangraphs views Heyward as a player who helped his team by preventing a large number of runs on defense, while according to the metrics Freeman was a major liability for the Braves.
The fact that by fWAR the gap between the two players can so dramatically reverse the value of the two players is the kind of thing that is so offensive to traditional minded fans about sabermetrics and wins above replacement. A Braves fan who just watched the team last year without using advanced stats would find the notion of Heyward being better than Freeman obviously false. Nobody likes their preconceived notions being challenged and it is always these issues of defense that cause wins above replacement to tell fans something vastly different from what they already believe about the value of individual players.
The issue of Heyward vs Freeman is also contentious among Braves fans because Braves fans have been consistently told by Atlanta media and Atlanta players and coaches that Freeman is excellent on defense. I do not have any particular interest in arguing this point (this horse is fossilized and in a museum by now), suffice to say the numbers do not bear this out. The obvious caveat here is no sabermetrics inclined fan takes defensive numbers at absolute face value. There is larger margin for error with defensive metrics than offensive metrics. The exact accuracy of the numbers isn't really the point here; I doubt anyone would disagree that Heyward was better than Freeman on defense by at least some margin.
Whether Freeman is good, bad, or average on defense is not relevant to the point that the major disagreements about the value of players between advanced stats fans and traditional fans always comes down to defense. Miguel Cabrera vs Mike Trout was the national focal point of this discussion because WAR says Cabrera is inferior to Trout despite Cabrera being the best offensive player in baseball. The reason WAR favors Trout is because he is an excellent defender and Cabrera is awful on defense. The reason Ben Zobrist has always been the darling of fWAR is defense. The reason Josh Donaldson has been a sabermetrics MVP candidate of late is defense. If someone asks "why does WAR say this guy is so awesome, his numbers aren't as good as this guy" the answer will be defense. It is always defense.
I think this dividing line between the major baseball factions is important to delineate because it could help to ease some of the rancor between different types of baseball fans. This is an issue upon which there is never going to be agreement. Wins above replacement has consistently measured above average offensive players and elite defenders as more valuable than elite offensive players and poor defenders. Alex Gordon ranked higher in fWAR than Miguel Cabrera last season. To some fans this is absurd, to others it is logical. There will be no changing of minds on this issue.
What is worth noting is how much we can agree on. OPS is a generally accepted stat and while wRC+ is more precise, saber fans and traditional fans can generally agree on who the best offensive players in baseball are. Mike Trout, Miguel Cabrera, Andrew McCutchen, Giancarlo Stanton, these are the best hitters in baseball by any measure. I can write that Freeman was a little better on offense than Justin Upton in 2014 and most fans will agree, even those who don't realize I came to that conclusion using wRC+.
The different fan cults will never agree on the importance of defense in measuring players and that is okay. This is just sports and being totally precise in measurements is useful to those who care about such things, but it isn't essential to enjoying the game. If everyone could recognize where the real disagreement between the two sides comes from I think it could do a lot to lessen the tension. We do not agree on how to properly value defense. That's okay, after all we agree on so many other things. Let's just try to not get so heated when we arrive at that point of demarcation between the two sides.