why can't baseball fans just get along?

There is a war going on in baseball.

Either you are a proponent of new statistics that have been devised to help explain the game of baseball. Or else you think they're ridiculous.

Nowhere have I seen this battle more directly laid out than at this post at Fire Joe Morgan (a blog that critiques bad sports writing and loves their stats). Go read it. Marvel at the levels of anger that the two sides have for each other. If you're me, you might wonder why these people get so hot under the collar about people looking at the game differently than they do.

The issue in that particular article is stats like VORP which stands for value over replacement player. Now, I'm not sure how exactly it's calculated, but the idea is that you can use it to judge how much better a player is than the "readily available talent" meaning the cheap players you could pick up from anywhere at any time.

VORP and other stats are a part of a practice called sabermetrics, which is defined as "the analysis of baseball through objective evidence, especially baseball statistics." I've read a lot of grumbling that Sabermetrics take the human element out of the game, that good scouts "just know" when they've found a special player. and that many of them have a certain something about them that can't be measured by numbers. Intangibles. I don't know. For me, it's hard to listen to a lot older folks grumble about newfangled technology and not think that they're just scared.

This is how I handle stats like VORP. I think that they give me new perspective on players, but since I don't have a good understanding of the equations behind the most complicated stats, they can't be the only tool I'm using. But I fail to understand why having more perspectives could be a bad thing when it comes to enjoying the game. As a new sports fan, one thing seems clear to me--the more I learn about a sport, the more I enjoy watching it.