My girlfriend woke up this morning and told me she had a dream where she played for the Knicks with Spike Lee. I told her I've heard that the Knicks are pretty bad, so maybe they'd take her.

Bunch of basketball games today, but we've reached the point in the tournament where there aren't a whole lot of underdogs to cheer for. I'll probably keep cheering for the lower seeds (especially in the Ohio St. game) but ultimately when the teams get to be closely matched, it's not even a matter of who the lower seed is, it's who is actually behind right at this moment. I'm not interested in blowouts, except maybe over number 1 seeds.

An interesting article by Geoff Baker in the Seattle Times today about how tricky it is to evaluate players from their spring training numbers and performance. And an interesting kneejerk response to it at the USS Mariner blog. Apparently those guys can't handle: 1) any use of the word grit in conjunction with the game of baseball 2) any possible suggestion that intangibles might mean something.

Never mind that the article seems to me to be completely in line with the USS Mariner way of thinking, meaning that it takes fans to task for trying to draw ridiculous conclusions based on the small sample of spring training games.

I liked this bit about yesterday's game in particular:

Batista's stats will show he allowed 11 hits and four runs in five innings. They will show how all the runs came in the third inning, along with seven of the hits.

What they won't show is how that inning was prolonged by hit balls, which would have normally resulted in outs, being blown beyond the fielders' reach by the wind. Or accurately portray how Batista somehow adjusted to conditions that initially had his sinker bouncing a foot in front of its target, toughing out two more innings and keeping his team positioned for a comeback.

"It was pretty uncomfortable in the beginning," said Batista, who had to squint to keep the sand from blowing in his eyes.

Hargrove came away impressed by what he won't see in Batista's stats, including an ERA that jumped from 3.00 to 4.50. Plenty of pitchers would not have recovered from Batista's third inning.

It's games and stuff like this that helps make baseball worth watching. Players overcoming difficult situations. Things that have nothing to do with numbers. These things are worth talking about.

One more article: Putz has twins! Just when you think our closer can't get anymore awesome.

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.