Unlike some people, I do not blindly worship at the altar of the Batting Average. Sure, it's a fine stat, and has its place, but to ignore all other stats in favour of simply who gets the most hits, is an archaic way of viewing a player's overall value.
Even worse, in fantasy baseball, when there are 15 offensive categories that a player is to be judged upon, for someone to argue so strongly that Aaron Hill performed better than Raul Ibanez, one would think that the notion of Hits and Average being only two of 15 categories, would enter into that person's consciousness.
I pointed out, on the league Message Board, that Ibanez won 11 of 15 categories versus Hill, but was rebuffed by the idea that SB and SB% shouldn't matter to a player's fantasy value because not everyone has the greenlight to steal at will.
The conclusion being, that because Aaron Hill does not have that privilege, that we should ignore three of the fifteen categories completely. This would still give Ibanez an 8-4 lead in H2H against Hill, but that fact is left out of the argument.
In my opinion, a guy who steals bases, and little else, has as little value as a guy who hits meaningless singles, and little else.
It seems that Will, who just loves to use semantics to try to further his point (i.e. the true meaning of "stealing home field advantage", the true meaning of "most offensive line", etc.), believes that simply because Hill had more hits, that I should ignore the fact that he is one-dimensional and can not stand up to the scrutiny of a H2H comparison against Ibanez. We had another semantic argument a few months ago, but for the life of me, I cannot remember what it was about. Will asserted that the defintion of something meant one thing, until I pointed out sources that confirmed the opposite. (If someone from the hockey league could refresh my memory, it'd be appreciated....for awhile, anyway, until I forget the help you gave me here).
Anyway, today I assured Will that Ian Kinsler was more likely to be replaced by Hill in the Top Five, and went on to prove it with a H2H comparison of Hill and Kinsler, which netted better results for Hill (5-9-1) vs Kinsler, than Hill (4-11-0) vs Ibanez.
That only illicited a "You'll never convince me" response, followed by the assertion that his stats were accurate, despite my pointing out 3 or 4 that were wrong.
So given that logic and math won't convince him, I doubt that a bunch of random quotes will, but here are a few, anyway.
Brigham Young coach, Vance Law, on their 16-5 loss to Utah in 2000.
"We got a lot of meaningless singles with two outs and didn't get key hits when we needed them."
Doug Padilla, from the San Gabriel Valley News writes about a 2006 Rangers / Angels game, and Vlad's part in it.
"And it's not like the contribution is in the form of meaningless singles."
Some dude named Rob blogged this line last summer.
"Against Scott Feldman, the Angels accomplished almost nothing for four innings, scratching out a pair of meaningless singles and a one-out walk."
Another dude, named Mooseburger, was trashing Juan Pierre's meaningless average and wrote this, last summer.
"Isolated Patience subtracts batting average from on-base percentage to measure a hitter’s ability to get on base without getting a hit. Pierre’s Isolated Patience is low because pitchers aren’t threatened by him."
Mathematician, Kevin Devlin, has the best advice.
"If you really want to understand the difference between a meaningless average and a valuable one, see Ken Ross's book, A Mathematician at the Ballpark: Odds and Probabilities for Baseball Fans (Pi Press, July 2004).".
Some people take it to the extreme, and advocate the cessation of the use of batting average, altogether, so I should probably acknowledge these radicals. One such guy, David Pinto, writes the following.
"Batting average has to go. Batting average is the horse and buggy. It is black-and-white television. Its time has passed. I don�t know how we go about getting rid of it, though. Lately, Congress has shown a lot of interest in baseball; maybe we could get them to forget about steroids and pass a constitutional amendment."
The founder of SABRmetrics, Bill James, responded with this line.
"I think this is too important an issue to be dealt with by trivial measures like a constitutional amendment. That's just putting a Band-Aid on it."
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