This Week in Sportswriting: Conventional Wisdom and Statistical Reasoning Conflict

We've been having our fun with statistical looks at the candidates for MLB awards around these parts. But in the greater sportswriting world, some of the choices writers -- and coaches -- make are apparently meant for ridicule, not rational discussion.

Take, for example, the decisions of Will Carroll and Keith Law to leave Chris Carpenter off their Cy Young ballots. It solicited a nasty tweet from flat-earther Jon Heyman, and Law's decision in particular sparked a five-alarm message board fire. For their parts, though, Carroll and Law responded with good humor and reasoning.

I doubt Bryan Burwell and Bill Simmons would do the same.

St. Louis columnist Burwell wrote a piece with the confused, comment-baiting title "Why don't wins count anymore?" The key paragraphs:

But sometimes I guess we get guys who just feel like it's their job to show everyone how much smarter they are than the rest of us. Armed with all their sabermetrics, Carroll and Law — and obviously a lot of other voters — were able to determine that winning the most games in the heat of a pennant push was not nearly as important as looking good while losing.

And:

So here's what I still don't get. How can you look at what Wainwright did from a won-loss standpoint and essentially dismiss it in favor of Lincecum? As gifted a pitcher as Lincecum clearly is, he faltered down the stretch when his team was in the playoff hunt. In his last 10 starts, the San Francisco ace was only 3-4 with a 3.15 ERA. I'm sorry, but that has to mean something, doesn't it? If won-loss records are suddenly obsolete, why do we bother to keep the stat?

This all speaks to the deceptive nature of the win in baseball. It is imprecise because it is awarded for the efforts of the offense, not the defense. A pitcher can strike out every batter and still not win a game if his offense is hamstrung. But the idea of winning as the ultimate statistic has endured since the beginning of the game and will long past this article.

What sabermetricians and other stats-savvy people (Carroll and Law included) are trying to do is more accurately isolate a pitcher's performance by examining what he does and does not have control over. (Better forums for discussions of those examinations exist.) Their arguments, backed up by empirically derived stats, logic, and patience, will win out, eventually, because they have truth and time on their side. Burwell, and the rest of those who insist on clinging to misleading, flawed heirlooms of a time when people thought wins were the only valid stat, may just have to watch the sea change.

So will Bill Simmons. His column on Bill Belichick's fourth-and-two decision is one of the great testaments to valuing familiarity and personal biases over numbers and stats. 

Simmons says there are only inane angles to the decision, then writes one of the more inane columns of his career. In trying to factor in his observations of Tim Thomas' lethargy, expectation of amnesty from speeding tickets in Seattle, and some homeriffic rantings about how Belichick being 57 means he has lost his brain, Simmons does the sort of mind-bending shotgun journalism even Malcolm Gladwell might blush at. Simmons is wrong about the decision, and woefully inept when it comes to using statistics to prove anything: He trumpets a stat about the number of times teams have scored three touchdowns to overcome a double-digit deficit in the last five years as if it bore some weight on the outcome of that play or the final Colts drive. It's not exactly surprising that the guy some would anoint the king of sportswriting is so out of touch with the current trend towards smarter, deeper sports analysis, because his popularity does stem from being "the voice of the fan." The gap between him and the growing base of rational fans, though, is widening.

But, to his credit, Simmons was right about one thing.

When my editor e-mailed me asking whether I planned to write a column about it, I thought to myself, "Column? About that? What would the angle be? Should I interview the remote control I broke?"

It turns out he really had no defined angle after all, just a bunch of shards of sound and fury, signifying sports fans' appetite for brainless nothingness from their sportswriting rather than something substantive and challenging.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.