Late February means Spring Training has begun.
This year I am prepping for baseball by reading The Bill James Handbook 2020 and a couple of baseball magazines including Lindy’s Baseball Preview 2020.
I mentioned in an earlier post that I am returning to the teams of my youth. That means I am paying a lot of attention to the Oakland A’s again this year… and by extension the Houston Astros cheating scandal.
While the baseball strike of 1994-95 and the PED scandal led me to all but abandon a lifetime of baseball obsession, the current Astros cheating scandal has had the opposite effect. I am as excited about baseball as I have probably been since the early 1990s. Go figure!
One of the books I am currently working through (but not pictured here) is Smart Baseball: Smart Baseball: The Story Behind the Old Stats That Are Ruining the Game, the New Ones That Are Running It, and the Right Way to Think About Baseball, by Keith Law. Over the years I have dipped into Sabermetrics and the new baseball metrics a bit, but to be honest I have never quite understood them. I have always liked Bill James’s prose more than his numbers. I am hoping Law’s book can help me understand things like OPS and WAR (fWAR and RA9-WAR).
Law’s book makes the case for why the usual things like BA and ERA and Wins and Saves are not good numbers to focus on. But a lifetime of thinking about baseball numbers that way is difficult to let go. My old-school brain is wired to know what a .324 batting average is supposed to mean and a 20-win season. Looking at new benchmarks in new ways has not been easy for me in the past. I am hoping that at the end of this season though, that I will have finally figured some of it out.
Wish me, and my Oakland A’s luck. And happy Spring Training!
