I wasn't going to do this...

But, after re-enforcing to the five readers of this blog how tortured my math skills are in the previous post, I thought that I'd give a pointer to another math/baseball post. This link doesn't involve a made-up stuff. Well, it kind of does...Or, does it.

Famed science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law states, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Applied to the advanced baseball metrics we create, it could probably be paraphrased for the average reader (one unfamiliar with deep statistical musings), as, "Any sufficiently advanced baseball statistic is indistinguishable from a load of computer-generated bollocks."

To be fair, it is tricky to fault them for such a mentality. For most people, applying maths to baseball is neither easy nor particularly enjoyable - it takes a scientifically inclined mind to want to bother with this sort of thing. The stats crowd are, in essence, waving computer printouts and clamouring for attention in a space normally reserved for thoughts no deeper than 'Willie Bloomquist is such a gamer'. If I wasn't so fond of statistical analysis myself, I can see how this would be annoying (I used to think Willie was a good young prospect, after all). However, just because most people do not understand advanced statistical stuff doesn't mean they're dumb, or that they're irredeemable. Sometimes it's simply because we're not doing a good enough job of explaining ourselves.

Right there with you on that last sentence, Graham. Head over there and read the whole post to get an understanding of where the stat-heads are coming from on this issue. There is a flow chart or a diagram or something, too.