What Kind Of Baseball Expert Are You?

There's a war going on among baseball experts.

Granted, it's not a big war. And it's not, on the surface, all that violent -- nobody's stolen Chad Kreuter's hat or anything, yet. But it is extremely interesting, and could have a impact on the way the game is observed, interpreted and managed.

It's the battle of the baseball intellectuals vs. conventional wisdom. It's the philosophical godchildren of renegade baseball analyst Bill James taking on the accumulated lessons by which the professionals live.

It all started in 1971 with the founding of the Society for American Baseball Research, a haven for baseball smarties. The organization was and is devoted to telling new stories about baseball history, but its emphasis on research and statistics quickly bred a new animal of baseball fan: the sabermetrician.

More than anything, sabermetrics is a movement that intends to change the approach to being a baseball expert. These brash nerds seek to prove what works and what doesn't through scientific, analytically sound means. They want to build up a base of accepted knowledge, to refine conversation about baseball and winnow out the imprecise old talk. If your local broadcaster says that baseball is 75 percent pitching, these kids will dissect the argument exhaustively and prove that it isn't true, that it's a dumb thing to say.

The gauntlet has been passed from Bill James and the original sabermetricians to the boys of "The Baseball Prospectus." The "Prospectus" boys put out a book a year analyzing every team and every player with exacting detail and precision, and have a Web site where they attack baseball's sacred cows on a regular basis. The breadth and depth of baseball knowledge among these guys is staggering, and makes ordinary baseball commentary seem bush-league.

These guys are the renegades -- the other side you know well. It's the sportscasters and players, it's most of the baseball establishment. It's the guys who expound and theorize and conclude based on what they see before them every day. It's the guys telling you that expansion is the reason pitching is so bad and that aggressive hitting is the key to a good offense or that the reason Juan Gonzalez is doing terrible is that Ivan Rodriguez is no longer hitting in front of him and all sorts of other things, in all sorts of directions.

Some of these things might be true, some might not, say the sabermetricians and Prospectusites. The only way to know is to put them to the kind of tests and analytical thinking similar to those used in academic disciplines.

Let's give some examples of some differences:

Conventional baseball wisdom holds that batting average is the first statistic to look at for a quick evaluation of a hitter's ability. Baseball intellectuals hold that batting average is faulty, and ignores several dimensions of a hitter's value. Their statistic of choice is OPS, computed by adding what they attest to be the two best indicators of a hitter's ability, on-base percentage and slugging percentage.

Conventional baseball wisdom is that pitchers should finish what they start. Since the 1800s, a mark of a solid, tough competitor is the ability to consistently pitch complete games. The nerds on a mission say that's a lot of macho hooey, contributing to the early demise of promising youngsters from Mark "The Bird" Fidrych to Kerry Wood.

Conventional baseball wisdom champions things like "clubhouse presence" and "leadership" and "intangibles" and "proven veterans" and use these amorphous buzzword concepts to make sure Joe Girardi continues getting work. Baseball intellectuals sniff their noses at such unquantifiable ideas.

Each of these is a column unto itself, ones that other people have already done very well. My aim is more to note the conflict. For, if you're a serious baseball fan, I'm sure you recognize the sides.

And if you're in the majority, you hate these smarmy eggheads. You like to watch games and interpret what you see as you see it. You don't want some pencil-necked geek showing you a chart proving that Rey Ordonez is at best a better-than-average defender.

Well, I understand. I grew up in St. Louis in the '80s, and watching Vince Coleman day in and day out was a delight. I was convinced he was one of the more underrated players around. 100 stolen bases a year -- wow. So I wasn't too happy when Bill James proved he was only a good leadoff man a few years in his career -- he could steal 300 bases a year, but if he didn't up that OBP he would never amount to much.

And he didn't. And I learned from that and other hard lessons that a sober, analytical analysis, using statistics and logic above and beyond anecdote and vague perceptions, are simply more effective. We'd all like to convince ourselves that Tony Gwynn is actually more valuable than Albert Belle, because we've seen him do this and that and he has such a good work ethic and so on. But if we believed that and ran a franchise, we'd have problems.

And there are influential people who are catching on to the intellectual mindset. Billy Beane, GM of those surprising Oakland Athletics, won Executive of the Year by heeding the aforementioned principle of "OPS over all." Their blockbuster offense has few of the "five-tool players" that conventional wisdom likes to ballyhoo. Jason Giambi, Matt Stairs, John Jaha -- these guys field like Dick Stuart and run like Martha Stewart. They barely look like athletes. But they hit lots of home runs and draw lots of walks, and therefore score lots of runs.

Or Dan Duquette, out in Boston. Duquette drew endless fire for being a rotisserie baseball geek and allowing cold analysis dictate his decisions. When Mo Vaughn was let go, the city was up in arms. As it turns out, Mo wasn't really all that integral, and Boston is enjoying better success without him.

The tide is turning, towards baseball knowledge being gained from analytical articles instead of passed down from old coaches. Towards people who never played a game of professional baseball becoming more capable of assembling a club than the crony who played hard in the old days.

Does it take the romance out of the game to hand so much over to cold analysis? Maybe. Maybe it means that the kid won't be able to go on his father's knee and listen to him talk about the great young rookie who's so hard-nosed that he stays in the game through thick and thin. But maybe that father can talk instead about the rookie who, although still too young to go above 100 pitches per game, will soon blossom into the next Pedro Martinez.

Basically, I don't think it'll change the enjoyment of the game. It'll just make people be a little more precise with their thinking, a little more skeptical. And I know from experience that it stirs up more arguments, which is a big part of the fun of being a baseball fan anyway.