Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports doesn't spend all his time scrounging for rumors, sharing brilliant insights such as 'The Royals Must Rebuild To Win a World Series,' and dressing down bloggers for allegedly horrible breaches of ethics. He also writes opinion pieces. "Bloggers" have increasingly drawn his ire. The Morris incident above is the most well-known example. In another particularly entertaining piece, he decides that bloggers and the internet are the reason there are so many unfounded accusations of steroid use, and thus the freedom of expression afforded by the internet is "a new form of tyranny." I heartily recommend the whole piece as perfect concluding chapter in the following history: 1) most journalists ignore use of PEDs in baseball, and shout down those who mention it; 2) the problem becomes too obvious to ignore, so journalists start writing about it more and more; 3) journalists begin a period of handwringing about the Hall of Fame, baseball's sacred records; the writers begin demonizing players, saying that they can't trust anyone, and, yes, making unfounded implications about the majority of players in the "steroid era" (somehow, there isn't a "Greenie era"); 4) bloggers point out and mock the self-righteousness and historical shortsightedness of the steroids hysteria generated by the journalists; 5) Rosenthal finds a few bloggers who have adopted the same paranoid view as the journalists, and decides that the internet is at fault for this "new tyranny."

I'm not going to revisit that nonsense today. Rather, I want to briefly discuss Ken Rosenthal's latest discovery about the tyranny of blogs: "Sabermetric Group Think" (hereafter "SGT"). Those wacky intertubez are at it again, oppressing the poor, powerless traditional journalists by issuing "cyber-shoutdowns of anyone who offers dissent, anyone who dares suggest Derek Jeter, Kevin Youkilis or whoever is a legitimate alternative to Mauer." I'm sure everyone is glad that Rosenthal is there to defend those without voices at every paper, television network, and major news website in North America.

I won't address all of the points in Rosenthal's brilliant missive. But, unlike when he confronted blogger Morris, I have read Mr. Rosenthal's piece carefully, and will try to discuss a few of the issues at hand respectfully: 1) specific issues with the stats between the candidate, and 2) why this actually makes the very "debate" Rosenthal craves possible.

Mauer, the Other Candidates, and the Stats

[As I'll mention below, there are different methods sabermetricians use to measure individual player value. I will use Wins Above Replacement (WAR) here because a) it's my favorite, and b) it's easily accessible on the player pages at FanGraphs.]

Rosenthal argues that part of what the evil SGT cabal might be missing is that despite having value as a catcher, Mauer missed more games than other candidates, and that Mauer has played a substantial chunk of those games at designated hitter.

This is true, of course, but while Rosenthal mentions Wins Above Replacement (WAR) in the article, he doesn't seem to understand that WAR accounts for these issues. In Mauer's (and every player's) WAR value at FanGraphs, you see columns for "Batting" (runs created above what an average player would have created in the same number of plate appearances), "Fielding" (not yet implemented at FanGraphs for catchers), then also "Replacement" and "Positional." These last two address Rosenthal's concerns. Replacement takes into account the value of the player over a freely player who would replace the player's playing time , and is thus prorated for playing time -- it assumes that the "free" (a.k.a. "replacement') player will be worth ~20-25 runs less total over a full season than the player being valued. By using replacement level rather than 0 as a baseline, it enables playing time to be properly valued. "Positional" adjusts for position... and so Mauer's time and DH is also included in his WAR total. So Rosenthal's concerns are both already addressed by WAR's method.

The positional adjustments thus also take into account Youkilis willingness to play multiple positions and its value to his team. The defensive stats also reflect Jeter's improvement in that regard. So Mauer's lead in WAR at FanGraphs already includes a statistical accounting of the issues Rosenthal mentions.

If "actual value to his team" is something else... well, I don't like this particular interpretation, but isn't Mauer much more valuable to a weak Twins team than Jeter or Youkilis to the stacked Yankees and Red Sox?

But these are really minor issues. So, I do think Mauer has been more valuable than Jeter or Youkilis this season, although I've suggested that there's an even better candidate than Mauer for 2009 AL MVP. But I'd hardly be "offended" if Jeter won. I can't speak for Ken Tremendous, of course...

Sabermetrics and "the Debate"

An important issue is lurking about "subjective" and "objective" valuations, but given that I have general  frustrations with the way that those terms are used and applied by both sabermetric and non-sabermetric writers, I'll leave is aside for now.

The larger issue is Rosenthal's implication that sabermetricians are closing down the debate. You have to love his stance as a martyr:

Here's the problem: Sabermetricians were ignored for so long, they had to shout to be heard. Now they are getting heard — properly heard in the highest levels of baseball media and front offices. But some continue to shout, dismissing those who disagree as ignorant dolts.

Last I checked, it's a free country.

Sabermetricians are now threatening the freedom of others? You see, Mr. Rosenthal, a "debate" is when one side gives reasons for a position, then the other side gives reasons an opposed position. Having your view criticized is not restricting your "freedom of speech." A good example of trying to shut down freedom of speech, hypothetically, would be threatening bloggers with lawsuits when they express opinions. It may be a bit cruel when someone points out that you don't know what you're talking about, but it doesn't threaten your "freedom."

I'm not going to pursue this obvious point much further, as it's clearly just another case of a sports journalist taking on a stance in order to shore up his declining position as someone who offers insight in the game. That's over. I'm pretty sure that anyone reading this knows that FanGraphs, Beyond the Box Score, or The Hardball Times, among other places, are at least 1,000 times more valuable in terms of analysis than reading anything by Ken Rosenthal. And that drives Rosenthal and those like him (i.e., journalists who can't carry Joe Posnanski's jock, or would it be carry his pen? Laptop?) nuts. That's one issue, but it's been covered before.

The main issue is that, while the tone of some blogs may be too harsh and rude, Rosenthal misses the reality of sabermetrics: it doesn't shut down debate, it opens it up. If all the considerations are over immeasurable definitions of "value," there isn't much to debate. There's just a bunch of dudes in a pressbox expressing their opinions without any validation. Sabermetrics offers ways of interpreting data. And guess what? We can still argue about that. Not everyone likes WAR. Maybe you want to use WPA or WPA/LI to measure offensive greatness. Maybe you want to set replacement level differently, or not use it at all. Maybe you think Playoff Probability Added is a better approach. Maybe you think Win Shares still is the best measure. And so on.

You see, Ken (can I call you Ken?), "Sabermetric Group Think" is a myth, one that I can't imagine you are ignorant enough to believe in and thus invented for your rhetorical stance as one of the poor victims of those evil number-crunching bloggers. Within sabermetrics, there are debates over how to value players. Moreover, putting the data out there for discussion (made ever more possible by the internet you so clearly despise despite the fact that it has made you wealthy and successful) allows for real debates about what it means, rather than simply asserting opinions based on "feelings" and "guesses" about value.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. When you and yours controlled the airwaves, so to speak, sabermetrics was easy enough to ignore as stuff invented by people not "in the game" or in the pressbox (the next best thing!) and thus with no authority. Now that people have the information to draw their own conclusions, not only don't they need you to do it for them, but they can see when you don't know what you're talking about.

Leave the posturing aside, Ken. The real issue isn't whether or not there can be a debate. It's about what counts as a good argument within that debate.