The Sabermetric Soapbox: One month down….

And a few notes about numbers and tags.

It’s every writer’s favorite bailout column: the review. Doesn’t matter if you’re professional or amateur, in print or online, you know you’ll see them when the [insert time period here] is through. And it almost became the idea for this column, even though there are multiple writers who do fantastic recaps at this very site, both current and with a historical perspective.

However, this is the Sabermetric Soapbox at the end of April 2008, and no solid statistical analysis can be done other than the “Hey, look at this!” kind for potential indicators. Yet, because a writer has to produce something to read, he or she will venture into trying to make column out of it.

It is in this case when a sabermetric writer will venture into a realm he or she typically spends most of his or her time arguing against: that of qualitative analysis. Sometimes it comes in the form of observation from actually watching or listening to a game in order to support the statistics one can read. This process is highly recommended to those who like to bury their heads (and some their writing) in numbers.

Other times, it’s a prediction based on looking at data. Case and point: Joe Sheehan this week on the 2008 Diamondbacks. You see those words and those citations of numbers and could easily be convinced of Mr. Sheehan’s conclusions. The metrics he uses are reasonable indicators. But that’s as long as you understand their context.

How about a news related example to illustrate my point, shall we? The number 25 was a significant one. It has a broad impact on hundreds of millions of people, primarily indirectly. But this number is meaningless without the tag. Now add the phrase “basis points cut from the Fed Funds rate” to the figure and it makes more sense regardless of your financial knowledge. It now has significance to your analysis if you’re taking out a loan of some kind, putting your money into savings, etc.

Let us remember that with baseball. The numbers are important, but it takes a qualitative analysis and understanding to validate the numbers.

(H/T to Tangotiger for his post on numbers as merely one lens for analysis)

Next week I’ll diverge away from the stats. Stay tuned….