Yeah, those “old school” baseball writers
didn’t know what they were talking about.
Naive guys like Red Smith
I admittedly didn’t know who Red Smith was, so I googled him and apparently he was hugely influential in sports writing. I assume by choosing him you are saying essentially, “see, this important writer agrees with me, so I must be correct.”
Honest question bccran, have you ever had any kind of class or education in statistics, research methodology, or anything of that nature? I have when I was in grad school, and one of the biggest lessons you learn in those classes is that measuring things correctly is hard and people frequently look past the flaws of the metrics they are using which leads to poor conclusions. Over time, fields of study find better ways to measure things that improve upon the flaws of previous metrics, that is normal and a good thing. People who refuse to adapt tend to get left behind. It’s funny to me that in sports there is a large segment of people who think however things were measured 100 years ago is how we should measure things today, or that we’ve learned nothing new about what sort of things we should value in a sport since the days of Babe Ruth. That line of thinking makes no sense and would never be taken seriously in other fields, but with sports it’s ridiculously common. Red Smith can be a great sportswriter and still be very wrong about this particular topic.