Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
This modern view of the game comes down to one thing: the overvaluing of the walk. It's just regurgitating Bill James. But James himself is smart enough to understand how the game actually works. Unfortunately thousands of goofs who have read the Baseball Abstracts are not.
When you boil the game down to its core, a good offensive player is either scoring a run or driving one in. If he isn't doing either of those things I have to question how great he is. Brock lead the league in runs scored at least a couple times and he scored 100 or more probably close to ten times.
This idea that Darrell Porter is retroactively better than Jim Rice or Tony Perez because he walked more is patently absurd. I recently mentioned two specific situations regarding this phenomenon of worshiping the walk. The first was Jose Abreu batting with a full count and a man on second. The pitcher was obviously not looking to deal with Abreu, especially with first open, and he threw one low and away. Abreu went down and got it promptly driving in the run. Stone remarked, "That's what run producers do." Stone's typically snarky comment was a shot across the bow of SABRmetrics which would reward Abreu equally for taking the bad pitch and letting Avi Garcia or some other lesser player do the hard work. Perhaps Dan Bernstein would even insist that Abreu should take that pitch because about two-thirds of the time the batted ball will result in an out.
The other situation I referenced was Joey Votto up in the 11th inning of a tie game with his team at home. One swing could win the game. But Votto is looking to walk. And Joakim Soria is glad to let him and face the next guy. But you're gonna reward Votto and destroy Abreu. It shows a real lack of understanding of how the game is actually played.
I agree with you that OPS, and by extension WAR, probably overvalue the walk. However, WAR is made up of so many different variables, I don't think you can use the walk/single issue to completely toss out the stat. Therefore, I think the argument that Brock was not a Hall of Fame player based on his WAR is still a reasonable one.
Also, while I'm not saying you used this line of argument in you post, a lot of people tend to use testimonial evidence in justifying the greatness, or lack thereof, of a player. For instance, "I saw Brock play and he was far and away a great player," or "Brock was so much better than [insert name of one of his well regarded contemporaries]."For someone like myself, who never saw Brock play, this is the weakest form of evidence you can use. Unless your Bob Costas, Peter Gammons, or some other keen observer of the game most people are probably not going to take your word for it.
