HR seems like a nice guy and I don’t find him unbearable like Steve Phillips. But he should either provide some interesting insider/ex-player insight or actually do some goddamn research. It does bug me somewhat that much of baseball is so anti-intellectual that a guy pulling a very substantial paycheck doesn’t feel it necessary to actually put in some work on the product he produces.

There are guys going around presenting themselves as professional sports journalists right there in Kansas City, who do a terrible job. I think Joe ought to pick apart some of their garbage, rather than Fisk an (admittedly very dumb) article by a former player who is not a professional writer.

You’re right to say that Joe didn’t attack Reynolds personally; he’s too nice a guy to do that.

You’re thinking way to hard about this. OPS is just a toy that gives you a very rough estimation of what kind of a hitter a given player is. As with all stats, if you understand its’ limitations than you won’t get in trouble. Guys with low OPS’s are bad at both…Mid-one or the other or mediocre at both…High-good at both.

However, it’s far from a good measure, b/c OBP is by far the more valuable component. Any individual with a sophisticated understanding of sabermetrics wouldn’t use OPS to prove anything about a guy. wOBA or BABIP or batted ball percentages are better metrics.

@MAF

Sites like FJM.com existed because people within the baseball-writing community are often too lazy or too incompetent or whatever to actually look things up and learn about their game. They assume they’ve got it figured out or the people who do have things figured out, and therefore they bang out lazy, prepackaged stories…”David Eckstein is small, but golly he tries hard. That makes him good!” “ARod/Beltran/whoever isn’t clutch and isn’t a guy you want b/c they have no passion!” “Stats don’t tell you every thing about a player…look at W/L and RBI to learn about one!”

And so on…Whether HR or a crony wrote the blog post is irrelevent because it’s the same, unintelligent dribble that we’ve been hearing about for years. To make matters worse, HR/whoever crushes stats people without bothering to REALLY understand OPS and it’s limitations or even bothering to note that no one at fangraphs or BP or whatever will rely on OPS in the first place. Bottom line…HR/someone did a crappy job and needs to be called on it, or else said crappy product will find it’s way out there again.

Note—this is why Joe Poz is so friggin’ awesome…he’s got an open mind and sees baseball as it is, not as some kind of contest of whose grit is the gritiest.