Talk Nerdy to Me

The nerds have gone to WAR.

Ok, wait. That lead sentence is a bit misleading. The nerds – the baseball nerds, that is – have been at WAR for a while. It's simply me, a 41-year-old simpleton baseball nut, who has failed to keep up.

You know what I'm talking about, right? The stats baseball geeks use to determine the true, I guess, value of a baseball player.

(Let me interrupt and say I use the words "nerd" and "geek" with the utmost flattery and respect. I really do. I'd love to have the smarts to be considered a geek.)

Reading baseball stories and listening to podcasts these days can be like dropping in on some long, lost language. Don't get me wrong, I find the new (or maybe not so new) statistics fascinating, but I'm still clinging to batting averages, runs batted in and, for pitchers, wins and loses and earned run averages. Heck, I just learned WHIP a few years ago, and that was only so I could keep up in my fantasy league.

Yeah, I really feel like a dinosaur. But I'm vowing to make a change and give WAR, BABIP, RZR, and so far my personal favorite (only because of it's name), xFIP, a fair shot.

I'm not just now discovering this stuff. I've made a few stabs at it before, but it just didn’t connect with me until I read a story on Fangraphs.com yesterday comparing the differences in the release point of Matt Cain's slider between this season and last. For some reason, that story hooked me.

For how long? I don't know. Maybe once the World Series ends, I devolve back to reading simple feature stories, like this once I also found on Fangraphs' Not Graphs page about Ichiro's cap style. Fascinating!