My favorite part is the end. Falsifying opposing on-base percentage numbers, and saying that the difference between a fake .430 OBP and a fake .410 OBP is insignificant.

Also, if I were to start a blog, it would be called Stat Zealots and our New-Fangled Numbers.

Great post. A complete incineration of a crusty old d-bag. Well done.

Nice job, Patrick.

Somehow people in the mainstream media often have difficulty understanding that the skill set needed to write baseball articles, especially when one's career started quite awhile ago, is different from the skill set needed to determine how valuable a player's performance was. Excelling as a member of the mainstream media does not necessarily mean that that individual is best qualified to determine whose performance was worthy of the Hall of Fame.

Well done. And even as the Chass's and Shaughnessy's of the world opine on the irrelevance and wrongheadedness of the analytic-minded writers, the best (Mr. James and others) get hired and have their research relied upon by real life baseball teams. If any product of Chass was ever relied upon by a baseball team, I'd assume it was as toilet paper.

*applause*

Murray Chass, time to retire. And time to shut your mouth. Hand your Hall vote over to someone who knows how to use it.

Nice "clearly deserved" response Pat. I've been following his blog for the past several months and get annoyed because he just doesn't seem to know anything about baseball beyond the average 8 year old and he talks like he's the be all end all.

Now he just sounds like he's proud of that & flaunting that. I don't even know where this Chass guy came from. his arguments for things often sound like he's making Pascal's wager or he just displays a lot of logical fallacies.

I can understand why he doesn't enable comments on his blog... ehh, articles.

Well said, Patrick.

Of course Jack Morris is better than Curt Schilling! He has 254 wins to Curt's 216!

Wow, way to stay classy Patrick.

I think it's freakin' hilarious that Murray Chass doesn't understand that he's a blogger.

P. Sullivan's diatribe will do nothing to change the public's perception that the Bill James-obsessed New Age baseball writers are a myopic, rigid orthodoxy more akin to a geek religion than a science.

Touché!

..keep feeding the potential backlash against the saber community? Why?

Be thankful of the publicity he gave you :)

Anyway, you accuse Dan Shaughnessy of not being bothered enough to figure out who the best players, and then vote for them. Well the fact is he did actually vote for the best eligible pitcher and position player (Alomar and Blyleven).

Ok he also voted for Morris (a personal favourite of his, buddy of a buddy, whatever his reason, albeit the Schilling argument was not good) - well so what?, he is not the enemy because he votes for Morris, because he also votes for Bert. It's the people who vote Morris not Bert you need to work on to persuade (not vent at, no diatribes, because you just entrench their position)

How will you feel if you piss him (and others) off so much that they has a rethink, wouldn't take too many of these for borderline Bert to be unhappy next time around.

It might make sense to read Chass's original post. It argues that sportswriters (including him) should NOT vote for the Hall, and implies, not too subtly, that in the end it's always going to be a matter of opinion, no matter what that opinion is based on.

@jim - Good point, Jim. I would urge others to read it as well.

I only dealt with two parts of the column but to Murray's credit, he did advocate in the past for writers NOT voting on the HOF.

@Paul - I think you're giving me too much credit.

Really, really well done, Patrick. Thank you.

If anybody needs one example of why print newspapers are dying in this country all they would have to do is read the patronizing comments of Chass and Shaughnessy.

Why are Rich and Patrick's opinion worthless? Because the don't work for a print media??? Is that Chass' argument. We can't understand baseball unless Chass and Shaughnessy tell us their Point of view?? Why would anybody want to read an article by two men who hold their readers with so much contempt??

Why exactly are Chass and Shaughnessy more knowledgeable about baseball? Did the play in the Majors? Do they have a Master's degree in Baseball History??

If anybody needs one example of why print newspapers are dying in this country all they would have to do is read the patronizing comments of Chass and Shaughnessy.

Why are Rich and Patrick's opinion worthless? Because the don't work for a print media??? Is that Chass' argument. We can't understand baseball unless Chass and Shaughnessy tell us their Point of view?? Why would anybody want to read an article by two men who hold their readers with so much contempt??

Why exactly are Chass and Shaughnessy more knowledgeable about baseball? Did the play in the Majors? Do they have a Master's degree in Baseball History??

You're right on the substance, and I wouldn't go so far as Paul ("backlash"), but the tone of this post is horrible.

Look, guys, we (the people favoring an analytical approach to evaluating baseball players) have won. Sure there are holdouts, but increasingly they are irrelevant - except to some extent in the HOF debates, and even there the problem is IMO more a lousy voting system than lack of appreciation for statistical analysis per se.

So how to respond to this? Well, I can see several options. Maybe Chass is hopeless, but some people are reachable. But they won't tend to be persuaded by this sort of stuff. Or maybe we've already persuaded the persuadables. Then the best strategy is probably just ignoring this crap. Or if you can't do that, then take the FJM approach and enage in some well crafted ridicule.

But this - the defensiveness, the attempt to seriously refute what are in the end unserious arguments, the nasty tone (no, the fact that Chass is also nasty doesn't make it okay for you to sink to that level) - is beneath you.

You know one of the funny things about Chass' argument is that he is implicitly arguing that most of the hall of fame voters don't matter. You see many people have hall of fame votes and have never worked the baseball beat and are actually not baseball writers, but instead editors and assorted other newspaper people that just did enough to qualify them to eventually get a Hall vote. A lot of these people haven't seen a game in years. Of course I'm sure if you told Chass this his head would explode as he tries to reconcile the justice of them having a vote and internet baseball writers not having a vote.

Thanks for the feedback, LarryM.

You know what the irony is? Baseball players claim that "geeky sportswriters" (such as Chass and Shaunessy) don't and CAN'T understand baseball because they never played. Apparently Chass didn't learn the Golden Rule growing up.

It's this ridiculous food chain in which athletes believe you can't understand the sport unless you play, sportswriters believe you can't understand the sport unless you write for a newspaper/magazine. Of course, we're also seeing a trend today that the Sabermetrics crowd is getting on their high horse and saying that you can't understand baseball unless you understand tRAs, zone ratings, etc.

At the end of the day, the only truth is that we're all hypocrits.

I think the tone of this post was refreshing in its honesty. People like Murray Chass shouldn't be treated as respected colleagues in a simple debate when they clearly show they have no respect for their audience or the process of argumentation.

I remember a few years ago the BP guys took a much higher road when Murray ripped them for taking the joy out of the game with stats like VORP. Nate Silver responded with a mostly amicable piece along the lines of "Hey try to have a more open-minded view on us, we do this because we have a strong passion for understanding the game."

But Chass doesn't deserve that show of respect or patience. Not anymore. Time has indeed passed him by, and it's about time someone finally told him the truth - that he's just an old fart who shows with each post on his (gasp) blog that he is less informed than the typical blogger that he holds such unwarranted contempt towards.

I took such umbrage with Mr. Chase's ludicrous blog post, I sent him an email:

Dear Mr. Chase,

I am a career journalist, and have worked for legitimate news organizations my entire life, have lived and worked on both coasts and Texas. I read your most recent blog post, as well as a rebuttal from Mr. Sullivan, regarding Hall of Fame voting, empty ballots and the war between bloggers and “real” journalists.

Let me add here that I am a lifelong baseball fan, and have ravenously devoured baseball literature, box scores, television programs, documentaries, and any other information related to the sport for as long as I can remember. What I no longer consume regularly or have much use for are traditional baseball columns. I have make a couple of exception, but for the most part, I get the bulk of my baseball information and education from the many bloggers you despise. Why? Because I don’t feel traditional columnists have a lot to say. You are a crotchety and snarky lot who seem uninspired and unwilling to evolve. This is unfortunate, because the sport is constantly evolving. And thousands upon thousands of educated, engaged fans like me want to evolve with it.

I highly recommend you put down your poison pen for a moment and consider actually reading the work of some of these bloggers you’re lashing out against. Is it traditional journalism? No. But it is, without question, interesting. And even you might be able to learn something.

Sincerely,

Simon Gutierrez
San Antonio, TX

Oh man. I think we all need to write letters/emails to Murray and call him "Mr. Chase" now. I don't know if that was intentional, Simon, but it's wonderful.

People like Chass are so embarrassing, at some point, those who "get it" simply need to ignore them like a senile elder. Of course, I'm certainly glad you didn't in this case.

The sad irony is that Chass was once a trailblazer - pioneering the coverage of the business and labor side of the game. Many people thought that such issues were taking the joy out of the game too, but his persistence on the topic helped earn him a Spink Award.

I guess it just goes to show you that even good writers can overstay their welcome to the point where it's painful to watch what they do, just as it is with players. Chass would be better off hanging up his typewriter instead of pissing all over his legacy.

Chass is well known for being an unpleasant jerk and has long been referred to as "Chasshole."

I'm surprised no one's mentioned what seems to me by far the biggest howler in Chass's blog post: "That’s just one difference between a blog and a newspaper article. A newspaper would have deleted all mention of Olson and her ballot once the correct story was learned."

Can he be serious? Yes, a mistake caught prior to publication will generally be edited out of a newspaper, but 1. once it's in print, a newspaper error is far, far more permanent and damaging than a blog post. The former may, perhaps, get a small Editor's Note, which no one will read, in the next day's paper, where you would have to physically track down the previous day's paper to match the two up; the latter will have the correction right there on the same page, permanently, so that anyone who comes across the post on the web will be certain to see the correction, once it's been made - which can be immediate, rather than waiting 24 hours. Does he really think dead-tree publishers go back in the microfiche and expunge any trace of erroneous statements that ever made it into print? Do they visit the libraries of America and retrieve their faulty editions?

2. Besides, this is the >sports

>

I think I'll emulate the argument of our esteemed Mr. Chass:

Bert Blyleven's opinion > Murray Chass's opinion

Clearly, the people who played baseball are more equipped to decide whose opinions count than people who just write about it. And since Blyleven trusts in the opinion of Rich Lederer, and others, they have all the credibility they need. Nice try Mr. Chass...

Myself, I don't go after wounded prey.

I think Sullivan's sour grapes prove Chass' point. Nobody's ever heard of Sullivan anyway. Gee whiz, Chass has watched thousands of ball games and written about it for decades. Yet his opinion doesn't count with this crowd. The intolerance and pack mentality of the sabermetric crowd is pretty ugly to see.

Maybe some of the BBWAA guys have the same problem I have. I'm math challenged. In Bible College, I barely squirted through algebra and that was all the math that was required.
But I just started an online algebra course and my engineering major son is going to help me (when he's not laughing at me).
I do wish the entrenched experts would make a little effort to investigate beyond their tiny universe.