I mean, I still love looking up stats, that’s been a fun part of baseball since I was a kid (though it was more about runs, RBIs, HR, and BA in those days)…stats are always a part of baseball. And I love listening to games on the radio, cause then I see it in my head, the whole game kinda slows down when you listen on the radio, and I totally get why people love stats and trying to challenge their preconceptions. But alot of the advanced metrics/stats, I’m not really into them…

Unless they say something good about Chris Davis.

Based on your statements though…player-wise…you’d like Win Probability Added. Only issue you might have with it is that it considers all parties to be average when you have actual specific people involved with varying ability levels.

I think the term “ability” is where the problem occurs. I am thinking of ability as something very close to skill, but might you be using it more of as “opportunity”? If so, then this might be a very different discussion, but if you are using it as skill then yeah, we agree to disagree.

It seems your definition of best includes randomness as a factor. I disagree with that, so our perspectives cannot come to an agreement as that is unresolvable. I think each step of the way we agree. We simply disagree on where to make the final determination. I think of performance outside of randomness. You prefer defining players by their abilities and the randomness of events involving them.

Is it really too much of a logic leap to say that because we, as a population, declare the team with the most wins as the best that this criteria is also imperfect?

That is not to make the claim that there is a more perfect way, but that there is some imperfection in determining who is best, which makes that determination potentially wrong?

That’s it? I don’t think anyone would agrue that. I think you saying the the “best” team doesn’t always win is where the arguement happens. You are stating the the “best” team can lose due to factors outside of their control (wind, umpires, etc.), where as I think the best team is the one that wins and overcomes these enviromental factors no matter the underlying ability.

But in the end, I don’t think I disagree with anything you are saying once you state that, “The point is to simply acknowledge that wins are imperfect because there are susceptible to accumulations of randomness.” I mean, there’s nothing to argue with there, that’s pretty obvious. I’m not sure why you stated it, I don’t think people have been going around claiming that “wins are perfect”, i mean, it’s just a game. Wins are the result of the game. Number of wins is how we judge who is the best. You don’t disagree with either of that, right? I thought you were trying to redefine who was a better team based on something that wasn’t wins, but just stating something is not perfect, yeah, if that’s all this is about, I would of course have no problem with that. I mean, everything is imperfect.