I wish, for once, they’d spruce it up with entries about magic or dragons. Those damn eggheads will never understand that physics isn’t about research; it’s about the stories.

Conversely, Will Carroll has never let a simple fact get in the way of his stories.

But he’s still way off base.

He complains about the snarky tone of the sabremetrics crowd, then publishes a screed that paints all who are interested in learning more about the game with the same snarky brush. That post could have come from any number of ignorant mainstream sportswriters’ columns over the last five years. A sentence that includes a snide swipe at VORP – gosh, that’s original.

I’m inclined to agree with what might have been a tertiary point of his – that sabremetrics will have really hit its stride when it’s used to tell a story and impart insight to the broader populace, just as science is at its most interesting to the largest number of people when it’s framed to illustrate to the layman the breadth, majesty, and complexity of the natural world.

But he’s ignoring that this is already happening. Stat-heads do sometimes haggle about formulas, yeah, but it’s all in service of trying to explain something interesting about the game. Joe Poz and the mods at both LL and USSM use advanced metrics to reveal and explain compelling stories, not to substitute for those stories. It’s just like sportswriters decades ago who used batting average, RBI, and home runs to leaven up their stories. It’s no different. We’re just smarter now – or at least we should be.