Idiots Write About Sports

The other day I read the most astounding piece by Murray Chass of the New York Times.

Things I don’t want to read or hear about anymore:

Statistics mongers promoting VORP and other new-age baseball statistics….

To me, VORP epitomized the new-age nonsense. For the longest time, I had no idea what VORP meant and didn’t care enough to go to any great lengths to find out. I asked some colleagues whose work I respect, and they didn’t know what it meant either.
Finally, not long ago, I came across VORP spelled out. It stands for value over replacement player. How thrilling. How absurd. Value over replacement player. Don’t ask what it means. I don’t know.

Leaving aside the obvious, namely that branding a statistic generated by an in-depth, dispassionate technical analysis of baseball as “new age” (a code word for flaky, phony, and half-baked), isn’t it ridiculous that the Times’ baseball writer should be so proud of being willfully ignorant?

Or to put it another way: Murray Chass gets paid to write about baseball for the New York Times. He sees a statistic called VORP, which has gained broad currency as a fairly simple representation of a baseball player’s overall performance compared to a generic, freely available replacement player at his position. Confronted with this statistic, does Chass show any level of intellectual curiosity? No, instead he allows “the longest time” to go by while he remains completely in the dark about what the acronym means.

Eventually, whatever scintilla of curiosity Chass had left allowed him to crack the acronym’s source code and learn it means Value Over Replacement Player. Was Chass, who presumably gets paid a lot of money to know things about baseball, intrigued enough about this information to find out what those words mean?

No. Instead, he still proudly doesn’t know. And is willing to write at length about his ignorance.

It’s one thing for a professional journalist to write a column that unfairly castigates the men and women who are working hard to give baseball fans a much more nuanced and interesting view of what makes good baseball players good and bad ones bad. It’s quite another for a professional journalist to profess his colossal lack of intellectual curiosity about his chosen area of expertise in public.

It’s an embarrassment, not just for Chass, but for the Times as well.

[Colossal tip of the cap to Fire Joe Morgan]

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