Jan from Wellesley sends these two competeing view points of the use of stats in baseball. First, the anti-stat position, by Steven Krasner of the Providence Journal.

Baseball is a game of numbers. Always has been. Always will be.

The numbers that have generated the most interest over the sport's storied history are home runs, batting averages, RBI, stolen bases, won-lost records and earned-run averages.

But over time, other numbers have been seeping into the game. Like how a player hits at night, against left-handed pitchers, on natural turf, when the temperature is above 63 degrees, in the month of May, from the seventh inning on, with a runner at first base who is timed at 5.3 seconds from home to first, on the road.

Managers these days have reams and reams of computer printouts to prepare them for the game's direction.

Indeed, the Boston Red Sox have taken this all a step further in hiring stats guru Bill James to provide analysis when it comes to player moves, not to mention in-game decisions. The odds are you will hear the terms "OBP" and "OPS" ad nauseum this year, based on some of the organization's numbers-driven philosophies.

And Major League Baseball honchos want to speed up the game? The reliance on stats can only add to the time it takes to play nine innings. I can envision baseball adding a few 30-second timeouts for the manager so he can pore over the printouts before deciding what move he wants to make when he needs a base hit in balmy 75-degree weather on a Thursday night on artifical turf.

Can all these numbers be helpful? Sure. But as the sole means for evaulating players, or even the primary purpose?

Not in my book.

Before we go any further, there are two uses of statistics in baseball. One is to evaluate players, and is mostly used by GMs, managers and agents. The other use is entertainment, and is mostly used by PR men, broadcasters and newspaper writers. Mr. Krasner, a writer, is mostly exposed to the entertainment side of the stats, which he gets in game notes from the PR person whenever he sees a game. The game notes don't try to do analysis, they are providing writers and broadcasters with tidbits they can use to fill their columns. But this is where all the dumb stats come from, like hitting in July under a full moon.

For instance, radar guns are all the rage these days. Let's take Pedro Martinez for example. He can light up the gun at 96 mph. When he throws a fastball at a mere 94 mph, there's a palpable gasp in the crowd. Pedro's losing it. Is his shoulder about to fall off?

Really, what is the difference between 96 and 94? Not much from a hitter's point of view. Now, if Pedro's velocity suddenly should drop from 96 to 86, which is a big difference, would you need a radar gun to tell you? No, those doubles in the gap will give you all the raw data you need.

Not much difference? A two mile an hour difference in speed is 1/100th of a second reaching the plate. But a ten mile an hour difference is still only 1/20th of a second. That's about the frame rate of a motion picture, meaning it's not something your eyes can easily pick up. Now it's amazing to me that anyone can hit a fast ball period, given the lack of reaction time, period. But if you make it easier for anyone with that kind of skill to hit the ball, it should be noted. And it is a sign of fatigue.

Anyway, he goes on for a while, but finally gets to his point.

Yes, numbers can point out trends and tendencies, which can be important. But the eyes of a veteran baseball man are even more important on a daily, game-by-game, inning-by-inning, pitch-by-pitch basis.

See, it doesn't matter how someone performs, it's how they look. And it's better to look good than feel good. And you look marvelous....

In the same paper, Art Martone, the Sports Editor, takes the pro-stat side:

His name was Joe Schultz, and he managed the Seattle Pilots in their sole season of existence.

Normally a one-time-only skipper like Schultz, fired more than 30 years ago after a 64-98 season, would be lost in the maze of history. But Schultz was immortalized -- sort of -- because Jim Bouton happened to be playing for the Pilots the year he wrote his ground-breaking book, Ball Four. It was in the pages of that book that Schultz articulated the anti-analytical sentiment that still flows deeply in the veins of the baseball establishment:

"I don't need no statistics. I see what's going on with my own eyes."

He may not have meant to, but with those 14 words Schultz conceived the Anti-Stathead Manifesto. As more and more statistics became available in the years to come, and more and more "analysts" began weighing in on topics historically left to "baseball men," traditionalists felt themselves under siege. And more and more, they responded -- angrily, in many cases -- by falling in line behind good 'ol Joe Schultz. Numbers? I don't need no stinkin' numbers.

They're looking at it all wrong.

Statistics are information. Nothing more, nothing less. When evaluating talent, an organization should look at every piece of the puzzle. Statistics -- the right statistics -- are one of those pieces. Fact is, baseball may be the only industry in the world that has at its disposal such a detailed and complete record of how an employee actually performs. To ignore it is just as foolish as ignoring a scout's evaluation of how a player runs or throws or hits.

Some statistics are more meaningful than others. Just because it's possible to determine how left-handed-hitting middle infielders perform against curly-haired right-handers during midweek day games in months that end in the letter 'y' doesn't make it important. The Schultz-ites, however, tend to cherry-pick the numbers they're comfortable with -- home runs, runs batted in, batting average -- and wave away all the rest as stat geek nonsense.

"The interesting thing is that (those) people . . . use statistics themselves," says ESPN.com's Jim Baker, who once worked as a research assistant for current Red Sox executive (and father of the modern analytical community) Bill James. "They reference things like home runs, RBI, batting average, and the number of games a pitcher wins. Those are stats, just like (the more sophisticated statistics). They just don't tell as complete a story."

And that's what it comes down to. People who are uncomfortable with math will never be comfortable with OBA or Slugging Pct., let alone Runs Created or Win Shares. I'm going to do a stat primer at some point. For example, the anti-stat people are comfortable with batting average, but have you ever tried to figure out what batting average represents? That will be the subject of another post.

I get the feeling that the anti-stat crowd is waiting for the Red Sox to fail so they can pounce on Theo Epstein. I think they are going to wait a long time.