MadduxFanII once stated that he does not lament The Adam Wainwright trade, and this is his thread to expound and expand!!

Coredor said:
Yeah a lot of the talk was about OBP being more important than BA and strikeouts were the same as other outs which is basically true but highly controversial at the time.

There were a lot of things that weren’t captured though like defensive metrics and Adam Dunn was an abysmal outfielder. He was a good player in his way but he kind of became a symbol of the stars movement because of how much he walked and struck out.
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There was no nuance back then in those discussions. Sure, strikeouts are the same as other outs, and preferable to multi-out plays, but they do matter in terms of hitter evaluation. Back then, the sabermetrics proponents wrote off strike outs completely (at least those on the board).
 
CyYoung31 said:
There was no nuance back then in those discussions. Sure, strikeouts are the same as other outs, and preferable to multi-out plays, but they do matter in terms of hitter evaluation. Back then, the sabermetrics proponents wrote off strike outs completely (at least those on the board).
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I never drove in completely to some of the statisical analysis, but I re-read Moneyball about a year ago and it's almost like looking at cave paintings. It retains it's value because it initiating a deeper appreciation for the game and a public dialog about how players' values are often misconceived. Bill James' first abstract came out in 1977 and John Thorn's and Pete Palmer's The Hidden Game of Baseball came out in 1984. Moneyball was published in 2003.
 
I think the big thing is Statcast has taken things to a completely different level. I think that’s part of the reason there was so much squabbling back then was because there was a lot that you really could see that was difficult to quantify. Now. I think most things you really can’t quantify.
 
CyYoung31 said:
There was no nuance back then in those discussions. Sure, strikeouts are the same as other outs, and preferable to multi-out plays, but they do matter in terms of hitter evaluation. Back then, the sabermetrics proponents wrote off strike outs completely (at least those on the board).
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I think there's some confusion between writing off completely and pretending like they mattered much less than things like walks and homers. The majority of the debates were around Adam Dunn a guy the traditionalists hated because he struck out and couldn't play defense and fans of analytics liked because he walked and hit bombs. Truth was somewhere in the middle as he wasn't as great as analytic guys made him out to be (often we were too obsessed with finding diamonds in the rough) and he was much better than traditionalists made him out to be. I vaguely remember Bill and the ilk thinking guys like Eli Marrero, Charles Thomas and Dwayne Wise were better players.
 
Well, Dewayne Wise did save a perfect game for Mark Buehrle.

In another thread, I wrote about how bench construction has changed for a variety of reasons. The only reason I mention it here is that baseball benches used to have guys like Wise on it in earlier eras. Not so much anymore.

 
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