Sabermetric All Stars

"Advanced statistical analysis" makes more inroads to the mainstream. Jacob Luft of Sports Illustrated filled out his All Star ballot using several sabermetric stats: Runs Created, Win Shares, VORP and Equivalent Average. These are stats utilized by a couple of the Sea Blog's favorite baseball sites: The Hardball Times and Baseball Prospectus.

The Red Sox fared pretty well in the voting: Johnny Damon, David Ortiz and (I believe) Jason Varitek received the top spots for their positions (for some reason, the Catcher listing isn't shown), while Trot Nixon and Manny Ramirez would make the team as backups.

I make no secret about favoring the use of statistical analysis in evaluating player performance. That said, I don't really favor going by the stats to choose all stars. An All Star, in my opinion, is a Star - somebody who has established a level of excellent play over the years. So while Kevin Mench may be having a terrific season, I would never vote for him over Manny for the All Star game (well, not this year anyway). I'm not interested in seeing the guy who is having a good half season, I'm interested in seeing the guy who is having a great career. Let the manager pick Kevin Mench as a backup - those guys should be the ones having the great seasons, whether or not they are stars. But the starters should be the true stars.

Last year I heard a lot of people saying, "how can Jack Wilson not be leading the NL voting at shortstop? He's having a great year!" My answer was, "easy - Jack Wilson isn't a star. He's having a great few months (indeed 332/354/501-8-35 at the break), but by the end of the year he'll be back below .300, and in a couple of years nobody will look at his 2004 season and think it was a great injustice that he wasn't voted in." I was almost right - he finished at 308/335/459-11-59, and was the second-best SS in the NL (very slightly behind Philly's Jimmy Rollins) in terms of EQA and VORP. And he was selected as a backup on the squad. A great first half was no reason to vote for him over a Rafael Furcal or an Edgar Renteria. And this year he won't even sniff the All Star game, as his line is an uninspiring, but more typical for him, 234/272/349-2-9.

So, it's fun to run the numbers (it's always fun to run the numbers), but I think you should just go ahead and vote for the players you like to watch.