Cubs Insider’s Jeff Burdick has started the conversation about new stats. The issue I have is that stats are not predictive: nothing is. They measure past production okay, and allow for a certain degree of extrapolation... but clearly not much, or enough, because people and circumstance are so chimerical and capricious.
But still... new stats. Contrary to common belief, I am stat-conversant. I’ve followed Bill James since pre-1984. I miss The National, a stats-dependent publication if I ever read one, and read Baseball Weekly on a weekly basis until they bundled it with auto racing, which I loathe.