Joe Morgan

The guys at Fire Joe Morgan go to town on Morgan's recent ESPN chat. As usual, they are both insightful and very, very funny. And as usual, Morgan makes a dismissive comment about OPS and sabermetric principles:

Statistics are overrated. What you do to help your team win is what it's all about. These stats like OPS, it doesn't tell you what you do for the team. To my opinion, to help the team, you drive in runs or score runs. That helps the team. That's how you should be judged.

Not surprisingly, the FJM guys take down that bit of nonsense in a thorough and efficient way. But it's not the first time they or others have had to do it, and it likely won't be the last. A lot of people spend a lot of time writing things about Morgan's strident, almost willing ignorance about statistics and, in many cases, the writers have chalked it up Joe's alleged lack of intelligence or proficiency with numbers, or what have you. I think these explanations, however, are barking up the wrong tree.

Morgan first went on record criticizing sabermetric concepts a long long time ago, back when they were far from mainstream, or at least farther than they remain today. He was one of the principal critics of Moneyball, and even before that seemed to bristle against the increasing use of OPS and other measures of baseball ability that had been filtering into baseball analysis.

I think Morgan's initial criticism constituted a knee jerk response, but not one that was all that different from what any number of other writers and broadcasters were saying at the time. OPS was for statgeeks in their parents' basements. A Nexis search for "slide rule" w/s "baseball" would definitely gotten you more hits in 2003 than it would today. Since those days, however, many of the initial naysayers and doubters have come around. WGN and Fox broadcasts show OBP, and the people who once laughed at the geeks are using some sabermetric principals in their analysis and commentary. But not Morgan. Morgan still sticks to his guns. Why?

Because what defines Morgan the most is not his ignorance, but his stubbornness. I think that now, in a private moment, he would agree that Julio Lugo and his RBIs aren't nearly as valuable to the Sox as Placido Polanco's OBP is to the Tigers. I think he would admit that an RBI is a team-dependent occurrence and therefore doesn't tell you a lot about an individual player's value. He won't do this in public, however, because he is simply incapable of reversing himself in public.

We've seen this recently with both his mistake relating to the hit he didn't have against the collapsing 1964 Phillies, as well as the comment he made about Luis Castillo being unfamiliar with the swirling winds in Wrigley. In both instances, ESPN ordered a correction -- an explicit order in the former, and an apparent one between innings in the latter -- and both times he did so in the most reluctant way possible and at great personal discomfort.

Say what you want about Morgan, but he is not stupid, either intellectually-speaking or with respect to his overall baseball IQ, which many have demonstrated to be among the highest among anyone who has ever played the game. He is, however, bullheaded and unwilling to admit a mistake.

For what it's worth, I think it would be easier to accept a broadcaster that is simply stupid or ignorant than it is to accept one who, like Joe Morgan, is unwilling to change his opinions about that which is before his very eyes. The former can't help himself. The latter can't help anybody.