Originally Posted by Soylent Green:
The Choo example offered by Jacjac above is a good one; I don't think Nolan Ryan and his guys would have valued Choo nearly so highly and paid the freight. Jon Daniels and his guys are more sabremetrics minded, we'll see how that goes for them. My feeling is that it was a bad contract for the team... too much $ and 1-2 too many years. But as Jacjac points out, there is a lot of "sabremetric" justification being offered by the team as to just how great a deal this was for the Rangers. Again, time will tell... but I have my doubts about the deal and about the metrics being trotted out to justify the deal. It's a good example of what bballman was saying about "making numbers tell the story you want told".
Uh, that's exactly the opposite of my point. Making up pointless stats to compare Choo to the guys mentioned in that article (as if SB has much of anything to do with Cabrera's value) is exactly the sort of misuse of traditional stats that people resort to in an effort to justify comparisons of otherwise substantially different players.