Posted by Bill Baer on Saturday, July 18, 2009 at 8:38 pm

I look at earned run average kind of like batting average. You get an average, but you don’t get the true performance of what happens in every game.

Quick! Name the author of that quote. Bill James? Nah. Rob Neyer? Nope. Nate Silver? Nuh-uh.

That would be none other than Phillies manager Charlie Manuel. As Brian Joseph pointed out yesterday, he’s a lot smarter than he is given credit for. Early in his tenure with the team, Phillies fans mocked his Southern drawl and an assumed lack of intelligence. No longer, of course. Throughout his stint with the Phillies, Manuel has generally done a good job with decision-making, especially with platoon splits. He doesn’t La Russa his bullpen, but he’s certainly not passive.

I was reading a discussion about the Manuel quote and several of the participants were wondering if Manuel knew about Sabermetrics. He has to — how else would he know to discard ERA and batting average, and utilize platoon match-ups? The only problem with that assumption is, well… Sabermetrics didn’t invent the futility of ERA and AVG nor did it create the contrast in success against same- and opposite-handed opponents. It’s like asking who invented gravity (not God) or electricity (not Ben Franklin).

Sabermetrics certainly made ERA and AVG much less popular. However, one needs not subscribe to Baseball Prospectus to reach the conclusion that the two metrics are inefficient at best. At some point in the past, they were the best options for player evaluation, but they were always flawed — you just never noticed it until something better came along.

For example, Sabermetric-savvy analysts were adding .120 to a hitter’s line drive rate to estimate his BABIP. Research by Chris Dutton and Peter Bendix found that line drives aren’t strongly correlated with BABIP, so the +.120 method was tossed out the window.

Baseball truths (which are self-shrevident) don’t belong to particular ideologies or groups; they’re simply facts. That a high-power, high-strikeout hitter has value, for example, is not a Sabermetric truth in the same way that “excessive carbon dioxide emissions are harmful to the environment” is not a Greenpeace truth.

It’s very easy to divvy baseball ideologies up. For as dichotomous as the stats/anti-stats crowds appear to be, they should actually hold a lot of common beliefs about the great game of baseball. The Adam Dunns and Mark Reynolds of the game should be valued (offensively) not because Sabermetricians proved their value, but because they have always had value (offensively), and now we know it.

It’s a truth… unless someone can come along and disprove it.

Ahh, science. The debates will rage on, as they should.

More managers should mimic Manuel in his decision-making because it’s based on logic, which is backed up by facts (disclaimer: not always; nobody’s perfect). Manuel is not a Sabermetrician and probably has little or no idea what one is, yet he probably thinks a lot like one anyway — even without the graphing calculator and slide rule.