Why I Love Baseball

From the Big League Stew blog at Yahoo! Sports:

Basically, the fundamental difference between old-school stats and new-school stats is that old-school stats measure what happened at the surface level — batting average, earned run average, wins. New-school stats try to measure each player's contribution to those surface stats, while filtering out the contributions of their teammates and the random fluctuations of chance. Because of this, newer stats tend to do a much better job of predicting the future. FIP is a much better predictor of future performance than ERA, wOBA is a much better predictor of future performance than batting average, and so forth.

The best stats = the best sport. Says I.