This is my first official post for “Joe Morgan said…” The others that came before this were originally posted over on my personal website, and I am excited to have a special place just for Joe Morgan (and, occasionally, his fellow sportscasting dunderheads).

Today’s topic comes from Morgan’s chat on ESPN.com from Tuesday, August 7, 2007, which includes this exchange:

Rick SD: Do you think there is often too much weight and kudos given to individual stat data accomplishments in what is supposed to be a team sport?

Joe Morgan: Finally somebody that understands the game. You’re right. 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.

First of all, I have to remind everyone about the time when Joe Morgan said this:

I like folks to have their opinions. We both deserve to have our own thoughts. Just don’t get upset if we don’t agree. We can disagree. That is what makes baseball and sports so much fun. There are varying opinions.

So while Morgan believes that everyone is entitled to their own opinions, and that those differing opinions make baseball fun, he ALSO believes that Rick from San Dakota (South Diego?) is the only person (besides Joe himself, presumably) who “understands the game.” (Or, technically, “that understands the game,” but I generally only like to pick grammatical nits with people who don’t have other, more glaring, problems.) Sorry, Joe, but you are an arrogant liar. You say you like people to have differing opinions, but you belittle people whose opinions differ from yours. (In fact, only a few minutes before he wrote that declaration of tolerance, he had just said to someone who believed Joe Girardi should win Manager of the Year over Willie Randolph, “I can’t argue with people who don’t understand the game.” Read all about that chat here.)

But now that we have established that Joe Morgan is an arrogant liar (if I say it enough, maybe my website can become number one in Google on the term “arrogant liar”), let’s get to the meat of his argument: that OPS is a stat that “doesn’t tell you what you do for the team.” This is where he goes from being an arrogant liar to being a stupid arrogant liar. Let’s make this simple:

OPS is on-base percentage (”O”) plus (”P”) slugging percentage (”S”). On-base percentage tells how often you get on base. Slugging percentage tells, essentially, how many extra base hits you get. Joe Morgan would have us believe that these stats don’t mean anything, because all that really matters is how many runs you score and how many runs you drive in.

This part of the argument is where I start to feel bad, because I know that anyone with an IQ over 65 can make the logical conclusions. Do I believe that Joe Morgan’s IQ is under 65? No. I don’t think he’s a smart man, but I think he’s smart enough to figure this crap out on his own. Why doesn’t he? I think it goes back to arrogance. I honestly believe that Joe Morgan suffers from a condition called Self-Inflicted Stupidity — it’s not that he’s stupid, it’s that he won’t allow himself to be intelligent. So once I convince myself he ISN’T a mentally challenged little boy who it would be mean to pick on, I don’t feel bad going forward with “Statistics for Dummies”:

Two points:

1. No one ever scored a run without getting on base first.

   You’d think Joe Morgan would be a fan of on-base percentage; after all, his lackluster .271 career batting average is regularly overlooked due to his stellar .392 career OBP. He walked 1865 times in his career, good for fifth all time, which largely contributed to his 1650 career runs scored (30th all time, and 8th among players not in the 3000-hit or 500-homer clubs). He is a Hall-of-Famer in large part BECAUSE of his on-base percentage.

   You can’t score without getting on base. Just as importantly, you will have a tough time scoring no matter how many times you get on base if the guys hitting behind you are lousy. Once you’ve gotten on base, 90% of what you can do is done. Sure, you can steal a base here, tag up on a flyball there. But unless you’re stealing home, too, you still rely on the guys behind you to drive you in.

2. The more bases a player gets on a single hit, the more runners he can potentially drive in with that hit.

   It’s pretty simple. Let’s assume a player comes to bat with the bases loaded. If he hits a single, he drives in either one or two runs. If he hits a double, he drives in either two or three runs. If he hits a triple, he drives in three runs. If he hits a home run, he drives in four runs. In addition, the more bases the player gets on his own hit, the easier it is for the guys behind him to drive him in, which means he is more likely to score a lot of runs, which makes Joe Morgan happy.

Joe says that “statistics are overrated.” I have to believe that he just doesn’t understand them, because the very statistics he HATES are the ones with results he loves. Runs and RBIs are great statistics, except that they reflect a lot on a player’s teammates. Joe Morgan believes that team results are all that matter, and if we’re talking about teams, that’s correct. But one of the beauties of baseball is the personal accomplishment, the greatness of individuals; and one of the beauties of team baseball is the impact great individual players can have on the success of the team. It’s no coincidence that Babe Ruth holds the record for highest career OPS, with Ted Williams, Lou Gehrig, Barry Bonds, Albert Pujols, Jimmie Foxx, and Hank Greenberg right behind him. This is a stat that is pretty darn accurate at measuring greatness, whether Joe Morgan wants to admit it or not.

And in this era of rampant free agency, statistics like these become even more important. Why? Because if you’re looking for a guy to bat leadoff or cleanup for your team, you’re going to want to know how well he will do on your team, not how well he did on some other team. And the only way to do THAT is to look at individual statistics. A couple examples:

Raul Ibanez drove in 123 runs in 2006, benefiting greatly from the presence of Ichiro on the bases. Barry Bonds drove in only 77 runs batting behind the anemic San Francisco offense. If you are the Yankees and you’re looking for a cleanup hitter, who would you rather have, Ibanez or Bonds?

Jimmy Rollins scored 127 runs last year with his .334 on-base percentage. Carl Crawford scored 89 runs with his .348 OBP. Could the presence of Ryan Howard in the Phillies’ lineup possibly have anything to do with Rollins’ 43% lead over Crawford, a better player on a lousy team?

Simply put: assuming the other seven players are all equal, a team with Carl Crawford and Barry Bonds will be significantly better offensively than a team with Jimmy Rollins and Raul Ibanez.

It may be true in Joe Morgan’s world that getting on base and getting extra base hits don’t help the team, but it isn’t true anywhere in the real world.