Most Tiger fans were pleased to learn Miguel Cabrera won the 2012 American League MVP award.  For most people, appreciating Miguel Cabrera’s talents would be good enough. Cabrera won the Triple Crown, he successfully moved to third base to make room for Prince Fielder, and after some troubling personal issues Cabrera seems to have cleaned up his life. 

However, famous fabulist Mitch Albom is not most people. He is a brand dedicated to protecting people from thoughts and ideas they might find complicated or uncomfortable—like advanced baseball statistics known as sabermetrics.

That’s why Mitch used the MVP race between Cabrera and Angels centerfield Mike Trout—billed as an ideological battle between pro-Trout analysts and the old-school “baseball guys” who liked the cut of Cabrera’s jib—to construct a straw man to attack with specious arguments against the statistical revolution that has changed the way we think about baseball.

Let’s break down this train wreck of demagoguery and schmaltz.

Albom: It also answered the kind of frenzied cyberspace argument that never shadowed baseball 20 years ago but may never stop shadowing it now.

Right, Mitch, a “frenzied cyberspace argument” over Cabrera and Trout has “shadowed” baseball (so ominous!) and will never stop. Prior to the invention of the Internet, there was never a debate over the relative merits of one baseball player over another. Except always.

That’s why awards like the MVP exist. They create fodder for the off-season hot stove league. What’s changed, thanks to advanced statistics and analytics, is that we can now make more sophisticated arguments for or against a given player. This doesn’t shadow baseball like the specter of communism once haunted Europe. It generates broader and deeper interest in a game that 15 years ago was actually shadowed by fan apathy following the 1994-5 labor dispute and canceled World Series.

Albom: Today, every stat matters. There is no end to the appetite for categories -- from OBP to OPS to WAR. I mean, OMG! The number of triples hit while wearing a certain-colored underwear is probably being measured as we speak.

No one is measuring a triples-underwear correlation. This is precisely the sort of statistical noise that sabermetrics attempts to eliminate from baseball stats. On-base percentage (OBP) isn’t a new measurement invented by the anti-social basement dwellers that exist in Mitch Albom’s imagination. In fact, no less a baseball man than Branch Rickey considered OBP vital to understanding a player’s worth.

Albom: It is simply being saturated with situational statistics. What other sport keeps coming up with new categories to watch the same game? A box score now reads like an annual report. And this WAR statistic -- which measures the number of wins a player gives his team versus a replacement player of minor league/bench talent (honestly, who comes up with this stuff?) -- is another way of declaring, "Nerds win!"

A box score still reads like a box score. What Mitch is doing here isn’t just constructing a strawman or exaggerating to make a point. He’s out and out lying. For proof, consider this box score from Game Two of the ALCS. It was posted on the Detroit Free Press website. You know, by Mitch’s employer. It doesn’t look like an annual report. It looks like the same box score newspapers have been printing for generations.

All sports come up with new statistics. The NFL didn’t keep track of quarterback sacks by defenders until 1982. As for the people who came up Wins Above Replacement (WAR), and other advanced stats, call them nerds if you want, Mitch, but we’ve seen your picture. It’s pretty obvious what side of the junior high swirly equation you were on. Stop projecting your own insecurities.

Personally, I like to think of baseball statheads as incredibly smart people with an incredible passion for baseball. Their work helps front offices build better teams and helps fans understand the game with greater depth. No one is digging into valuation statistics on Baseball Reference if they don’t also enjoy watching baseball games, either on tv or at the ballpark.

It would be one thing if Mitch Albom was a jockocracy throwback unable to comprehend complex analytic processes, but he’s not. He’s an educated man. It’s inconceivable that he is truly frightened and confused by sabermetrics. It’s hard to view his anti-stats column as anything more than playing to the prejudices of an audience he hopes to exploit for profit.

This is the opposite of journalism. However, that’s between Mitch and the Free Press. Worse, by defending the Cabrera MVP choice with an appeal to ignorance, essentially casting Cabrera as the morons’ MVP, he diminishes Cabrera’s fantastic season.

As a Tiger fan, I find that unforgivable.