The United States is the greatest country in the world. The combination of quality of life, freedom, equality, and opportunity experienced by the average citizen in this nation is unparalleled. However, despite the obvious benefits of living in such country, one drawback that results from the country’s greatness is a loathing to any sort of change. The most prominent recent example arose from the ongoing health care debate. While there are plenty of legitimate reasons to oppose the Obama-care — none of which belong in a sports column — much of the criticism aimed at the bill seemed rooted in a fear to change rather than an authentic opposition to the bill.

But enough of politics, let’s talk now about sports. We are also seeing an identical reality towards change playing out in the sports world. In the old days, baseball players were analyzed by stats such as pitcher wins, batting average, and RBI’s. While those stats still have a place in baseball analysis, a statistical revolution has taken place that has all but rendered those stats moot for judging players.

Thanks mostly to Bill James and the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), new statistics have emerged that tell us more about player performance than we ever knew before. Stats like fielding independent pitching (FIP), OPS+, and wins above replacement player (WARP) can tell us much more about a player’s ability to help a team than the previous stats were able to convey. Despite the breakthroughs in understanding, America has been slow to adapt.

      Some baseball teams — the Kansas City Royals and the Houston Astros come to mind — blatantly ignore the new analytical methods. Announcers like Tim McCarver and Joe Morgan either refuse to acknowledge the new stats, or know about them but believe their audiences are too thick to understand them. Countless members of the mainstream media (Dan Shaughnessy and Bill Plaschke, I’m looking at you) prefer to attack the new stats instead of adapting to progress. Well-known ESPN columnist Bill Simmons had been an adversary to the statistical revolution before finally reversing course in recent weeks.

      The resistance to change is both irrational and predictable. It is irrational in the sense that the new stats have been created and tested through vigorous analysis. Statisticians (and entrepreneurial baseball enthusiasts) have spent hours running statistical regressions to determine how to create stats that are predictive (aka, can be used to make an educated guess about a player’s future performance) and correlated with team success (aka, a stat like WARP has been developed to measure the positive impact a triple or a stolen base has on a team’s chances of winning). To ignore such stats because “that’s not how we did it in the olden days” is a stance that falls somewhere between comical and ignorant.

      As foolish as it is to ignore the stats, it is disappointingly predictable. As mentioned above, most people in this country are at least content with their lives and thus resist change. An advance in the understanding of baseball is just one more change for people to fight back against. Don’t fall victim to this mistake. The statistical revolution has made good baseball players easier to appreciate, given fans more ammunition to berate a team’s weak link, and given baseball fans more topics to discuss and debate. Change in baseball is here. It’s time to stop fighting progress and start embracing it.