‘‘Bill James had a great line,’’ Tom Tango, the senior database architect of stats for MLB Advanced Media, told me. (If James is largely considered the godfather of sabermetrics, Tango could be its Michael Corleone.) ‘‘If you have a metric that never matches up with the eye test, it’s probably wrong. And if it never surprises you, it’s probably useless. But if four out of five times it tells you what you know, and one out of five it surprises you, you might have something.’’
from Why Are Some New Statistics Embraced and Not Others? NYT Magazine, On Sports By Jay Caspian Kang Aug. 29, 2017
