An Urban's Rural View

Baseball is back, and with it the emotional flames its return always fans: the excitement of the season's first trip to the stadium; the hopes that this will be the home team's year; the perplexity over which statistics to follow.

Yes, statistics are one of the game's joys, but with the rise of Sabermetrics they're also one of baseball's puzzles. The sports pages still sport traditional measures of a player's worth like the RBI, or run batted in. The Sabermetricians prefer less familiar gauges like value over replacement player, or VORP.

The traditionalists worry about a pitcher's earned run average or ERA. The Sabermetricians try to weed out the effects of good defense and even luck with the defense-independent ERA, or dERA.

Which to believe? It's enough to befuddle a baseball fan.

The fan in some ways is like the farmer trying to make sense of the ag-commodity markets. Which statistics should he believe? The technical signals? The fundamental supply-and demand numbers? It doesn't help that there are umpteen technical signals and myriad measures of supply and demand.

One of the things I've always liked about Darin Newsom's writings on DTN is the way he tackles this conundrum. Darin is, in one respect, a commodity-market Sabermetrician, a doubter of traditional ways of assessing the fundamentals, a proponent of new ways -- the DTN Six Factors. But he looks at all the statistics and is good about sorting out when to believe which.

Darin's DTN Six Factor analyses combine the technical and fundamental but lean toward the technical, assuming as they do that the market itself is a better indicator of supply and demand than anything the government grinds out. But Darin also slices and dices fundamental stats with the best of them.

While Darin makes no secret of his disdain for USDA reports his treatment of them is always illuminating. The previews he posts the day before make a point of explaining which particular government numbers will matter most—ending stocks, yield reforecasts or whatever -- while also explaining what the market is saying. His report day webinars are enlightening and his follow-up Newsom on the Market columns as entertaining as they are acerbic.

That someone so adroit at manipulating market statistics is also a baseball fan should come as no surprise. Baseball allusions pop up frequently in his columns. But, alas, he hasn't yet offered his analysis of baseball stats. Maybe someday DTN can offer a premium service giving Darin's views on pressing questions like when we should care about a player's batting average and when we should worry about his OPS (on base percentage plus slugging).

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