In Defense of Math and Brook Lopez  Posted on: January 25th,
2013 by Mark Ginocchio 2 Comments  Brook LopezI’ll admit I was
once a non-believer. A little less than a decade ago after
reading Michael Lewis’ Moneyball and watching the 2003 Boston
Red Sox –- with noted statistician Bill James as part of their
front office team -– collapse in the playoffs against the New
York Yankees, I questioned why there was a contingent of people
who follow baseball that were so insistent on moving away from
the traditional models we used to judge quality. What was wrong
with home runs, RBIs and batting average as the be-all, end-all
metric? Don’t even get me started on basketball. How was it
possible to take a team game like basketball and develop new
metrics to determine who’s better than who?  But I’ve since seen
the light, and I firmly believe if others did, rather than
focusing on antiquated criteria like points or rebounds per
game, or silly perceived intangibles like past reputation, Brook
Lopez would have been named a