Hello baseball fans! I can’t believe it’s almost time for the season to start again! It feels like it was just last October that I was in Colorado watching the Red Sox win another World Series, and it was. But now it’s Spring Training time, and this has to be my most favorite time of the baseball year, except for the All-Star Game, and the playoffs, and the stretch drive for the playoffs, and any time I get to see games on the West Coast, and when it’s not raining.

This is a great time for fans as well because of all the hope that is in the air for your teams. Many people don’t know who’s going to win the World Series yet, so there’s a lot of excitement around finding that out. Also exciting is the chance for new players to join your favorite team, whether they’re rookies trying to make the Big Club, or old veterans looking to get another shot, or folks from foreign countries like Japan or Canada. There’s nothing more exciting in March than seeing some young kid wearing the number 76 on the back of his jersey trying to leg out an infield pop-up or throw a 85 MPH fastball past a real major leaguer.

What’s even more exciting is seeing how players do as they warm up for the regular season action. If you look at the numbers coming from Spring Training — and I’m talking about the numbers that matter, like batting average and RBIs and home runs — you’ll see a lot of names you never heard of before. No-name folks like Callix Crabbe and David Murphy and Hanley Ramirez get to rub elbows with bonafide stars like Robinson Cano and Melvin Mora and Craig Counsell, both in the clubhouse, the field, and in the statistics. It’s an exciting time for these no-name players, as they play with their childhood heroes, wearing their favorite team’s colors, swinging bats and wearing gloves endorsed by professional ball players that they someday might get a chance to be.

But of course whenever there’s something fun about baseball happening, someone in the sabermetrically-inclined stat-loving community has to come along and tear it all down and upset people. A mysterious e-mailer (thanks Paul D. from Cincinatti!) sent me a link to the front page of this Baseball Prospectus website that a lot of people that like Moneyball seem to also like. On their front page, there is an article called “Prospectus Today: It Doesn’t Count” with a subtitle “If you’re watching leaderboards at this time of year, you may need to ask yourself why.”

Since mostly everything they write on Baseball Prospectus can only be read by people that actually want to pay money for this website (and I thought the internet was supposed to be free?), I don’t know what the article says. But I can make a pretty good guess about what they say in that article, because it’s probably the same thing that stat people say about stats they don’t like. There is probably a paragraph or twelve about that “small sample size,” and then something about how people are playing to just get back in playing shape instead of playing to win games, and maybe something about how there are a lot of non-major-leaguers getting these stats that stat people don’t like.

Well, if you think these stats don’t count, then you better tell the score keepers and scoreboard runners to go home. If the stats didn’t count, then why are they keeping track of them? If this was really just Spring Training, they wouldn’t play games — they would just have fielding practice and hitting practice and wind sprints and all that stretching. But they play the games, and someone wins and someone loses, and the games have stats, so someone keeps the stats, and the stats matter because there’s no other way to tell who won and lost without the stats.

Also, how can you sit in front of your computer and say that these stats don’t matter to kids that are trying to make a team? You want to take away Micah Hoffpauir’s .439 average? Are you trying to take away Eugenio Velez’s 10 stolen bases? You want to tell Andre Ethier that his four home runs don’t count? And if so, why? I think it’s because Joe Sheehan and other people like him are jealous of all these kids playing a game that he can only write about.

I think it was Elvis Presley that said writing about music isn’t like writing music because writing music is like building a big building, and those that can’t do that can only write about it or dance along, which is easy. Building a building is hard, because you have to worry about so many things, including the cost of building materials, the cost of labor, and even the weight of things that will be in the building after it’s done being built. And playing baseball is a lot like that. There are all these different things going on that writers and stat people can’t imagine, which is funny because then they go ahead and write about them anyway. And then people read what’s written which is even worse. But I already said what I want about writing a while ago, so you should read that too.

As far as playing not to win goes, go ahead and tell that to the guys on the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and New York Yankees that these games aren’t about winning. In case you didn’t hear, a Yankee catcher that wasn’t Jorge Posada was leveled by a Tampa Bay rookie and is out with a broken finger, and then another fight broke out after a hard play at second base happened a few games later. If these games weren’t about winning, then why are there fights breaking out? Fights shouldn’t happen in games that don’t mean anything, which means that these games do matter, even if they don’t matter to Joe Sheehan and his friends. They sure matter to the players in the fights, and that’s what matters in the end.