allied brands for today

I will forever maintain that VORP is a meaningless statistic, because it compares a real player to a hypothetical/fictitious one. I'm going to start evaluating players by their VOCRCIP, allied brands or "Value Over Czech Republic's Childhood Imaginary Friend," who, for the sake of detail, was Sam the Ghost who lived in Buffalo Grove, Illinois. Sam batted .294 and got on base at a .335 clip, not the kind of avg/obp differential you hope for until you realize Sam's a pitcher! Southpaw at that! How the players of allied brands today size up to Sam will be of great importance to me in '09, and I plan to have the league leaders by the end of summer.

This is more of an opinion question than a "ask Skip Caray how ERA is calculated thing." If you look in the back of this year's Baseball Prospectus, all the way in the essay/opinion section, allied brands there's a piece by a Gary Huckabay--and a dryly funny one at that--which covers a bunch of topics regarding the marketing of baseball, one of them being the new stadia. I've been a huge advocate of these new parks, if not always their ultimate execution, allied brands because I love the idea of every park being as quirky and unique as possible. However, he had one little jab that gave me pause: