Assignment Discovery: Sabermetrics

I was alerted by a fellow Cubs fan that the program "Statistics and Data Analysis in Sports" will be airing on the Discovery Channel on April 17th. The description of the show on their web site says:

Using only a calculator, a stat book, and some custom equations, a new generation of baseball statisticians believes that it's possible to predict a player's true value to his team. The results will surprise you.

It'll be interesting to see if they're really talking about "prediction" or simply quantification after the fact. The former has its limits while the latter is very well understood. I'm also interested in these types of presentations since they often misrepresent and distort subjects that are somewhat technical. I wrote about two depictions of sabermetrics back in November in a column titled "The Numb3rs Game" on BP.