Crowing about assists is like crowing about RBI. It's one of the most useless, or at least, overrated stats in evaluating a player's performance. It's totally reliant on the play/performance of others. Talking about assists is like arguing wins/losses to evaluate a pitchers performance. We need to move past the useless, antiquated stats.
Please cease these dumb uninformed blatherings about baseball; bad enough that you constantly display your ignorance about hoops without trashing truths about a game whose basic playing rules and practices have survived and prospered for 150 years. People who know the game are aware that stats have to be understood in the context of batting order, type of offense, matchups, 162 game schedule, etc.etc. A stat like RBI used in relationship to the OBP & baserunning of batters preceeding him---his run-scoring opportunities, live ball or dead ball era, managerial style---hit & run, Earl Weaver's 3-run HR, etc, and the duration---number of games/playoffs & the like---has always been recognized by astute baseball men as an exceedingly meaningful measure of offensive value.
And wins/losses reflect durability, endurance, conditioning, determination, conditioning both physical and emotional, and ability to help himself with both glove & bat. Only a pretentious moron would babble about the improtance of any single stat out of the overall setting of team's performance in the field and offensively: yes, occasionally in rare instances a Ralph Kiner or Ernie Banks leads in all the power categories and is the MVP, and just as rarely a pitcher like Steve Carlton wins 28 while losing only a 4th as many games. But what makes baseball uniquely a game that meshes individual performance with that of the team is how EVERY player's statistical measurements are integrated into team performance in every game for the full course of the season.
Those who foolishly believe baseball is played by"draft selections" on the internet are especially ignorant of such attributes as speed, fielding range, throwing strength & accuracy, and defensive & baserunning skills--- almost entirely so. The childish ignorance that amuses me most is the "analytics" crowd's use of OPS in place of XBH, HR & RBIs (OPS actually counts base hits twice, but ignores totally stolen bases, SB % of success, extra bases taken % runs scored as consequence in a supposedly precise measurement of offensive contributions).
(Oh, and that reflects a priceless distortion & reversal of the meaning of "analytical": an analytical proposition is the opposite of a synthetic proposition. Analytic statements express only LOGICAL relationships (TRUTHS), which are by definition ABSTRACT as in HYPOTHETICAL models---unlike SYNTHETIC statements (what we normally call FACTS), which describe the empirical ("real") world.
ALL STATISTICS are attempts at measurement of distances, frequencies, conditions of empirical reality, and thus are necessarily synthetic propositions. They have nothing to do with analytical/logical relationships. And the sensible conclusion to be drawn from this obvious failure to grasp the very nature of statistical method and the probability theory derived from it, point directly to the reasons why they abuse statistics so badly.
