Sometimes I think there are baseball fans of the sabermetric sort that would rather watch FanGraphs’ Live Scoreboard than actually watch a game of baseball. This isn’t a knock on how people choose to enjoy the National Pastime, just an observation. Heck, having seen Adam Eaton pitch more times than I care to remember, there have been times I wish I wasn’t actually watching the game.
Those who love the numbers of the game are often refer to sabermetrics and almost treat as a way of life when discussing how they choose to enjoy the game. Wikipedia defines sabermetrics as the analysis of baseball through objective evidence, especially baseball statistics. While this is a simplified definition, I always found the definition ironic. The notion that sabermetrics is truly objective is silly when there are a number of ways to “objectively” look at a situation statistically depending on your subjectiveness toward the game. Take player value, for example. Some prefer VORP, others look at WAR and others consider Win Shares. Each serves a purpose and each way to evaluate players has its following and detractors. So, it is truly not objective.
...I know, I know. I’m hard on those who love sabermetrics. My guess is while I love the numbers of the game, I will never be truly accepted in the sabermetric fraternity. But, at the end of the day, you can’t understand baseball just by looking at the numbers. The statistics of the game are too malleable to make an iron-clad complex argument without someone else manipulating the numbers slightly to fit their hypothesis. And no matter how snarky you are in your commentary or how sure you are in your conclusion, there’s another way to look at it.
It’s chaos theory, at it’s best. Too bad it sometimes brings out the worst.
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Ty Cobb almighty, what a freaking passive/aggressive jerk. "Just an observation." I'd rather drink paint while watching NASCAR than spend even three seconds in this guy's company watching a game. I'm 100 percent positive Nieporent and DiPerna would be better company for me at the stadium.
Prick.
And here's Joseph's reply:
It'll be interesting to see whether anyone here takes Joseph up on his challenge, or whether it just turns into one more snark-infested heresy trial.
This is going to be a post and run. I would post it to his blog, but don't really have the time for a back and forth with anyone today. If someone else would care to take this line of argument and run with it, go right ahead.
On some level, I sort of see where this guy is coming from. Just using WARP to bash a guy gets pretty tiresome, and there is a bit of that on the web.
But I disagree strongly with what he has written. Here is the gist of the basic flaw from the quoted excerpt.
The problem here is the confusion between the desire to effectively measure something, and the imperfect tools that are used to make the measurement. It is kind of like saying astronomy is objectively silly because the optics on your telescope are badly designed, or poorly aligned, or dirty, or something like that.
The author also assumes that the analyst has some sort of ax to grind, and they will bend the presentation of the numbers to fit their "subjectiveness toward the game." While this is certainly the case some of the time, it is sort of the opposite of objective analysis. Anyone trying to objectively analyze anything is going to go to great lengths not to do this. When you do twist the information to give a particular slant on results, it is simply bad analysis (or not analysis at all). Hopefully a careful reader will pick it up.
Being objective with data isn't really that hard, and many things that I read on the web about the objective analysis of baseball do a very good job of this.
..........
In the bit from the author that I quoted, he rightly notes the imperfect nature of some of the tools of baseball analysis. This does not mean that imperfect tools should not be used.
I am a scientist. In the sciences, we will never have perfect tools. Some tools are really good. Some tools are OK. Some are sort of crappy. If we sat around and waited for perfect tools in the sciences, we would hardly ever make any scientific discoveries. Using the tools properly, and understanding their limits is the key.
It is important that baseball analytical tools are carefully used, and that the analyst understands the limitations and is not led to incorrect conclusions. If I have a microscope, I understand the spatial resolution limits of that microscope, and am careful in trying to draw conclusions based upon things where spatial resolution limits could lead me down the wrong path. Again, if I screw this up, a careful reader who knows something about microscopy will figure this out.
I also think that most of us have pretty realistic ideas about how reliable various projection systems are. Basically, they do a pretty good job on 2/3 players, and miss on 1/3. Some might be somewhat better, some might be somewhat worse, but really that is sort of the nature of the beast.
.........
I think that this article is actually pretty measured in its criticism of baseball analysis methods. I still feel my criticisms are valid, but the article is a lot more thoughtful than the typical "OPS sukks" stuff that often gets linked here. I don't normally bother posting on those threads.
That reads as a bit harsher than what I would go with. But our styles differ. I will check back tonight to see how it goes.
Enjoy.
Anyone who has a foot in both baseball worlds can often feel a pair of frustrations: That of trying to explain to your bar buddy that BA and RBI and web gems highlights reels aren't the be-all and end-all of understanding a player's value; and that of trying to get a certain subset of the geek squad (smile) to pay more than dismissive attention to the opinions of a player's contemporaries, many of whom might actually have noticed things about the player that don't necessarily show up on the BB-Reference page. IMO both of these archtypes are in need of an expanded horizon, but from reading Joseph's article I wouldn't be all that quick to place him in the Luddite category.
As to your point, I'll only ask you this: Have you never seen people here (let's keep it here on BTF) take any one of those sabrmetric tools and try to use it as an argument-ending club? People like you won't, and to the extent that people like this are made out to represent sabrmetricians as a whole, of course it's a strawman. But reading the article, it's pretty evident to me that he's not addressing people like you; he's arguing with those who use nothing but decontextualized numbers to frame a debate. I guess the question is just how big a group of people fit that category, and I imagine that he probably thinks it's a bigger group than you do.
you know I've been coming to baseball boards like this for 15 years now, and I only remember one person claiming they prefer the numbers over watching the game. I'm trying to find these people that supposedly never watch the game and spend all this time on numbers.
He's dead and has been for years, but supposedly Ernest Lanigan was one of them. I haven't read the argument yet, but I consider myself a sabermoderate; like our esteemed Primate from the North Pole.
I was trying to explain something like this on a thread about New Yankee Stadium back in late May. I think park factors are problematic. We need to adjust for park in certain cases, but one can take an enthusiasm for adjusting for park in the majors too far. I suspect it's more important to adjust for league, although I couldn't prove it right now.
This statement is, I believe, based on a misunderstanding of what it is to be objective. And all the rest of the article's problems arise from here. I suspect that if 'objective' was replaced with 'scientific', the author would not have misunderstood. 'Scientific' refers to a method, nothing more, so history can be scientific. Sabermetrics sometimes is not purely scientific. (Think of James's 'subjective factor' in the New Historical Abstract.) But that's rare.
Joseph then wanders into various specific examples, which unfortunately don't clarify the matter. One problem is that 'neo-sabermetrics', to borrow a term from Don Malcolm, is concerned with evaluating True Talent Level. Joseph is arguing that on a day-to-day level, True Talent Level doesn't actually explain very much. Well, anyone who thought about the matter probably knew that already. But True Talent Level isn't the only way to use use sabermetric studies.
It's always worth reminding ourselves that Bill James didn't start from wanting to know how good players would be, but rather how good they had been. Malcolm and some other members of the Big Bad Annual (BBBA) crowd, which included Primer's own Jim Furtado, were sort of feeling around the theoretical foundation that the game, not the season, is the cornerstone of performance analysis. Then BPro's great success and certain unprofessional characteristics of BBBA strangled that initiative, not quite at birth, but in late childhood. However, many of those basic concepts are still out there. James himself gave us the Game Score for pitchers, but I don't find that helpful. I don't think want a number in that way, I prefer the categories of the Quality Matrix. The same with the idea of Leverage for bullpens. Leverage, and the related Win Expectancy, can tell us everything we need to know about what succeeded in a victory or what failed in a loss. Start totting that data up in columns and there's a handy explanation of a team's strengths and weaknesses.
Pecota, Zips, Chone and Marcel are great tools, but they are literally only half the picture.
you know I've been coming to baseball boards like this for 15 years now, and I only remember one person claiming they prefer the numbers over watching the game. I'm trying to find these people that supposedly never watch the game and spend all this time on numbers.
I completely agree that that tired old line is just BS hyperbole and doesn't help Joseph's case a bit. It's a cliche every bit as shopworn as "get off my lawn" and all the variants of Maude Flanders.
I wasn't all that put off by the article until I saw that response from the author in the comments. I would think "fundamental criticism" is a meaningful attack on the foundation of sabermetrics. And this article doesn't do that.
First, you have the normal "they would rather watch graphs than a ballgame" criticism, which is an ad hominem argument.
Second, you have what amounts to a semantics argument over the word "objective." It's hard to view this as a fundamental criticism, when all of the practitioners of sabermetrics understand and admit that none of the statistical models are perfect. In fact, it is that knowledge which leads to continual improvements in statistical tools.
Third, he argues that someone can manipulate the numbers. So? Any kind of tool can be misused, but does that mean you throw out the tool? You could make that argument against any scientific method. Misused or not, I would rather have someone use statistics to back up their argument than face an argument like "that's the way it's always been done in baseball." At least with the former argument, the statistical support can be tested by someone else and shown to be invalid if it a misrepresentation.
In case you lived under a rock, the projections on Wieters after what was considered the greatest minor league performance of the last four decades (according to the annual’s write-up on “Orange Jesus”) were off the charts! How off the charts? 31 homers, 102 RBI, 105 runs scored and a batting line of .311/.395/.544! No wonder some were surprised that Wieters didn’t levitate from the on-deck circle to the batter’s box when he made his Orioles debut.
In case you live under a rock? I know many baseball fans who like the game but don't surf the baseball blogosphere. A number of them have read Moneyball and similar stuff. But they don't peruse sites like here and BPro all that often. Was Weiter's PECOTA projection mentioned much in mainstream media or is this guy overestimating how many people reside in the sabersphere?
Maude Flanders? Do you mean "think of the children!"? That was Helen Lovejoy, not Maude Flanders.
Perhaps in spite of the tone of his article, Joseph may be extrapolating from his own circle of acquaintances. Maybe he needs to get out to a few games himself and mix with the crowd in the bleachers, where PECOTA, PETCO and PETA are likely used interchangeably.
Yeah, you're right, but crazed cartoon Christian chicks are all pretty much all alike, and anyway, I'm sure that Helen spoke for Maude every bit as much as Casey spoke for Mickey.
Last week, Johan Santana had the worst outing of his career. The Mets were pounded by the Yankees and most of the damage was done on Santana’s watch with Johan allowing nine earned runs in just three innings.
The impact? Santana went from a 2.39 ERA to a 3.29 ERA. He also went from 8-3 to 8-4 in the W-L column (even though we’ve already been told by many that W-L records are meaningless, right?).
At this point in the season, Santana would have to throw 31 scoreless innings to return his ERA to that impressive 2.39 number. So, even if Santana threw three consecutive complete game shutouts, his ERA would still not be as good as it was before he allowed nine earned runs in three innings. Does that make sense? Statistically, it does. Hence, if you evaluate Santana based on his ERA alone, even though Santana could go 3-1 with three complete game shutouts in a four game stretch, because of how poorly he performed in that one outing, we’d have to assume that he was a better pitcher ERA-wise four starts ago.
Some would blast him for using ERA because it doesn't separate pitching from defense, but I want to make a different point. Michael Wolverton's Support Neutral stats were tailor made to handle outings like this. But I may be there only champion. I rarely hear anyone else talking about them.
I'm pretty active in my local SABR chapter and it's pretty much the younger guys who are aware of this type of stuff. Our chapter head knows about sabermetrics, as do another older guy or two who board game, but the last time it came up was when Steve pimped Joe Horlen for a retroactive Cy Young Award in 1967 on the basis of his Relative ERA. I sometimes call it that instead of ERA+ myself.
The discussion took place a year ago, not back in the Summer of Love.
I didn't think that people said that W-L records were meaningless, but rather that, over a single season, they were often a poor method by which to evaluate a pitcher when compared to the other metrics out there, since they're subject to being influenced by a whole bunch of things outside of a pitcher's control (with Nolan Ryan 1987 and Storm Davis 1989 being held up as two prime examples). Over a suitably long career, however, most of these things will largely (not completely, and not always) even out, allowing for a decent (but by no means perfect) evaluation of a pitcher via W-L record.
Well, at least for starting pitchers. I have no idea if the same applies for relievers, since there's a lot more control for situational usage influencing their records over multi-year and full-career stretches.
1. Messing with the Johan, he complains because Johans era got knocked up by one bad outing. Considering that ERA isn't really a saber stat but more a traditional stat (Sabers would point to other stats that are a tad better but oh well) he complains about how hard it is for his saint Johan to return to his great ERA from prior to the game. Well there is a reason that great ERA's are hard to get, it requires consistent dominance. If Bob Gibson had one game as bad as Johan in 1968 we wouldn't remember that year as much either. I just don't see this complaint having any validity.
2. Wieters and Pecota. I agree with him here, but as he himself mentions in the article is that some projections are dead on, others are off. I've seen arguments for Wieters projections and understand why it was so off, but I'm not even sure that BP really believed he was going to be as good as their projections, but it would be "subjective" for them to modify the stats more inline with what they thought they should be. In this guys first paragraph he complains about the subjectiveness of a stat persons point of view, yet here he is advocating they apply subjectiveness to an objective stat.
3.Lidge and Madson. I have absolutely no idea where he is going with this one, he doesn't point to one stat that says anything. It was a typical debate the closer is struggling, why not go to the setup man. Find me any stat based or non-stat based guy who doesn't get into this type of discussion when the situation is happening, and you will have found a person who doesn't enjoy watching baseball. If this guy can find a situation in the past 20 years where the closer was struggling at some point in the season and nobody made comments about bringing in the better performing reliever, and you would find a city that just doesn't care about baseball (I remember even one year where Mariano was not his usual self to start the season and there was some rumblings)
I remember QMAX! Haven't heard much talk of it in years, but I have a couple BBAs and Malcolm used to write about baseball online for a while. Could you elaborate on the theoretical foundation that the game, not the season, is the cornerstone of performance analysis? I don't think that's a better tool for projecting things, but like James, I'm more interested in what happened than what will happen so that isn't a concern for me.
Coincidentally, I was messing around with some 1965-7 statistics a few weeks ago, and I did a DIPS-based projection for Horlen for 1968.
H/9 BB/9 K/9 HR/9
1965 8.8 1.2 5.2 0.7
1966 8.7 1.8 5.4 0.6
1967 9.4 2.0 3.9 0.5
Projected 68 9.0 1.7 4.5 0.6
Actual 9.3 2.6 4.2 0.7
The White Sox' BABIP for RHP was consistenly in the mid .270s, while the AL average for 67 was .268.
EDIT: I can't figure out why the tags that normally work aren't working now.
Most park effect ratings are after the fact, and they are value measurements, meaning it doesn't matter why this guy hit a homerun, double, or flyout, just the fact that he did. If you are making a trade for a player, how the nuances of a park may have affected his numbers does need to be considered, but for how valuable he was in comparison to other players, park effects are just fine.
I don't think the author of the article understands how park adjustments are calculated. (Two points: most analysts would use 3 year park factors over a 1 year version; and Halladay had a significant impact on the Blue Jays' runs allowed on the road, as well as at home, which implicitly adjusts for that issue.) An explanation of Baseball-Reference's calculation of park factors is here:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/about/parkadjust.shtml
Linkified for the lazy.
I'm weirded out, too.
He says there are four things that show stats aren't the be all end all.
1. Messing with the Johan...
2. Wieters and Pecota...
3. Lidge and Madson. I have absolutely no idea where he is going with this one...
Are you going to get back to that third one? ;-)
I made one of the initial snarky comments, but he makes a specific point to go after people who like baseball statistics as if they really don't like the game. I cannot believe I'm still hearing this, and it really really isn't even worth responding to him because it isn't provable. "I know this guy, these guys..." and the responses that focus on the rational arguments and, well, numbers, basically prove his point to him by simply EXISTING in the first place. It's a no-win.
The author seems to be saying that if Johan Santana has a bad game and his single-season ERA shoots up by a run as a result, it doesn't tell you much about whether Santana is a great pitcher or not.
The old-school baseball guy would say, "Everybody has a bad outing now and then, he'll pound some Budweiser and get 'em next time."
The saber guy would say, "Small sample sizes."
For once, everyone agrees.
I'm still groping around the idea of the game being more important than the season for performance analysis myself. It stems from work I did trying to applying sabermetric methods to cricket. Cricket four-day and Test matches can rest on the performances of a couple of players, just like individual baseball games or series. Given that a Test series can be as short as two matches and not more than six, the impact of a great performance can be quite profound.
I then noticed, while tracking the effect on Win Expectancy of the Nationals' bullpen that sometimes a loss is not the bullpen's fault, or it's not the pitcher's. Sometimes the starter gave up too many runs to begin with, sometimes the Nationals' lineup couldn't score, sometimes it was a blown play in the field.
Now the objective in baseball is to win the World Series. The competition has its own endpoints. And in between those endpoints the objective isn't to compile a player's statistical line, but to win games. As it happens, good statistical seasons normally win games, but the information is diffused across wins and losses.
What happens in adjacent seasons is only relevant in so far as it can help us figure out whether a player is really good, or just lucky. Thus, I agree that a Game Analysis isn't going to tell us much about projections. However, in determining who contributed the most to winning the World Series, it might be better to divide up the credit among various components - hitting, fielding, starting, relieving. It might also be better not to think in terms of a 'Win Expectancy' average, but more in terms of categories, like QMAX's structure of Hit Hard versus Success Square versus Power Precipiece &c;. Could we import the concept to fielding or hitting? Worth a look, I reckon.
And that's about as far as I've got.
I was going to go to all four, but I didn't see a fourth one, his last point is chaos theory and it's pretty non-sensical but it doesn't deal with the four debates he was saying was going on.
I guess the him using four is him being subjective with numbers?
Malcolm sometimes alluded to something called Ashley's Hexagon which was supposed to be a geometrical representation of batting, but I never saw it and have no idea if it was supposed to represent a season or some other unit.
I spent about $200 I don't really have six weeks ago on Alibris and ABE Books buying up BBBAs and Baseball Sabermetrics. I used to have a complete run of the latter from 1989 through 1993, but I sold them for peanuts about eleven years ago, just a few months before I discovered baseball was on the Internet. What an ill-timed move!
I now have the Baseball Sabermetric from 1990-3, and the BBBA from 1996-2000. 1994 was the year of the Baseball Insight, and 1995's BBBA wasn't available on Alibris or ABE.
it was a primate(and probably not a regular I imagine), but I don't remember who it was, just that it came up in some discussion or other, person said something about loving the numbers, likes looking at the box score etc but just doesn't watch the game.
I spent about $200 I don't really have six weeks ago on Alibris and ABE Books buying up BBBAs and Baseball Sabermetrics. I used to have a complete run of the latter from 1989 through 1993, but I sold them for peanuts about eleven years ago, just a few months before I discovered baseball was on the Internet. What an ill-timed move!
I now have the Baseball Sabermetric from 1990-3, and the BBBA from 1996-2000. 1994 was the year of the Baseball Insight, and 1995's BBBA wasn't available on Alibris or ABE.
I only got one big bad baseball annual and I loved it (funny thing a friend of mine who is a printer, worked for the printing company that printed the book somehow smuggled me a copy, he hates stats but loves baseball, and he is a guy who hates going to the games, would rather watch the game on tv) I've never seen the BBBA at a book store so I never got another season.
Probably an important reason why it's no longer around! Marketing and distribution are the hardest fields of the publishing industry to conquer. Any darn fool can write a book.
Right. Before I was aware that folks were discussing this type of stuff online, I saw BPro in a bookstore. In your case, you found stuff in '98. It wasn't until '01 when I met Jim Furtado at a regional SABR meeting that I found the sabersphere. I might be the one of not many who found this site through word of mouth instead of stumbling upon it thorough a link at another site or a web search.
it was a primate(and probably not a regular I imagine), but I don't remember who it was, just that it came up in some discussion or other, person said something about loving the numbers, likes looking at the box score etc but just doesn't watch the game.
And, you know, here's the thing about this: so what?
What difference does it make if someone doesn't prefer watching games? How is that a bad thing, in any way? How does their expression of that preference make any of the rest of us morally or intellectually superior?
This is the dumbest non-issue within the larger dumb non-issue of "baseball good, sabermetrics bad."
Seriously I've been a long-time supporter. "Tis true that it doesn't address the impact of defense -- which will really affect somebody like Jim Palmer. Still, it's miles ahead of any runs based system.
Oh yeah, Chris Dial likes to point out when we're going over old usenet ground. Chris wrote a much more nuanced pience more than a decade ago. Can't find it now but it was called something like "I, anti-stathead". May of the responses could be cut and pasted to the current author. Ditto for Larry Roberts' thread in the Blue Jays group.
I think this was J. Henry Waugh in Robert Coover's novel.
That, or maybe Jeff Kent :)
Treder is no hermeticist!
from Wikipedia:
What difference does it make if someone doesn't prefer watching games? How is that a bad thing, in any way? How does their expression of that preference make any of the rest of us morally or intellectually superior?
to me and most of us here it doesn't matter, but somehow the the mainstream has this perception that this is how the majority or a super minority or even a significant number of people who like stas are. I know for a fact that I watch more baseball than anyone of my friends, heck I've probably missed less than 20 innings this year of Cardinal baseball, and I find it just odd that the impression of a stat friendly baseball fan would prefer numbers about the game, while not even enjoying the game.
Good call, Bob Dernier Cri.
So statheads are maligned! It's the DMB, APBA and Strat players who need to get their heads out of the game and into the game!
(T)he game, not the season, is the cornerstone
I was thinking about this and maybe the series is the cornerstaone. Games aren't played in isolation, they pretty much play six days a week; unlike football in its various codes. Reminds me of a hangup one of my friends has about the NBA and NHL playoffs. They use a format that differs from how the regular season is played, while MLB and the NFL don't.
#23 SNWL roolz. Happy now?
I'm always happy to see you, Ron. I treasure your institutional memory and that definitely sounds like Dial.
Hit Tracker + an adjustment based on physics would probably be the best way of answering that particular question
Well, I'm not sure that the mainstream has that perception, but clearly folks who write this sort of trite diatribe do. And my point is that not only is their perception incorrect (at least in your experience, as well as mine), in any case their notion of superiority over those who would prefer to wallow in stats over watching a game is wholly unjustified.
It's baseball, folks. It's a game, a pastime, a hobby. It's just for fun, it isn't real life (in fact that's kind of the whole point). There is no right way or wrong way to enjoy it, just as there's nothing wrong with people who don't care a whit about it at all. There's a petty pointlessness to the "mine is the one right way to appreciate baseball" attitude.
it was a primate(and probably not a regular I imagine), but I don't remember who it was, just that it came up in some discussion or other, person said something about loving the numbers, likes looking at the box score etc but just doesn't watch the game.
It's a little too extreme to be me, then. That said, I watch less than anyone else posting in this thread.
All the time. "A 117 OPS+ from a corner outfielder is not good enough for the HOF."
I don't know about this Jon. Winning a series doesn't get you anything more than winning the individual games does.
Maybe looking at series can tell you something about the structure of a team that would help figure out how they'd do in the playoffs. Then again a regular season series is shorter than a playoff series, so I don't know how helpful it would be.
I'm probably in the same boat as Chris. I generally get in a full game every week or two on TV - and maybe a game or two a season in person across the majors and minors.
It's not that I don't enjoy watching baseball, it's that I don't have a lot of free time, and my wife doesn't like to watch.
That's a great point. After I read this comment, I started thinking about the period when I was growing up and televised games were much less frequent, meaning that, if you didn't live close enough to go to your team's ballparks, radio and newspapers were the primary means of following your team. And it's possible that you might not follow radio broadcasts games very much, either because you didn't like the media or you didn't have a station broadcasting your team nearby. In that situation, I could very easily see a young baseball fan growing up with boxscores and stats as the way to follow their team. If that person grew up more interested in analyzing stats than watching games, would that be so unexpected?
***or that wonderful interlude known as interleague play, which is a great opportunity not to be completely clueless about at least one NL division per year
In the \"#### around" area of a baseball forum. Anybody claiming Wieters' projections as some sort of victory for the notion that saber people just swallow whatever the numbers tell them isn't paying attention to much.
I'm more of a radio guy myself as well. But a local bar has the Extra Innings package and I've been catching some muted out of market games lately. About once a nite, I have my mental picture of a player shattered because he looks totally different than I expected.
That's still quite a bit more than I do, trust me.
I used to go to a few/couple games every year in person. I've always loved doing that. But I'm getting worn out by the prices going up every time. (I'm aware they have the right to price them as they see fit, just as I have the right to get sick of it).
At home, for whatever reason, sports mainly works as background stuff for me. And when I watch TV, it ain't background, but the central thing. So I rarely watch baseball (or any other sport). Usually I'll catch some games, or at least parts of games, as the year goes on. This year, I haven't seen dick. I've probably paid less attention to the season than at any point since I was in a college dorm without a TV.
Obviously not catching the Skinemax baseball wrapup every evening.
But watching is baseball is fun. Really fun. Superfun. You should try it.
who on this thread said differently?
All the stat nerds.
Pay attention.
While I agree with this entirely, I think the (I'd call it an over)reaction by the "I watch the games" types stems from when they perceive that they're being told their understanding of baseball is fundamentally flawed, or, I guess, less correct, by a guy who doesn't even bother to watch the game. In a way, that's kind of understandable. I mean, it's easier for me to believe someone telling me Derek Jeter is a crappy fielder because his numbers suck and he can't field anything up the middle than it is to just take a -10 UZR or whatever at face value. What I mean is, it's helpful for a "stat guy" to watch and know the game if they want to explain what the numbers actually mean to the layman. But, that said, I can't remember many times when the "watch the game" types have been measured and reasonable in their kind of response as opposed to petty and childish. And if someone wants to just enjoy the numbers and the history and that's how they get their kicks from baseball, there's obviously nothing wrong with that.
Personally, I don't think my desire to watch baseball even remains consistent from season to season. I really love watching baseball, but sometimes, you know, I'd rather just check out the box score than see the A's eek out two hits in a 4-1 loss to San Diego to drop to 30-38. But if it were September and they were even remotely near first, I'd probably watch the same game pretty intently. Though I think for most, that's kind of a given.
Sounds like some scouts I know...
Are they the ones from the roundtable? Maybe they can answer #1's question...
Why reinvent QMAX, Jon? This is basically what QMAX does, except instead of an 'A', it gives us an 'Elite Square', and instead of an 'F', it gives us 'Hit Hard'.
I did wonder, however, if QMAX is missing a Third Dimension, of the Home Run.
There's also radio. I often find myself on the road in the evening and putting the game on while I drive. Or, I'll have it on while writing in the kitchen.
I take issue with this statement. Plenty of people bashed PECOTA for that miss well before Wieters played his first major league game. We didn't need to wait for him to come up and get off to a slow start, in fact, the ammunition on this issue was spent well before his callup. A good projection is one where you don't know whether to bet the over or under. When PECOTA says Wieters is going to hit like a prime Mike Piazza as a rookie, it's pretty easy to bet the under. Maybe a few hard core defenders will say "well, he's a super-being, so he might hit that". But NOBODY was saying Wieters would exceed his PECOTA projection. Quite simply, that's a crappy projection if you can't find anybody who wants to bet the over.
at this point it should be noted i live in europe, so kinda got an excuse.
Bob was dreaming.
The BBBA 2000 has the best short summary of QMAX, but the 1997 one has the original article about it. I think there was at least one more article subsequently.
The BBBA 1999 has a really good article by Tom Ruane about Organizational Talent during the expansion era. It seems to have been part of a larger study that as far as I know was never published. Someone should get a hold of the rest of that and get it into print somehow.
There are just so many ideas lying around the pages of the BBBA, relatively unexploited. I could never say that about Prospectus. The Hardball Times is a much better annual in that regard.
EDIT: It's not that Prospectus exploits the ideas where BBBA didn't, but rather that Prospectus isn't really historically minded in the way the BBBA was. Thinking historically is thinking innovatively, for me. Nothing is worse than a bright idea that ignores context.
No excuses - after food and housing and telephone and computer, the mlb.tv subscription is next. It's all archived!
Having been in the same boat as BFFB, and possibly returning to it sooner than I had wanted, I have to say that it is problematic to follow baseball from Europe because of the time difference, rather than the distance. (The Internet annhilates distance.) And that's not because of the clocks. mlb.tv used to allow access to only five minutes of the games of the day before until something like 6 am EDT. But that's not until 11 am in Britain, and 12 noon on the Continent. So you couldn't even get up a bit early to watch a few innings before going off to work.
That's why, like Vaux, I'm more likely to listen to games on the radio. Used with GameDay as well, it's almost as good as TV.
It won't help.
Gore Vidal once wrote about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, saying that, like Norman Mailer, he was too much of an engineer to be a literary genius. (Although not in so many words!) I could go on about the injustice of this statement, but instead I'll use it to lead into my take on the Malcolm/BPro stylistic divide.
Engineering simply delivers a solution to a problem. It doesn't have to be pretty, and if it is prettified, it's often done in such a way as to decorate the structural elements on view. Baroque architecture has bits added in corners or at certain points of view 'because we can', and in order to achieve a particular impression. Prospectus is kind of Engineering to Malcolm's Baroque. Everything works, and is sort of clear. (You can't see some of the stuff that's going on, but the results are there in plain view.) Malcolm is more like a Baroque architect. There's stuff that's not really there for any structural reason, but the overall effect is to impress, for good or ill. So he treasures literary turns like the whole Wafering metaphor, where Prospectus would just apply amusing snark.
Nor do I, but it presents a striking mental image, with the manager all dressed up as he informs the pitcher about the change to his role!
the world series kills me every year. i end up spending a week in work looking like a zombie.
Actually I think he used to play third base for Cleveland: Chris Thurible.
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