Sean,

I read both the new and old version of the article. For what it's worth, I don't think that your comments are any more "over the line" than what Neyer typically has to say about journalists or baseball people. That said, Neyer is in a slightly different field than you when he writes his comments. Neyer's ESPN column puts him in a commentator/wonk role, while your peer review efforts places you more in the role of a hard scientist. Yes, this is slightly a matter of semantics, but a real distinction does exist in my mind. For the purposes of your PAP piece, you are really like the physicist reviewing a colleagues work for a scholarly journal, whereas Neyer is like the technology reporter for the New York Times who digests the work of the scientist (Woolner) and provides context and commentary for lay people like me. This is not to say that Neyer is less of a scientist or you are less of a columnist. Indeed, the science reporters are usually every bit able as the people doing the primary research. You are, however, providing different functions.

This distinction is important, I think, because keeping it in mind will help sabermetrics gain respect as a "real" science. A science where peer review actually means something other than simply criticizing ones peers. Sure, physics and genetics has its share of personal squabbles, nit picking, and accusations embedded in the peer review process, but as a relatively new field, the science of baseball is going to be held to a higher standard than physics. Even if it is not, wouldn't it be great if, as it matures, the science of baseball finds itself to be a more congenial discipline? One that is immune from the pettiness that often characterizes the other, more established fields?

In closing, I think it is fair for the BP's methods to be questioned, and the fact that it has the dual intent of selling books and providing good analysis is important to consider. I just think that such broader criticisms are better suited to an opinion piece than a piece containing valuable critical anlysis.

Keep up the good work,

Craig Calcaterra

John,

Thanks for the comments and thanks to everyone else as well. The point
I'm trying to make is that I don't believe in they've shown that
PAP measures abuse. We know repeated high pitch counts are bad, but
why do we need this formula when we have pitch counts already? The
formula implies that anything above 100 is bad and that the damage
accumulates at an ever quickening rate. These are assumptions that
must be proven, and I would argue that they haven't been.

I enjoyed your article, Sean.

I don't know whether the first version (not available apparently now) was out of line, but it can't be any more out of line than the 1999 & 2000 Big Bad Baseball Annuals were in making attacks and included namecalling. They seemed to disagree with PAP merely because someone else thought of it first and then posted color-coded graphs on their website of rolling 3-start pitch counts, again for no more obvious reason than they thought it made intuitive sense (or at least that's my recollection of it). Not that you implied otherwise, but it'd be nice to acknowledge that others throw out sabermetric measures without first backing them with research.

Now that we've progressed to the point where we can have well-written, well-researched peer review, maybe we can have some real research. It's incredible with the data now available and seemingly a fair number of interested researchers that we still are relying on things like small-scale studies Bill James did in the 1980s or Craig Wright's book published in the 1980s before the necessary data was widely available to support some of our most basic sabermetric tenets.