(Partly) excusing the underwhelming offseason

True, so the division being weak is only really beneficial if we can beat the teams that are in it.

The aging curve is weird for pitchers. Cain has been basically the same pitcher for 4 years now, plus or minus some luck/defense/variation. Unsurprisingly, pretty much every good system has projected him for more of the same.

But do you think him returning and them playing .500 are related?

And bookie receipts.

Well, the way you phrased t seemed pretty dismissive to me, but it’s not important.

I don’t actually have much of an opinion on this matter, but I see one big problem with the “enough baseball people” theory (which definitely makes some sense):

It’s not a lot of different people who came to the same conclusion individually. It’s groupthink. It’s general baseball common knowledge that’s being passed on from one to another. Just like AVG – one might wonder how is it that the vast majority of baseball people value it so highly. How did they all come to the conclusion that it’s so much more important than OBP? How could so many experts come to the wrong conclusion? Well, they didn’t. Shawon Dunston did not sit back in a chair at the end of his career, and decided to evaluate the relative value of those two stats, based on his years of experience in the majors, as well as logic and research. No, Shawon Dunston knew that high AVG = good hitter well before he even reached the majors. It was drilled into his head from the moment he started playing Little League. Probably before. He never had a conclusion – the mere thought of trying to reach one is offensive to him.

It’s why baseball people found it so hard (and some still do) to accept a relatively minor change (if you think about it, we still consider AVG to be most of hitting. We just made the stat a bit more inclusive and renamed it). It’s not just because they disagreed with the conclusion – they disagreed with the concept of reaching one. They disagreed with having a discussion, because that meant questioning ideas that were not supposed to be questioned.

Such it is with common knowledge. Most of the time, maybe even the vast majority of the time, it’s spot on. But sometimes it’s not. And when that’s the case, it’s extremely difficult for people who share that common knowledge to acknowledge its faults.

Now, someone said (not sure who) that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. And you could make the case that any claim that directly contradicts the opinions of professionals should count as an extraordinary claim. So maybe the burden of proof is on those who claim chemistry is meaningless, or means very very little. But some evidence, even if not extraordinary, has to be enough to make one to skeptic of common knowledge.

in fact – it’s not even really detectable why would you try to account for it?

It’s not that it doesn’t exist, it’s that there is no way to use the information, because, in fact, you never have any preknowledge of information regarding chemistry.

Do teams even interview prospective free agents?

Exactly.

We should repost some of the comments on here and discuss. . . wait no. We should all just read that link

I’d also like to invite Wreckard to be a guest commenter.

Al and Cubbie-Tim keep arguing "Intangibles can’t be measured b/c the definition is not tangible therefore can’t be tangible . . . "

But they’re just buried in the semantics they decided to use.

LOL Wreckard makes EXCELLENT points that they are confusing cause and effect, and really [Hard to Measure] w/ [Impossible to Measure].

All those skillz/causes like heart, clutchness, ballzieness, (and my person favorite) swagger, are all caught up already in the stats.

The real problem is that the stats also include a billion confounding variables/causes. So to try to distill one “intangible” (or hard to measure skill) from another is really difficult.

You’d need a huge sample size to be able to regress-out (word???) all the other variables.

The ones I"m most interested in “Clutchness” probably would be less difficult than others though – Do any sabrmetric type sites calculate AVG/OBP/SLG etc. with runners in scoring position or 2 outs etc.?

But after all those words, I return to: Life is Short. All that matters is runs scored for my Gints and on a more granular level lack of outs made by a hitter.

END (sorry so long)

the worst ones we have here are at least sorta marginalized. And not quite that crazy.

MONER!

And I lived in New Jersey that year, so I remember the Mets especially well.

ME TOO!

Psssh. You were born and raised in Moraga. I aint scurd.