a700hitter

He reads my posts and responds to them through an internal filter that distorts the truth. LOL>

If the stats were never wrong as a predictor of future performance, GMs would never make bad moves. Stats are interesting and fun and there is a place for them when debating relative past performances, but they and any other method are very imperfect at projecting future performance.

http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2011/10/14/red-sox-owner-john-henry-i-personally-opposed-signing-carl-crawford/ From the article: And this:

The anti-Luchinno sentiment has been one that has pervaded this board for some time. Several of my favorite posters feel the same way and with great emotion. It is a theory for which I just haven't seen much reliable support. The inner dynamics of an organization is something that is hard to get a handle on. There is one fact that is hard to argue. We one 2 championships with Theo as GM and one with Ben as GM. LL has been here for all three.

It's not the case on this forum, and I realize that you are not completely familiar with TS yet. It really is time to move to the next topic. Lol! This one has gone in a number of clockwise and country clockwise circles.

Theo never shrunk from accountability. He always too responsibility. It was a very admirable quality. Cherington has that same quality.

He might be the first to depart camp too.

I come here to share my opinions and to get the views of others about the game. I don't come here to debate opinions that almost never can be established to be right or wrong with any certainty.

It's odd to have this discussion especially since none of the posters here have said that they don't use stats or don't see a value in them, yet the assumption has become that some people completely dismiss stats and the explanation for that erroneous assumption is that those people either don't understand the stats or the stats don't support their opinion. This is a case of erroneous conclusions proving an erroneous assumption.

I don't need them for my Red Sox. I use them for the rest of MLB to some extent or another.

This will be tomorrow's topic. Lol!

The stats are very useful to teams, because the cost of an individual scouting operation to provide coverage of 700 major leaguers and thousands of minor leaguers would be prohibitive. All teams undoubtedly incorporate statistical evaluation in their operations, but this is not rocket science or advanced physics or something that you need an MIT degree to understand. I would also venture that good individual scouting is more of a differentiator today among teams when evaluating players than statistical studies. Statistical studies like defensive shifts have become standard fare. There is less deviation in the quality of these studies than there among scouts.

If we were communicating in Spanish our roles would have been reversed. Also, your post was much more detailed and descriptive.

And all of those Yankee championships were attributable to the Yankees being pioneers in sabermetrics?

They also didn't have a World Championship until they went to multi divisional play with a wild card spot.

I agree with everything in your post. Where some of the statheads lose me is when they predict player A' s career arc based on the career arc of player B. To me that has zero value other than to demonstrate what is possible. It doesn't demonstrate even the slightest probability. There are usually many other examples of players who were at the same point in their careers that player A is at, but whose career arc was very different than that of player B. I am also still advanced fielding metrics to be unreliable. Any fielding metrics that would show Cespedes as an above average fielder is not reliable. He takes awful routes to balls, can't judge even the simplest carom off any OF wall and when he does get to a ball, he handles it like a hand grenade or hot potato. He has a canon of an arm, but the rest of his game in the field is not above- average. Other than a few uses of stats that I consider dubious such as WAR, I find them useful and use them often for visiting teams, especially west coast teams.

Yes, I would like to see that too.

I think they would trade him only for a big bat or a blue chip prospect. They would be ill- advised to move him in return for a grab-bag of middling prospects.

That lines up with Stevie Wonder's opinion.

Stats are great to learn about players that you don't get a chance to see play, and with 700 major leaguers and thousands of minor leaguers it would be impossible to have enough scouts to get adequate coverage. I would doubt that a major league team spends 70% on their stats function and 20% on scouting. It is probably the reverse. What the statheads are not taking into consideration is that the stats themselves are not automatically produced. There are people who are watching these games who are recording the information. It is a form of personal scouting using statistics. Statistical reports don't include the nuances and subtleties that a scouting report will provide. The individual scouting report is always more complete if the scout has been following the player for a while. I would liken the issue of scouting reports vs stats to internet communication vs. in-person conversations. There is a lot of internet communication today and a ton of information, but in-person communication is superior as expression, inflection and body language cannot be conveyed on the internet. Communications experts say that the nonverbal aspects of communication make a substantially larger impact than the words used to communicate. The other thing that the statheads don't understand is that those of us who trust our eyes when we watch players day in and day out, we still look at stats, but I don't look at them to tell me how the Red Sox are performing. Occasionally, I will check the stats to get some specific information. If Pedroia is raking, I might check the stats to see what he has done in the last few weeks. The stats give me the specific information, but they merely confirm what I already knew -- that he is raking. I will study the stats of visiting players, because I don't watch them everyday. I' ll check their splits etc. Most of the time if the guy is a veteran, his stats line up with my opinion of him, but there are many times that the stats reveal that he is in an anomolous hot streak or cold streak, but as you said past performance is no guarantee of future performance. That is especially true of a player's hot streak or slump. That situation can reverse itself in a single AB, and no stat can accurately predict when. Live scouting is much more accurate in that regard as they can judge body language that indicates increased confidence, a change in the player's swing or approach etc. In any event, this is a stupid argument. We all enjoy the game in different ways. If someone is intent on proving that he knows more about baseball than I do based on the way that I process the game, let them think so. That's their issue, not mine.

I remember a story about Joe McCarthy when he was Yankee manager telling a sportswriter why he loved Joe Gordon so much. He called Joe Gordon over in the presence of the writer a said: "Hey Joe, what is your batting average?" Joe said, "I don't know". "How many Home Runs do you have?" The answer was the same. "How many runs have you driven in?" Again, Gordon didn't know. McCarthy told the writer that Gordon didn't care about his own accomplishments. He only cared about one thing -- winning, and that is why McCarthy loved him.

Yep. Agreed 100%

Excellent point. Neither approach has proved to be fool- proof when handing out contracts.

I find value in stats, but more for players that I don't see very often -- especially west coast teams. I have found that modern sabermetrics tend to support the opinions that I have formed about the players that I watch most often. I have not found them to be inconsistent with views that I hold about these players or game strategy. There is definitely a value in stats for me, because it is impossible to be familiar with 700 players. But I must admit that when stats conflict with my opinion about players with which I am very familiar, I will go with my gut.

Don't let your head explode about it. The stats usually bear out my evaluations and without bothering to surf all sorts of stats websites and crunching the numbers. In the end, neither my evaluations nor those of the stat- heads matter. If baseball performance was a science that could be completely predicted and evaluated with statistics, there would be no bad GMs. I' ll continue to watch hundreds of games every year, rely on my eyes anf win money more often than not in my several fantasy leagues. It works for me, because when the stats are presented they just tend to back up what I already knew.