a700hitter

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.

They have a very talented roster.

If it is quicker, you can just ask me. Lol! That remark will get some people' s underwear tied in a knot.

If you let emotions enter into your gambling, you will go broke quickly.

And if you watched Jeter for thousands of games over his career, you already knew that without having to look up WAR. I have said it over and over. In the words of the great Vin Scully, "Statistics should be used the way a drunk uses a lamp post -- for support not illumination." It was also pretty clear that in his last season plus that Jeter's defense was hurting his team to a significant extent. He couldn't move at all after the broken ankle and his arm accuracy started to betray him as well.

Almost every expert projected them as a 4th place team or worse going into that season. Looking at the team on paper at the beginning of the year couldn't project the relatively good health of its pitching staff and the situational resilience of that team. As a group, they were very mentally tough. When things gor rough and looked like they might turn bad, they turned things around. This was very different from the 2011 and 2012 teams which caved when things started to turn bad and things spiraled downward.

Pedroia is one of those players that transcends his stats. He has what we used to mock about Jeter. He had the intangibles of leadership. Plus, he is a much better fielder than Jeter. I don't put a lot of stock in fielding metrics. I watch at least 150 Red Sox games a year. I have thousands of games under my belt. I have seen Pedroia's entire career. I don't need a stat to tell me about his range, his hands and his footwork on the DP. His offense has been down in recent years due to injuries incurred on defense, but in today's game, he is a great value even in down offensive seasons, because of the other aspects of his game and leadership.

Yes, those were some great teams in 1975, 1978, 1986, 2003 and 2008. In each of those years, the team caught some bad breaks that turned out to be good breaks for their opponents. In 1975, Jim Rice missed the entire post season with a broken wrist and then there was the the End Armbrister non- interference call. In 1978, there was the lucky catch by Lou Piniella on Remy's base hit to RF. He didn't see the ball at all and just threw out his glove. In 1986, there was the Buckner play and Clemen's blister that took him out of the game. In 2003, there was Grady Little and in 2008, there was Beckett's torn Lat. I would add 1967 to the list as the Red Sox had to face the Cardinals without Tony Conigliaro who was one of the brightest young stars in the game. This reinforces my point that a lot of things need to go right to go all the way. Those were great teams, but the planets didn't align for them in those years. The same cannot be said of finishing last. You don't need a lot of bad breaks at critical times. You just need to suck and be a poorly constructed team.

I' ll give them credit when things work out as they did in 2013, but they have to take the blame when they go into the crapper. It was no fluke that they finished last in 2014. They lost an all star CF who was an offensive catalyst and replaced him with a guy who would have needed a tremendous hotstreak to cross the Mendoza line. They handed over three starting positions to unproven kids and they had no backup plan except getting Drew after the team was firmly in suckland. And we know how Drew worked out. They went into the season operating without a net. There was no depth. Neither 2013 nor 2014 were flukes and the FO gets the credit and the blame. However, to win it all you need a few more things to go right and have luck shine on you than you need bad breaks to finish last. If Tori Hunter was 2 inches taller or had 2 inch orthodics we never make it to the WS.

To have any pitcher on your team put up one of the top 2 or 3 season performances for a closer is "the planets aligning". He had a season that was a statistical outlier and he had it at age 38. He had a WHIP of 0.565 while striking out101 batters in 2013. The great Mo struck out more than 100 batters once in his career -- in his first full year (1996) when he was a multi inning set up guy. He threw more than 100 innings in 1996. As a closer, he never came close to 100 k's in a year. Also, Koji's strike to ball ratio in 2013 was insane. Has any closer ever come close. Of course it was an ideal year for Koji. It was his " career year". He had it at age 38. Not only will that be his career year, but we will be lucky if we see another guy have a season like that.