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Thursday, July 24, 2003
baseball v. sabermetrics
steve from oregon:
I loved your take on 'Moneyball'. As a big A's fan I wish the son of a bitch would have never been written. Now every g.m. in baseball is laying to screw up ANY deal that might help the A's. Beanes' sharp but he had fortuna rota swing his way big with the big three and Chavez and Tejada all happening at once at less money per year together than Jeter makes. So when Lewis was wondering how a team with such a small payroll could win so many games, well, THAT'S HOW! I could have told him that and he wouldn't have had to write the book. This year the A's have no drama which is why teams win a lot of games. All that Bill James bullshit is after the fact stuff, like a Mr. Moto solving a murder with clues left behind. The book should have been called 'Mummyball' cause that's how they hit. I'm glad you started a blog.
thanks for the kind words, steve. but i think you're taking my arguments farther than i would. zito mulder hudson chavez tejada (and now byrnes) is some ridiculous luck, but when you build the kind of farm system the a's have, you get more lucky than other teams. so it's a little of both. one thing i'm trying to do here is meld the understanding that baseball people have with the things statistics can tell us. numbers people sometimes say things that are flat wrong, as anyone who played the game knows. but they also sometimes find value where others wouldn't. my goal is to find ways to communicate those values to people without a statistics degree, and also to tell number crunchers when they're idiots. i hope you'll keep reading and let me know how i do.
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