dpb@philabs.UUCP (Paul Benjamin) (08/28/85)
VanHandelDJ writes: > I was going to write a long, in-depth response to some of your > arguments, Paul. But after seeing this bit of reasoning, I decided not > to waste my time. Maybe if you started hanging around with high school > freshman more often, you'd learn something. > Like most of the rest of what you wrote, it makes no sense. David > Rubin and myself never claimed to know more than the experts. But at least > we can support our claims with SOMETHING. > It must be easy to win arguments when you can say that nothing > supports the other person's side; therefore your opinion is correct. Excuse me for wasting your time, but perhaps you can teach a little old Ph. D. like me some math :-)? Perhaps if you had been in my class when I taught prob & stat you would have learned a bit more about it. Like EVERYTHING you wrote above, you make no points at all. I can support my reasoning with something, too. It's just that you choose to ignore stats which favor my side. Is that objective? Are you saying that all people who support Pena have nothing to support their opinions? Other people voted for him to start the all-star game, too. Are only your opinons supportable? OBA is not the best stat. Where is the proof of that? For one thing, it needn't correlate with runs scored by the team. Being on base doesn't mean being in scoring position. It also doesn't take into account such things as taking extra bases or stealing them. Also, OBA doesn't include getting on base via errors. Even if this happens only once every hundred at bats, it's ten points on the OBA. This is significant relevant to the size of difference in OBA between Carter and Pena. (If you love OBA so much, you must love Jason Thompson. He is always among the league leaders in OBA. However, I bet that Tanner would love to trade a lot of those walks for some RBI hits.) It's true, you never claimed that you knew more than the experts. But Rubin did! Check what he said. He even extended it to other fields. He feels that statistical analysis can prove something. It can't. My point was that I can easily compute stats that favor Pena. It is also possible to compute stats that favor Carter, or Jody Davis. His bias is clear, since he chooses OBA over BA, when Carter's edge in OBA amounts to geteting on base 10 or so more times a year, then chooses to ignore Pena's edge in speed, which he computes to give Pena a similarly small edge. My statement about opinion is not that nothing supports the other side. Again, I wish you would read my postings instead of making up something. I stated that his opinions are certainly no better than mine. We are all amateurs in baseball - merely spectators. To presume to be able to judge the opinions of professionals is ludicrous. I used this argument to justify my acceptance of the opinions that Pena is better defensively, based upon his Gold Glove.
dpb@philabs.UUCP (Paul Benjamin) (08/28/85)
VanHandelDJ writes: > We don't believe stats are everything (as you seem to think), > but they are obviously better than nothing. 1) Statistics can be misleading, and thus worse than nothing. 2) Personal observations (forming your own subjective opinion) is not nothing. 3) Reading and accepting expert opinion is not nothing. > Where do you think expert opinion comes from? If you were a dcotor, you > would probably use untested medicine just because you think (for no apparent > reason) that it should work. You say you don't believe in stats; would you > try a medicine that caused cancer in half the test group it was tried on? Expert opinion does not just come from statistics. This is the point that you fail to grasp. Experts have knowledge of the domain that may not be apparent to you, but nonetheless exists. It is quite possible for an expert to feel that an experiment has failed because its results did not agree with his preconceptions. Sometimes he is right, sometimes not. Rubin earlier stated that since experts disagree, who is to say that they are really experts. Again, this shows a lack of knowledge about expert knowledge. Experts often disagree, and this in no way decreases their ability. If you worked with experts, extracting their knowledge to put it in a program, you would see this. >> Rubin feels that statistics explain. > You say this; he never did - I never did. Oh yes he did. You didn't. If he didn't feel this, he would never quarrel with expert opinion. He would instead ask experts for their explanations about the differences between Carter and Pena. But he doesn't wish to do this. He computes statistics instead, (and only those stats which can be computed based on the data made public). He even explicitly states that he feels he knows more than the professionals, that his stats give him more knowledge than they, so that his opinions are more accurate. If stats don't explain, then where has his knowledge come from, God? >>> Who's to say this is subjective. Any good manager will base >>> his decision on the results obtained by past performance. >> >>Of course it's subjective. Different managers have different >>opinions of a player. This is based upon knowledge that they have >>that we cannot possibly obtain, such as "This batter has trouble >>with curveballs over the outside part of the plate from left-handers, >>and I think I know how to correct that." >> >But how do they KNOW these things - at least part of it, many times a large >part of it - is from past performance stats. No! They have accurate detailed info about players and situations. For example, when a new player from the minors comes to bat for the other team, they don't look at stat books for his numbers, they ask players and coaches who have seen him in the minors about him, to determine how to pitch to him. The stats for this knowledge, such as "this player hits low outside curves 15% better than he does low inside curves", is not available. An immediate example which comes to mind is when, years ago, Tug McGraw was brought in to face the Pirates, in a game late in the season (a season in which Pgh was contending, and won.) The manager, instead of sending up a right-handed pinch-hitter, sent up John Milner, reasoning that Milner's type of swing would be particularly effective against the screwball. Now, stats for managers were less prevalent then, and at any rate, there are few screwball pitchers, and Milner hadn't faced McGraw in years, since he had just come from the American League. He hit a grand slam, winning a very important game. Now, I am NOT saying that stats aren't important. I am saying that they don't tell the whole story, and that expert opinion often is not based on statistical data, so that you, Rubin, and I can be no more than knowledgeable fans at best. Our opinions CANNOT be, on the whole, better than or equal to those of the pros. > So then we agree. The right stats ARE valuable. And the best available > stats to the regular fan are OB Pct and Slugging Pct. If you have not finally > agreed with this, then you never will no matter how good the reasoning is. If you knew anything about reasoning, you would know that you are making a metatheoretical argument. That is, you are not arguing about stats, but about the relationship betewen the model that any group of stats constitute, and the actual game. We can easily agree that stats are valuable without agree on which stats are best. I have seen no good reason to accept OBA and Slugging pct as "the best available stats." There are many facets of the game which are totally ignored by those numbers, such as avoiding double plays, causing errors, driving in runs with sac flies or groundouts, advancing runners with sac bunts or by hitting behind the runner, taking the extra base (whether by stealing or by daring baserunning). By modeling baseball with OBA and slugging, you are ignoring too much. You are right, I will never accept these stats as the best. If they are, then stats truly are useless. > I'll admit a hit is more valuable than a walk, but I will not agree > that batting avg is more indicative of offensive contribution than OB Pct. I never made the statement that it was. Rubin has been making the blanket statements about stats modeling baseball. I feel that some players are valuable for their OBA (Rickey Henderson, especially before he becamea HR hitter), and some are valuable for hits. Others (Phil Garner) contribute a disproportionate amount of the other things - advancing runners, etc. You seem to be misunderstanding my position on stats. I quoted stats on Parker and Carter vs. Pena (only for 1984, Mr. Rubin - I never said Pena was better in 1975) only to make the point that Pena does produce some good numbers. My position is that ANY simplistic statistical model, which pretends to take global statistics and apply them to all individuals, is doomed to be wrong very often. Of course Batting Avg. is not the best stat. Nor is OBA, nor slugging pct. not amount of strikeouts, etc. My point is that each player must be considered in the context of his team, and the contribution to it. Pena is leading the team in game-winning hits once again (I know Rubin thinks this stat is meaningless, he must think Pena's constant game-winning contribution is a coincidence.) Ask yourself one question: "If Pena and Carter were both on the same team, which one would be catching, and which one would be in left field?"