Saturday, May 04, 2013
What is sabremetrics?
?Before I say my one cent, I should say something important, and that is that the 1986 Baseball Abstract is available at Amazon Marketplace for under 10$ including shipping. I count twelve separate sellers, and I'd suggest that any follower of sabermetrics should buy this book right now.
Anyway, back to my one cent. I think the simplest application of what sabremetrics DOES is when Bill James tackled the "is baseball 75% pitching", and he goes out and demonstrates that we don't see any evidence of it, nor does anyone actually behave as if it is. It is, in essence, a summary opinion with no evidence, and sabremetrics basically exposes bullsh!t just as much as it highlights insights. In the aforementioned book, Bill has a very long article on the topic, and I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that that article may have been the one that crystallized for me exactly what sabermetrics was all about:
What is sabremetrics? It challenges you to form your thoughts into a hypothesis, which you can then test, and you test it by finding evidence. Sabremetrics requires that you start with a question. If you already have the answer, and no amount of evidence will change your conclusion, if new data doesn't alter your thinking, then you have no use for sabermetrics."No pitcher allows home runs as often as Dale Murphy hits home runs. No pitcher allows home runs as seldom as Bob Dernier hits home runs. . .No pitcher allows hits as often as Wade Boggs gets hits. No pitcher, not even Dwight Gooden, allows hits as infrequently as Steve Lake will get a hit. . .No pitcher strikes out hitters as often as Rob Deer strikes out. No pitcher strikes out hitters as rarely as Bill Buckner strikes out.
"This is true of every significant area of performance, including those things like walks and hit batsmen, which are usually considered to be controlled by the pitcher. And what does that mean? It means that in order to create a working model or simulation of a baseball game, you must allow the hitters to be the dominant, shaping force in the game. And if baseball were 75% pitching, one would not expect that to be true."
Recent comments
Older comments
Page 1 of 150 pages 1 2 3 > Last ›Complete Archive – By Category
Complete Archive – By Date
FORUM TOPICS
Jul 12 15:22 MarcelsApr 16 14:31 Pitch Count Estimators
Mar 12 16:30 Appendix to THE BOOK - THE GORY DETAILS
Jan 29 09:41 NFL Overtime Idea
Jan 22 14:48 Weighting Years for NFL Player Projections
Jan 21 09:18 positional runs in pythagenpat
Oct 20 15:57 DRS: FG vs. BB-Ref
Apr 12 09:43 What if baseball was like survivor? You are eliminated ...
Nov 24 09:57 Win Attribution to offense, pitching, and fielding at the game level (prototype method)
Jul 13 10:20 How to watch great past games without spoilers