I believe that baseball statistics are a valuable tool. If you make any kind of important baseball decision or develop any key strategy without looking at the history, trends and projections, well, you're using bad judgement.
But there is a reason that the accounting department doesn't have the final say at your corporation. Real life is dynamic. The CEO has to consider the people involved and their skills, a rapidly changing marketplace, risk-reward factors, one-off opportunities, various scenarios, dated statistics, investor ramifications, global warming and a thousand other things that can interact with numbers to make each business situation unique - both short term and long term. In business you don't get to use the excuse of small sample size.
Any long-time professional in any field is going to laugh at you when you come to him or her and tell them how to do their job by some formula you learned at the University. Not because you don't know anything. More like because you have no idea what you don't know.
I admire people like Bill James who change the world and push knowledge forward. But he'll be the first person to tell you that stats are nowhere close to perfect and that the science is still evolving.
So how do all these sabre kids, teenagers and college students running around the Internet feel like they can look you straight in the computer screen and tell you, you know nothing and they know everything.
Well, let's see, there's "youth is wasted on the young?" Parental mismanagement? Alien pods?
What these Internet sabre people ARE good at is Beating Dead Horses. OMG! They CAN beat themselves SOME dead horses.
Over at Mike Scoscia's Tragic Illness the author is once rolling out his Billingsley is every bit as good as Chris Capuano nonsense. Why? Because the advanced metrics he subscribes to say so. And he's in a snit because those dumb baseball fans give too much credit to Capuano and his 9-2 record. Why? Because wins and ERA don't matter. And poor Chad is every bit as good and those advanced metrics prove it. Darn them.
It shows once again the utter nonsense of some baseball stat analysis. Billingsley is a talented underachiever. I like him a lot as a No. 4 starter. Capuano has little stuff but he knows how to pitch. An overachiever. Don't forget he's been an All-Star and he's come back from two major arm surgeries. You don't lose your smarts and competitiveness. And you can't teach it to someone who doesn't have it.
Tragic Illness finally did admit that if he had one game to win he'd probably choose Capuano over Billingsley grudgingly. Oh Really. Well so would every baseball person on Earth. Join the party. Those ridiculous stats used in the CHAD argument would mean almost nothing in making that choice. Capuano is not a great pitcher and will never be one. But he gives you a much better chance of winning. He starts ahead of Billingsly in the playoffs why? Because he's the obvious baseball choice. Not the statistical choice.
In yesterday's game Capuano was out of gas in the fifth inning but kept pitching shutout baseball. The stat kids will say that was lucky and we can prove it with our pitching luck stat. He may have been lucky but what he really was, was a tough competitor. Chad would have probably been all in, all done in the 5th inning.
Heart and brains can't be simulated in a stat. Some guy in the Tragic Illness chat room said, "The least valuable measure of a baseball player is heart,'' trying to make fun of people using the term to describe a player. I would say if you don't know what heart is and means, then yeah, it's useless, TO YOU.
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