Quote:
Originally Posted by ctorg
I think most SABR stats are meant as predictors rather than descriptors. The overall general goal of sabermetrics, as far as it has one, has been to create a model that will predict what a player will do in the future. Not that every measure is aimed at this, but in general, sabermetrics came about as a way of beating other fantasy baseball players by figuring out a way to predict performance. Its biggest value is in its ability to say, "Yes, you should sign that guy" or "that's a bad trade" or something like that, not in its ability to look back at a season and say, "This was the best guy that year."
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No and yes. SABR stats are designed to do both.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ctorg
Now, there are some measures aimed at doing that, but the thing is, you can always make a good argument that opportunity for accomplishment is not relevant to the fact of accomplishment. IOW, it doesn't matter how much of a chance someone has to do something, only whether they did it or not.
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Correct. This is a basic principle of SABR stats.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ctorg
This doesn't work for predicting the future, but it works for rating the past, and that is where traditional stats people can legitimately argue that their way is better, although I still tend to favor sabermetrics personally.
It's a matter of philosophy rather than logic, in a way.
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No, it's not. Do you really simply want to say the guy with more RBIs was better without considering that stat is largely controlled by his team-mates? Really, until we get over this, we can't advance our understanding very far.
SABR stats will tell you what it was the
player did. In other words, it will tell you which player was better, for his team, in real life. Not in a vacuum.
Casey Blake and Grady Sizemore had the same number of RBIs last year.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ctorg
When we want to judge who the richest person is, we can simply look at who has the most money. When we want to judge who has the best ability to make more money, we need to set up theoretical predictive models. Traditional stats are the equivalent to figuring out who the richest person is. One doesn't take into account luck or opportunity or talent or anything. It's all about how much money there is. While it may hint at someone's ability to generate money, there is no way of seeing through the other factors.
So if you want the baseball equivalent of figuring out who the richest person is, you go with traditional stats. If you want the baseball equivalent of figuring out who is best at generating money, you go with sabermetrics.
It's not a perfect analogy (iie. the goal in baseball isn't to get the best stats, but to contribute to wins, and while these are related, they are not the same thing), but it's the best simple one I can think of.
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And you've just made a strong case for SABRmetrics and why traditional stats are nice but don't really begin to tell the whole picture.