Quote:
Originally Posted by KBLover
None of it is luck.
There's no mystical force or such that made the ball hit the glove. There's no mystical force of randomness that makes a fielder fail to get a ball after running 100 feet or that makes a "seeing-eye single" get through. If a fielder is incapable of making that play 98% of the time, that doesn't make the 2% "luck". It just means a better fielder (say Ozzie Smith vs Joe Fielder) would make the play maybe 10% of the time since he has a better skill set.
There's a reason why BABIPs of groundballs hit to different angles is different than others, but I don't think that reason is luck but physical ability (timing, reaction time, reading the ball, able to manipulate his body in ways to get in position) as well as location of the ball (which also is physics - ball hits bat, physics dictates what happens). Some plays will be harder to make than others (harder to field balls, fielder reactions, etc) - that's not luck, imo.
To me, all of that happens based on physics.
Stat models might not can capture this, players might not know "why" they were able to get to the ball, but that doesn't mean the reason it happens is pure luck.
|
This conversation is rather pointless unless the parties involved agree as to a definition of "luck". It seems to me that by your definition, luck doesn't exist anywhere in anything, because everything can always be explained by natural laws (this is an area of much philosophical debate that isn't worth going into here). By this definition, a sudden change in wind in the stadium that affects a high fly ball to either stay in the park or leave it is within the realm of physics, so it's not either lucky or unlucky.
Generally, most people consider luck to be the realm of things that are both out of an individual's control and unable to be reasonably predicted. By this definition, luck can even change depending on the perspective you approach it from. For example, the pitcher can control what pitch he throws and how he throws it. He can predict with some degree of accuracy, based on his knowledge of the batter and location of the pitch, whether or not the batter will swing. However, he can't reasonably predict (for most batter-pitcher combos), when and where the batter will swing. The result is that the location of a batted ball is, from the pitcher's perspective, partially controlled by luck under this definition. The batter may not feel it's luck at all in the sense that he controls when and where to swing, as well as how to pull his hands through the hitting zone (to either influence a pull or a slice on the ball). He's prearmed with the pitch information because he observes the ball coming out of the pitcher's hand. So while he can't control what the pitcher throws, he has enough time to react to the pitch and predict where it's going to go. So by this definition, the batter doesn't have much luck in this interaction. Now some would argue that the batter's ability to react how he wants to the pitch is variable, and he has little control over that variance, so there is still some luck involved from the batter's perspective. At any rate, I think we can agree that by this definition of luck, the aforementioned fly ball being buffetted by the winds meets the criteria of luck for both parties, since neither the batter or pitcher has control over the wind, and neither could have predicted the sudden change.