Quote:
Originally Posted by olivertheorem
Yes, because it doesn't matter if the data shows that sacrifice bunts tend to lead to fewer runs scored overall. Baseball people (managers, etc.) are never wrong.
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LOL! The data do not control for all possible factors, such as the individual skills of the basreunners, the relative bunting ability of the batters, the fielding ability of the players involved in each play, the hitting capabilities of the subsequent batters, the amount of practice spent on these plays, the relative differences in focus on these plays across eras, etc. So it's absolutely fallacious to make the claims that they do on the basis of such shoddy analysis and experimentation.
Until they control for all factors, they have proven absolutely nothing. They can claim some vague correlation that they believe they've found in macro-level statistics, but this is weak and their work doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
I'm hardly impressed by crunching numbers after the fact with severe limits and a lack of proper experimental controls.
Also, these cute statistical exercises don't deal with fundamental issues such as the incompleteness of mathematics and the epistemic and metaphysical problems with the very notion of probability. They also don't deal with the skeptical problem of the baseless assumption that past results are somehow indicative of future occurrences. But the non-starter is with their methodology, which is sorely lacking experimentally.
So, sorry, I'm unmoved by the so-called 'data'. Let these people actually meet a proper standard of epistemic proof and reliability, and then I'll buy it.