Quote:
Originally Posted by lukasberger
I'm quite a saber guy, but in the end, when it comes down to a choice between guys who merely look at things theoretically and those who look at things both theoretically and practically, I'm going to go with the opinions of the latter, especially when those guys also have as good or better credentials as the purely theoretical guys.
Sure, some old school baseball guys may lack the knowledge and education to make analytically sound decisions. But you can't say that about guys like Friedman, Epstein, Luhnow, Alderson etc, who have both the academic credentials with their degrees from Ivy League schools, as well as a wealth of practical baseball experience.
That's not to say they can't be wrong of course, or that an outsider can't be right, but overall I don't see any reason to automatically assume it's the outsiders that are right on some of these questions.
As for base coaches, I'd say some of what they contribute is certainly more in coaching and intangibles than simply in quantifiable baserunning gains or losses.
In the end, as you fairly allude to, the problem I have with a lot of the arguments against chemistry, leadership etc. is that there seems to be an assumption that because something is difficult or impossible to quantify, that it doesn't matter or doesn't exist.
Whereas the much more intellectually sound approach is simply to admit that the issue is with our inability to find a way to measure certain things, more than to assume that something we can't measure simply doesn't exist.
Hundreds of years ago we had no way to measure the effects of gravity, yet that didn't make it any less real or less vital. It's doubtless the same with a great deal of things we're currently unable to quantify or at least to quantify accurately.
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This could certainly be true, but I'm uncomfortable with
include a feature that will impact certain aspects of the game play despite there is no evidence that such feature actually do have an impact. Especially
if it's impacting something that can be actually measured.
Say if you argue that if a team with a good base-coaches that its player are slightly more likely to have a higher baserunning or steal rating, I can get the idea behind that, but I'm uncomfortable with the idea that a base-coaches will impact
my success rate of stealing bases in game unless, of course, you can show data that support that it's indeed the case.