Quote:
Originally Posted by NoOne
nearly every argument as to why not to look at it in this thread is a logical fallacy.
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It's also a logical fallacy to say it's useful because everyone looks at it now. It's an
ad populum fallacy. The argument is MLB teams look at it now, so it must be useful. There's a reason why that fallacy is also called the bandwagon fallacy.
My original question was never answered:
What does it tell us that we didn't already know?
This is from Hank Aaron's book "I Had A Hammer, p.119", writing about Spring Training 1954 before he made the Braves major league roster.
"I cracked one over a row of trailers that bordered the outfield fence-hit it so hard that Ted Williams came running out of the clubhouse wanting to know who it was that could make a bat sound that way when it struck a baseball."
So had we have known the exit velocity of that hit, the evaluation of Aaron in 1954 would have changed...how? For that matter had statcast been around during the time Aaron played it wouldn't have made a dime's worth of difference. No thinking person would have thought any less of him if someone else had a higher average exit velocity.
My issue with advanced metrics and statcast data is the blind acceptance by some adherents without any critical thinking about what it's saying. It's on FanGraphs so hey, it must be valid. I'm sure the math is valid, but that still doesn't mean the data is giving us any new insight. How many different ways are there to say Jacob deGrom was really good last year and Tyler Chatwood wasn't? (even with a reliance on analytics the Cubs still made a huge mistake on Chatwood) No matter how you crunch the numbers, the results will be the same.
Data mining is useful, but that's not advanced analytics. That's simply breaking data down into distributions. Before the Cubs played the Mets in the 2015 NLCS it was pointed out the Cubs had the worst batting average against fastballs 95+. Given that the Mets had hard throwers, that told me the series wouldn't end well for the Cubs and it didn't.
I'm a firm believer in data mining. I have a relative who is brilliant data miner, it's how she makes her living. She also played volleyball in college. Her average spike velocity wasn't that important to know if no one ever blocked them.