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Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!dpb
From: dpb@philabs.UUCP (Paul Benjamin)
Newsgroups: net.sport.baseball
Subject: baseball stats
Message-ID: <432@philabs.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 28-Aug-85 11:43:05 EDT
Article-I.D.: philabs.432
Posted: Wed Aug 28 11:43:05 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 30-Aug-85 00:20:46 EDT
Distribution: na
Organization: Philips Labs, Briarcliff Manor, NY
Lines: 50


VanHandelDJ writes:

> I was going to write a long, in-depth response to some of your
> arguments, Paul.  But after seeing this bit of reasoning, I decided not
> to waste my time.  Maybe if you started hanging around with high school
> freshman more often, you'd learn something.
> Like most of the rest of what you wrote, it makes no sense.  David
> Rubin and myself never claimed to know more than the experts.  But at least
> we can support our claims with SOMETHING.
> It must be easy to win arguments when you can say that nothing
> supports the other person's side; therefore your opinion is correct.

Excuse me for wasting your time, but perhaps you can teach a little old
Ph. D. like me some math :-)? Perhaps if you had been in my class when I taught
prob & stat you would have learned a bit more about it. Like EVERYTHING
you wrote above, you make no points at all. I can support my reasoning
with something, too. It's just that you choose to ignore stats which
favor my side. Is that objective? Are you saying that all people who support
Pena have nothing to support their opinions? Other people voted for him
to start the all-star game, too. Are only your opinons supportable?

OBA is not the best stat. Where is the proof of that? For one thing,
it needn't correlate with runs scored by the team. Being on base
doesn't mean being in scoring position. It also doesn't take into
account such things as taking extra bases or stealing them. Also,
OBA doesn't include getting on base via errors. Even if this happens
only once every hundred at bats, it's ten points on the OBA. This is
significant relevant to the size of difference in OBA between Carter
and Pena. (If you love OBA so much, you must love Jason Thompson. He
is always among the league leaders in OBA. However, I bet that Tanner
would love to trade a lot of those walks for some RBI hits.)

It's true, you never claimed that you knew more than the experts. But
Rubin did! Check what he said. He even extended it to other fields. He
feels that statistical analysis can prove something. It can't. My point
was that I can easily compute stats that favor Pena. It is also possible
to compute stats that favor Carter, or Jody Davis. His bias is clear,
since he chooses OBA over BA, when Carter's edge in OBA amounts to
geteting on base 10 or so more times a year, then chooses to ignore
Pena's edge in speed, which he computes to give Pena a similarly small
edge.

My statement about opinion is not that nothing supports the other side.
Again, I wish you would read my postings instead of making up something.
I stated that his opinions are certainly no better than mine. We are all
amateurs in baseball - merely spectators. To presume to be able to
judge the opinions of professionals is ludicrous. I used this argument
to justify my acceptance of the opinions that Pena is better defensively,
based upon his Gold Glove.