from Amazon
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Does Tony LaRussa hate MGL or Ron Shandler?
“I’ve been sat down and told they can give me a better way to do everything,” Tony La Russa… describing the statistics crowd. “They really are convinced that they can sit there and crunch out a formula that negates my power of observation. “It’s been a little irritating, because there’s a certain arrogance with that whole group.”
But he closes it off with:
“The ‘Moneyball’ kind of stuff has its place, but so does the human,” La Russa said by telephone from Pittsburgh. “Really, the combination is the answer.”
Which is exactly what I’ve been preaching when I say that the pinnacle of sabermetrics is the convergence of performance analysis and scouting observations. Theo Epstein described it best when he said he sees each side as the lenses of his glasses.
What is really out of place are guys who crunch numbers, but don’t know how to (like giving me the ingredients to making my mother’s sauce… unless you tell me exactly how to mix them, for how long, and what else I need to do, it will only be passable at best). Or the yappers who cook a sauce without even being given the list of ingredients; they just know in their guts how it should come out. This is your Steve Phillips and Bill O’Reilly.