from Amazon
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Experience, schmexperience
I’ve got a two-year WPA list for batters involved in pennant races, broken out by age and time period (before and during the pressure-filled months).
As you can guess, nothing there. I have no doubt that there will be something there. (For example, in The Book, I noted that there is an age effect with a runner on 1B. Young hitters aren’t as smart in taking advantage of the hole.) However, whatever we find will be some isolated skillset, something that will be real, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s like finding a 50-foot tree in a forest of 30-foot trees. So, yes, it’s something real, it’s something noticeable, but when you’ve got a forest full of 30-foot trees, if you happen to find a 50-foot tree, it’s not like you’ve found a forest of 50-foot trees.
I’m good at data entry with the numeric keypad. Really really good. Or was anyway at one point. My fingers would fly over those numbers. But, when it came to typing words, and using the letters on the keyboard, I’d be average. If you gave me 20 papers to type, and 19 was for a lawyer and 1 was for an accountant, I’d fly on one of them. But, if all I get to do is expose my real skill 5% of the time, then won’t it be really hard to find that skill if you have 100 people’s results to look at, and you didn’t realize, or think to realize, that one paper might be filled with numbers? And even if you did think to find it, you realize, “eh… it’s real, but it comes to play so little… how the heck am I supposed to find it?”