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Sunday, January 01, 2012
Ron Polk
Somewhere in this, I can easily find a common place to agree with Ron Polk. Take for example:
Here are a few examples of the ‘math’ complaints and the ‘baseball’ answers: Why one point deducted for a strikeout swinging and two points deducted for a strike out looking? They’re both one out.: A perfectly legitimate math complaint, but the two strikeouts are different to ballplayers. With two strikes the hitters is expected to expand his zone, stop being picky and try to get the ball in play. A strike out looking does not give the hitter or his team a chance and is considered by many coaches to be bad baseball.
One way to think about this (and really, the way to think about EVERYTHING) is inference. We don’t care about the results, when trying to figure out a player’s true talent level. An out is NOT an out, when you think of his talent level.
Now, is a caught looking strikeout somehow worse (or better) than a swinging strikeout? Well, this is what we have to research. What if most swinging strikeouts are on pitches outside the strikezone? I have more faith in Tony Gwynn having a strikeout swinging than Andres Galarraga. That is, a Tony Gwynn strikeout swinging is a better than for Big Cat, in terms of what it tells us about the hitters. Indeed, maybe Big Cat needs to have more caught looking strikeouts, because he swings at so many pitches outside the strikezone with two strikes.
Anyway, there’s definitely legitimate viewpoints here, and it’s just a matter of trying to synthesize it into “truths”.
There is NO reason to argue here as if there’s a final opinion that is somehow some assumption of fact. We are in the research and learning stage here.