from Amazon
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
Aristotle, Casablanca, and Win Probability?
Very cool article by Colin.
Because in the narrative, clutch hitting does have to exist. If you’re trying to boil a ballgame down to a simple narrative… then you are boiling the game down to a handful of plays, and thus making those plays stand in for the entire game. You create heroes and villains, successes and failures, tragedies and comedies. In the narrative, you have to have clutch. Have to.
• Sabermetrics
• Clutch
Thanks for posting a link to this. If what I say below makes no sense, remember that I came to Casablance for the waters.
Really enjoyed this. Saw it mentioned at tangotiger’s blog. I have heard that human beings are hardwired for narrative, that our brains like it or recognize it. I don’t know if that comes from evolution or something else. Maybe being hardwired for narrative helps us make sense of a complicated world (as numbers do). Maybe both approaches add something to that understanding in a different way.
I have heard that a myth is “a lie on the outside but true on the inside.” As Steven Landsburg wrote in the book “The Armchair Economist,” there never was a hare who raced a tortoise but the moral that slow and steady wins the race is often true.
A good, clear story is a model of reality. And equations are models of reality. I don’t know which one works better. They both illuminate but perhaps in different ways.