THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Obviously agree that experience has an impact on performance.  But I’m not sure that experience improves performance in pennant pressure situations, even minutely.  My bias is that ability to perform well under pressure is primarily a personality trait that is well formed by the time a player reaches the majors.

As I often say, people are human, and so, we must expect some variation and some bias.  I think that if we accept that an 18yr old is better suited to handle pressure than a 14yr old, and a 22yr old is better suited than an 18yr old, then I don’t see much problem is extrapolating that out, even all the way to death (though not necessarily as a straight line).

(As a quasi-related example, a hitter’s and pitcher’s walk rate improve virtually every year until retirement.)

Countering the positive aspect of experience is that the older you get, the more your physical skills diminish.  So, even if older and more experience humans are better equipped to handle pressure, against that backdrop is the physical improvement that someone who is 25 will continue to exhibit every day against someone who is 35 who will continue to diminish in physical tools.

It’s certainly possible that the minute changes here are small enough that basically they will cancel themselves out.

Similar to what I was saying in the other thread from today about creating a baseball model, I think it’s fair to suggest all these parameters, and then it’s a question of trying to create a model that uses these parameters.

The only way to treat a baseball fan as an intelligent observer is to acknowledge that yes clutch hitting exists, yes clogging the bases is real, and yes experience matters.  And then show him how utterly little difference it makes.

Yes, the Padres, a team of humans, still have a chance to make the playoffs.  This is how much they have.

That’s our job here: to show the degree to which something exists or can exist.  Once you make the presentation, we can move on to something else, unless the reader is being a stubborn a$$.  And there’s nothing you do with those guys, other than ignore them as much as possible.

Once you make the presentation, we can move on to something else, unless the reader is being a stubborn a$$.  And there’s nothing you do with those guys, other than ignore them as much as possible.

I will not be ignored!

Seriously, that’s a good perspective, though it’s still fun to talk about whether things “exist” regardless of whether they show up in the stats.  Just maybe not on this blog…