THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

It’s almost worth paying the $40 just to tell these guys what solipsistic asshats they can be.

He is right about one thing:  If your discussion is limited to subscribers, then of course it will weed out 99% of the noise.  Who is going to pay $40 for a hard-core baseball site and then be an ass who knows little about baseball?

You know, I can’t have 2 JC threads.  I’m moving all JC-related comments to the other thread.  Sorry, my bad.

Will,

I’d like to invite you to send me ten questions in the same spirit as Mike Silva, who was decidedly saber-perplexed.  (Did you read that thread?  If not, don’t do it until you make up your questions.  It’s better for you to be fresher.)

So, any saber questions you have, anything that confuses you, that perplexes you, that you outright even dismiss.  Any of them.  You’ve often said that you’ve been looking for that SABR 101 type of book.  Well, this is your chance.  I’m calling you out here: you said you’ve been wanting that SABR 101, you said that you want to lead the discussion.  Here I am.

I’ll even let you post the entire Q&A on your site, on the condition that anything I say, and you say, remains unedited.  And that it is not part of premium.

Tom

Will declined.

Will, actually, there would be no one better than you.  You would be the perfect person for this.  You read the ten Mike Silva Chronicles threads, and tell me that I’m wrong:

http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/category/Mailbag/

If you still disagree, then you forward my email to the group, and have someone step forward.

Tom

to be continued…

The end.

colintj:

“One of the wonderful elements of a research-oriented community is that you can have robust debates, as certainly occurred/is occurring on Bradbury’s article, without excluding people because you disagree with their conclusion.”

Yeah and apparently they’ve been happening without you. It is not my argument that JC is wrong therefore he’s dishonest. I’ve witnessed it over the course of however long The Book Blog and JC have been having their back and forth. All I did was read. His problems are obvious enough to me and I’m no expert. Tom and Mitchell are and they agree with me. So does Colin Wyers. Where are JC’s expert defenders? Patriot, Sean Smith, Jinaz, Phil Birnbaum, various THTers, the new hires, etc. Where do they stand? If they stand at all, it’s not with JC. If you weighted everyone’s answer equally, JC would not come close to winning. But that’s exactly the opposite of BP’s approach here, which privileges JC’s argument for BP readers.

In case you’re skeptical, I did a quick search on my google reader. Here’s Tango and commenters on JC and replacement level, from 2008:

http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/even_more_about_replacement_level

It’s pretty obvious whoever signed off on this didn’t talk to Colin Wyers.

If all BP had done was consistently link to the Book Blog, you’d be right there with the rest of us, as there’s basically no one left defending JC. That, in fact, includes MGL, who started off assuming that JC could not possibly be making the elementary mistakes he was. Since then JC has been in the business of obfuscation, to the point where it’s evident he’s certainly not above wielding his status in service of his project.

Will says that he’d “love it if BP became the pulpit for discussion again.” The title of the post is “Leading the Discussion”. It’s not like the discussion stopped while BP neglected to make the most of its proximity to the discussion (Moneyball came out in 2003). They dropped the ball when it came to the opportunity to lead the discussion. Thus when they wanted to start it back up, they came up with JC instead of any dozen better candidates, including folks on their own staff.

If they see it at all as part of their mission to keep their readers up to date on the latest sabermetric research, then they’ve simply failed in the recent past.

For example, it’s weird in and of itself that there’s no standard Link Roundup style post on a daily basis that links out to the best content beyond the site. Everyone does this. Links connect the nodes of the internet and create opportunities for community-building around related nodes. The Unfiltered blog would be a perfect place to start linking to THT, TBB, Baseball Analysts, BTF, etc.

That’s probably the most basic step and BP hasn’t taken it. How many interns have they had over the years that could easily handle such a task?

Yowza.  Tough words.  Tough but fair.  We need more of that.

And yeah, I love the stuff Tommy Bennett was doing at BtB in terms of linking elsewhere, like Neyer does.  Now that he’s over at BPro, let’s hope he can exert himself…

Right, Tommy should be doing a link post in Unfiltered every day.  It’s not like he’d just be plugging other saber sites either.  Tommy always finds interesting articles about game theory or economics or statistics.

Again, I’m not sure why BP is being lambasted.  I don’t see that they did anything wrong.  They published a controversial article by someone who has his own sabernomic blog and is a college professor and an econometrician.  Sites like BP and THT don’t really “vet” their articles in terms of having a sabermetric expert go over them with a fine-tooth comb, I don’t think, nor should they.  They will have good and bad articles and everything in between.

FWIW, they (Kevin Goldstein) asked me if I wanted to write a similar/follow-up/rebuttal article on the same topic.  I told him that I already wrote one for THT. I am not sure if he is aware of that.  I have not received a response from him yet.  I don’t think it is appropriate to publish the same article on two sites like that.  Maybe I am wrong though.  I certainly don’t have any contractual agreement with THT that I am aware of and I certainly did not give up the rights to the article.  Of course if THT did not want me to publish the article on another “competing” web site, I would me more than happy to comply. I would do the same for BP if I wrote an article originally for them.

"Again, I’m not sure why BP is being lambasted.  I don’t see that they did anything wrong. “

My view is that they could have introduced JC’s article as the minority view, of a larger conversation happening online.  The EXACT reason the first asked him to do the article.

Instead, you have thousands of BPro readers who don’t know about the issue who see JC’s article and think that it’s “da bomb”.  And virtually none of them clicked to read your article.

They didn’t do anything “wrong,” but there is something certainly distasteful about joining a discussion several years late, promoting the least popular POV of the discussion as if it’s new ground, and then, when the inevitable debate manifests in the comments, patting yourself on the back for “leading the discussion” on the topic. 

Maybe it’s not “wrong” but it certainly makes me want to ignore them even more than I already do.

#10 and #11, makes sense, given that they were (presumably) aware of the ongoing discussion about JC’s work on aging on other blogs (here and on Phil’s and JC’s).