THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I have my doubts about people like Will Carrol.  This offseason he said that Chad Billingsley and the Dodgers were hiding a major injury.  Billingsley a K/9 of almost 14 at this point.  The sources feeding him info don’t seem especially reliable.  vr, Xeifrank

I don’t follow the injury stuff much, but I put it in the same category as the pitching and batting mechanics analysis.

By that, I mean, until there are studies that suggest that what they tell us is true and useful (over and above the obvious of course), it means nothing.

Isn’t that they way science works?

Now, to be fair, and since I admittedly don’t follow these areas, there may already be such studies.  Are there?

If not, why should we believe anything these guys tell us?  Or, probably more accurately, what should we believe and what should we not believe?

If you didn’t know anything about sports handicappers, sports commentators in general, and stock market and other financial “experts” you would believe them too, as they sound like they know what they are talking about, and they are truly experts, “information-wise.” The problem is that you need to be an expert (or find someone who is) to PROCESS that information.  For example, the stock market guys know more about companies, the market, and financial markets than I ever will, and they are truly experts in those fields, “information-wise.”

But what exposes them are the scientific studies, which say that they cannot predict the market, even though that is what they purport to do, and that it is difficult if not impossible, for any one individual to have much skill in beating the market overall.

And of course, you can find 100 sports handicappers who know more about sports and handicapping than most people will ever know, yet, 99% of them cannot do better than a dart board.

Scientific studies are the great equalizer.  So until there are such studies (and maybe there are but I am not aware of them) looking at what these injury and mechanics guys have to say, no matter what kind of expertise they seem to have, and I am sure it is a lot, what they say means nothing to me.  Nothing.  No more than some yapper on Bloomberg TV or CNN or Fox who tells me which way the market is likely to go in the next day, year, or month.

So that’s what became of the Nando guy from Fantasyland.

MGL, Victor Wang did a recent study here in our blog whereby I basically concluded that most of it was unreliable.  I’ll find the link later this morning.

Post 27 has a summary and interpretation of the data provided earlier in that thread:
http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/forecasting_injuries/#27

And in post 29 I said:

Unless someone wants to challenge me on it, my conclusions are:

1. All hitters get the same light, unless you want to pick out a tiny minority (less than 10%) as Green, and a similar minority as Red.

2. All pitchers get either a Yellow or Red light, split pretty closely to 50/50.

I think that there’s two separate roles here. There is not a Will Carroll, for example - there is Will Carroll, reporter, and Will Carroll, analyst. As a reporter - let’s go ahead and clarify this as a clearinghouse/aggregator of information - Carroll is very well-sourced, and provides a lot of information that you don’t find through other outlets.

It’s when he moves into analysis/prognostication that I don’t think he’s adding a lot of value. His red/yellow/green light system is practically useless to me - any system that rates Carlos Zambrano the same as Mark Prior is doing something wrong. There is absolutely no way that you can make the correct decision about anything if you view Zambrano and Prior as the same when it comes to injury risk. Either his system is flat-out broken or his reporting methods are too vague to have any meaning.