from Amazon
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
The Satisfaction Deflation Rate
I disagee with Patriot that this is a freak show stat. Baseball-Fever is filled with freak show stats. This is not one of them.
What makes this not a freak-show stat is that it attempts to quantify something real: our satisfaction with our team. In short, how much of your soul would you sell for a moment in time? Patriot posits a 3% satisfaction deflation rate. If the 1994 Expos went on to the World Series, would the debacle that followed have been acceptable? In short, could they have lived life in Miami from 1998-2002, if they got 1997 out of it?
I think it’s a definite worthwhile exercice, and it’s also personal. Each person will have his own satisfaction deflation rate for regular season wins and losses, as well as for playoffs and World Series.
The process makes it legitimate, even if the expression of the units themselves don’t have a meaning.
It is something of a freak show stat in that in that it measures something very subjective and variable (people’s feelings toward something), but then again, I work with measures of feelings all the time. I’ve seen widely accepted ones that are developed on much less logic than this.