THE BOOK cover
The Unwritten Book is Finally Written!
An in-depth analysis of: The sacrifice bunt, batter/pitcher matchups, the intentional base on balls, optimizing a batting lineup, hot and cold streaks, clutch performance, platooning strategies, and much more.
Read Excerpts & Customer Reviews
If you are a media member and would like a review copy of The Book, please contact Kevin Cuddihy of Potomac Books.

Buy The Book from Amazon

MOST RECENT ARTICLES
MAIL : You ask | We say

Advanced


THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Filter posts by...

 

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Does Tony LaRussa hate MGL or Ron Shandler?

By Tangotiger, 02:06 PM

LaRussa says:

“I’ve been sat down and told they can give me a better way to do everything,” Tony La Russa… describing the statistics crowd. “They really are convinced that they can sit there and crunch out a formula that negates my power of observation.  “It’s been a little irritating, because there’s a certain arrogance with that whole group.”

But he closes it off with:

“The ‘Moneyball’ kind of stuff has its place, but so does the human,” La Russa said by telephone from Pittsburgh. “Really, the combination is the answer.”

Which is exactly what I’ve been preaching when I say that the pinnacle of sabermetrics is the convergence of performance analysis and scouting observations.  Theo Epstein described it best when he said he sees each side as the lenses of his glasses.

What is really out of place are guys who crunch numbers, but don’t know how to (like giving me the ingredients to making my mother’s sauce… unless you tell me exactly how to mix them, for how long, and what else I need to do, it will only be passable at best).  Or the yappers who cook a sauce without even being given the list of ingredients; they just know in their guts how it should come out.  This is your Steve Phillips and Bill O’Reilly.

(12) Comments • 2008/02/01 • SabermetricsMLB_Management
Page 1 of 1 pages

Latest...

COMMENTS

Dec 03 13:52
Sabermetric Moves of the 2009 Pre-Season

Dec 03 16:28
Avery being Avery

Dec 03 16:17
How to calculate the area of a baseball field

Dec 03 16:14
What would happen if the shootout period was 10 minutes, not 5?

Dec 03 14:50
The Return of the Baseball Abstract?  No, the next best thing…

Dec 03 14:48
Estimating BABIP

Dec 03 13:58
NYC’s 3 1/2 year mandatory jail time sentence for carrying a loaded weapon

Dec 03 10:42
What was Pedro worth?

Dec 03 10:20
Complete Run Expectancy, Retrosheet Years

Dec 02 23:36
The Holy Writers strike again!

THREADS

January 15, 2008
Does Tony LaRussa hate MGL or Ron Shandler?