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Friday, June 17, 2011
Ignorance is bliss… but, bad analysis is hell
I agree with Will.
I can’t get excited by a hit-and-run, even when it works, because I know that in a macro sense, it’s bad strategy. I can’t even trade for a closer in my fantasy league anymore without feeling guilty, knowing that saves are just managing to the stat and that today’s managers are frighteningly inefficient in their bullpen usage. I mean, how do you make someone feel guilty for a fantasy baseball transaction? That’s nuts. But the more I learn, the sillier I feel, sometimes, watching one individual baseball game. After all, one game is a small sample size.
And I wish I didn’t know what I know. I was once at a game where Marquis Grissom led off the bottom of the 10th (tie game), and he hit it in the gap, and as he’s rounding third, I’m thinking “Are you crazy? Do you know what’s going to happen to the win expectancy if you are thrown out?” He scored, and hit an inside the park home run. It was a beautiful thing to watch, to throw caution to the win, and the crowd was huge that night ($1 hot dog Tuesday or something). Top of the order, no outs, fastest runner in the league on third base, bottom of 10th, tied game, and the 1994 Murderers Row due up… how crazy do you have to be to try to score on an inside the parker, rather than just wait there?
Against knowledge that diminished the experience for me somewhat was the complete silliness you get from people trying to interpret what numbers mean. Those things hurt my head. It’s completely unnecessary to see Jim Bowden’s article as he wrote. If we could stop the bad use of numbers, then I would be happy to stop publishing and thinking sabermetric thoughts. But the bad use of numbers is an escalation of war that needs to be countered and shot down, and if we have to use knowledge, logic and rational thought to do that, at the expense of blissful ignorance, then that’s the price to pay.
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