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Friday, November 13, 2009
JC v Tango?
JC says:
For example, the other day I pointed out an excellent study by economists Jahn Hakes and Skip Sauer that examined baseball’s labor market at Baseball Think Factory . A commenter responded “Tangotiger hates the Hakes & Sauer paper”; I guess I was supposed to defer to him. Anyway, I followed the link and the analysis conducted by the pseudonymous sabermetric icon doesn’t refute the findings at all. He’s plugging in extreme values into a model to make absurd predictions outside the sample for a model that the authors are acknowledging is out-of-whack with what should be. For some reason, this damns the model. I have seen Jahn and Skip present their work several times in front of many economists who are well-versed in the techniques used. It’s been vetted by skilled referees and editors and published in respected academic journals. I’ve read their work closely and talked to them about it.
Yet, what bothers me is not that someone reaches an erroneous conclusion, but that the commenters wholehearted embrace the flawed critique, which it is later parroted across the Internet. No attempt is made to contact the authors, or submit a response to the journal that published the article--a common practice when flaws are discovered after publication. That’s not what this is about, it’s some sort of status game--chest thumping at a safe distance. Sabermetrics (with a big S) has become a club focused on rhetoric, not a serious research program.
I just want to correct him, as he misses the point about the out-of-whack numbers, when in the same thread in the comments I said:
No, the point is how far I have to go to find an equivalent to a .340/.400 player with 400 PA, if I give the other guy 600 PA. Basically, I can’t even find a guy so bad that he would be valued worse than the .340/.400 400 PA guy. It’s not that it breaks down at the extremes, but it simply breaks down period.
As for the rest of the adjectives, I’ll ignore them, if only because we’re just going to be back at the same spot with the same issues. If JC wants a healthy and spirited debate, I’m game.
All that I will focus on is the nice complement he gave me about being a “sabermetric icon”. I can’t wait to use that somewhere!
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