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Thursday, August 12, 2010
Ted Williams, saberist
TW: I’ve been a very lucky guy. Even I know how lucky I’ve been, especially in my baseball career. Anybody who thinks he’s had great success or outstanding success, he’s a lucky guy. You’re damn right.
...
Somebody will hit .400, maybe .410 or .415. Oh, you bet. It’s a hard thing to do. Ya gotta be lucky. Baseball might be a little tougher today. They bring in a new pitcher any old time. Ya gotta go through that whole ritual again of trying to find out as much as ya can on six pitches. Ya hit at him four times, ya got a chance of gettin’ him locked in a little better.
And Kincaid finishes it off:
The same honesty let him publish his chart saying that he was only truly a .400 hitter on the very fattest of pitches, and saying that if the pitcher could paint the lower-outside corner perfectly against him, he could be reduced to a .230 hitter. Part of that honesty is that Williams had the sense to understand that no matter how great he was, his greatness was enabled by good fortune along the way, and that no amount of greatness can erase the role of chance and luck in the game. It’s that honest pursuit of objective knowledge of the game that makes Ted Williams a perfect pioneer in the field of sabermetrics. He looked for the truth of the game around him and learned to understand its workings, and then he very matter-of-factly presented the truths he learned with no bias toward his own career or his teammates or anything other than what he saw to be true. And that, in essence, is sabermetrics.
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