Bob: No offense but I doubt that one has had to have heard of the statistical approach you presented to have an intuitive feel for what you are talking about. I think most of the "old time players" knew and know this. Commentators are always talking about just these issues even when they don't use this technical lingo. Cashmen has done a great job. But he had a bunch if money and he had the advantage of spending most of it on players that the Yankees developed internally. So you could say that the team stresses being patient and making contact with its minor league players but what team doesn't? Seems like mom and apple pie to me.
Me: Lots of teams. The Royals, the Devil Rays, the Orioles, the Braves, the Pirates, all of them ignore this sort of important stuff in the minors. Lots of them _talk_ about it, but only a handful actually practice what they say. Explain Billy Beane, to put it in the simplest terms. He didn't have a bunch of money. But the last two years his team has won more games than the Yankees. On a $30M payroll. He did a very simple thing. He said that the main criterion for promoting players was plate discipline, and that no matter how well a player was hitting, he would not be promoted if he did not control the strike zone. The results were obvious. Think about how many managers say that their team needs to "cut down on strikeouts." Almost no matter the circumstances, I assure you that they do not. The Oakland A's strike out _a lot_. The Royals strike out very little. Which one of them has a better offense? Strikeouts are the second best type of out (after a flyball) because they don't create double plays. How many managers say they need to emphasize the running game? Variation in stolen bases explains less than 5% of variation in run scoring - do you really think the running game is a vital part of scoring runs for anyone? For that matter, what's the break-even point for stolen bases? I'd be willing to bet that most people in the majors don't know, but it does exist, and if you're not stealing bases above that ratio, you're actually hurting your team. So no, you usually do need to use the statistical approach to find out these things, because the statistical approach has learned a lot of things that people didn't know before and, even more important, demonstrated that a lot of things that people used to know aren't true. A lot of conventional baseball wisdom evolved during the dead ball era. It might have been true then, but it certainly isn't anymore. More common, it's stuff that sounds reasonable. Lots of things sound reasonable. But they might not be true. To test that, you have to look at the data. And the data often says otherwise. Gautam
