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.
Bob: My point wasn't that different teams are not more or less successful at implementing strategies but simply that the insights from statistics are not all that novel. Me again: Bob, first, many of the insights from statistics have begun to "leak out" into the mainstream public, second, I've only described a very small fraction of what sabermetricians have learned about baseball, and third, they clearly are that novel if a team as distinguished as the Braves hasn't figured them out yet. Me: 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. Bob: So you mean to say that baseball people did not know in a general way that if you get caught stealing too much you hurt your team? Me: I'm sure they knew that, but that's a valueless piece of information. How often is too often? That's the important thing to know. Obviously if you get caught 100% of the time you're hurting yoru team, and 0% of the time you're helping. There is a range between those, however, and don't you think it might affect team strategies to know what that number is? Gautam
