> Because Brian Cashman believes in sabermetrics. I'm really > not quite sure why a Yankee fan, of all people, would disagree with me. > Your _own team_ is managed pretty much exactly the way that I would manage a > team if I could, and it's done really well over the past few years. There > might be something to these ideas if the teams that adopt them tend to beat > the teams that don't. > But many of the players came through or were well into the system before Cashman was there. The Yankees have been lucky (oops now I have admitted you were right) but this luck has to do with getting talented players with their heads on straight in their system. They have done a marvelous job in developing them but some of it just having the right people.
Me: I honestly don't understand why you resist the idea that luck has an implication on the playing field. Anyone with any experience in _any_ competitive activity will tell you, very simply, that the best person doesn't always win and that sometimes it's just luck that determines the outcome. I cannot imagine that you don't have experience with this in your own life. Luck exists. I mean, this is ridiculous, Bob. The Yankees were the best team in the league in 1998, right? So if you were right, they should have won 162 games. But they didn't. If Jeffrey Maier, Chuck Knoblauch, and Eric Gregg can't convince you that sometimes the better team is going to lose a baseball team to a worse one, I have no idea what could. Sometimes the ball bounces funny. Sometimes it bounces in ordinary fashion but a player makes a mistake, and even that is usually just luck (defined as the impact of random variables on outcomes). The rate at which any player gets a hit is indistinguishable from random chance, for example. Each at-bat is essentially an independent event where different outcomes have different probabilities based largely on the underlying abilities of the pitcher, hitter, and fielders. But the particular outcome of any at-bat is usually just luck. Do you really not believe that random chance has a significant influence on the outcome of something as closely balanced as a playoff baseball game? Gautam
