> Me: > Bob, _nothing_ can guarantee a championship. Prospectively you are correct. But when sustained success occurs in any endeavor it is most reasonable to assume that there is a reason behind that success. If a statistical analysis fails to find that reason you can call it luck (or God's intervention or voodoo magic) but what are the odds of that being true. If you flip a coin enough times you should get a 50/50 split. If you get 60/40 for enough flips you can no longer call it luck, You must look for a different solution.
Me: Yeah, but the number of flips isn't chosen arbitrarily. You're a scientist, you must understand this better than I do - why not apply that knowledge to baseball? We can look at all of baseball - which is an enormous n - and do statistical tests on it. The conclusions - that clutch hitting doesn't exist, and so on, are phenomenally robust. This is true to any reasonable level of statistical significance. That's what SABRE, or Baseball Prospectus, or Bill James's Historical Baseball Abstracts, were all about. > Lofton is an inferior player because Jose Mesa couldn't pitch. That does not make sense. _ I know it doesn't make sense and that is not what I am saying. The Marlins are of course a special case because they were broken up after the series so it is not possible to tell if they were a special team. The Indians have been very good but not special. The mark of a special team is the ability to repeat with the same core. That is what is not luck. Me: But that's precisely what you're saying about Pedro. He's not as good as Koufax because he doesn't win big games. Apart from the fact that this is empirically not true - his performance over the last two years in big games was dazzling - he could only win big games if his teammates hit. So you're arguing that Pedro was an inferior pitcher to Koufax because Pedro's teammates couldn't hit as well as Koufax's, _even though Pedro's statistical performance was superior to that of Koufax_. Oh yes, one other thing - I quite distinctly remember Koufax being quoted as saying that Pedro was better than he was. Gautam
