Baseball Hall of Fame ballot released

The silly thing is that I've gone out of my way in this thread not to use complicated statistics. I used batting average, for goodness sakes.

I could have gone to Martinez's 52.0 career adjusted batting wins, which are 38th all time. Or his 566 career adjusted batting runs, good for 29th all time. Or his .712 career offensive win percentage, good for 72nd all time. Or I could even go with silly ones like Bill James' Hall Of Fame Monitor, which puts Martinez at a virtual lock with a 132.

But I didn't do any of that. I'm a godless, stat-worshiping heathen who hates real baseball because I referred to on-base percentage.

 

And people talk about my arrogance. I understand your argument just fine. I just know that you are full of it. You want to dismiss anything that can't be proven by statistics, and in doing so you miss an entire part of the game. The best part is you don't even understand what a ridiculous little Catch 22 you set up when you pull that crap.
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Please cite an example of something that can't be measured by statistics that we disagree on.

 

That's exactly it. And his peak, particularly in this era, was brief--1998-2004: .340-246 HR-825 RBI-.434 OBP-.620 SLG. He's been merely good since then. He is the modern-day Don Mattingly, except with stats inflated from playing a mile above sea level.

 

Rick, please explain to me how it isn't a complete line of bullshit to insist that any argument for a method of evaluating baseball beyond statistics must be statistically proven to be valid.

 

OK, that made me laugh really hard.

 

As soon as you list something that's "beyond statistics," I'll let you know. I'm having trouble thinking of examples where you've argued something that was beyond statistics. Normally, you just take something that is perfectly within the realm of measurable statistical analysis and decide that you don't like what the analysis says.

 

Can we just agree Bert Blyleven should be in and leave it at that?

 

It's not the Hall of Very, Very, Very, Very, Very Good, now is it?

 

No, normally, you grab onto whatever sample you can find and try to twist it to win an argument, eliminating all factors that statistics cannot measure along the way.

Take the idea of Barry Bonds as a guy who choked in the playoffs. He did. We all saw it. We saw him underachieve repeatedly in the post-season. Did he develop past that? Absolutely, with a little help from chemistry as well as his own maturity. But that doesn't change the fact that he was unable to perform at his usual levels in the playoffs for most of his career.

It's not a matter of what I like or don't like. Your statistics don't prove or disprove the things that you think they do.

 

It's a statistical fact that some players choke at some times.
It's a statistical fact that there is no inherent ability to choke or not choke, that it happens randomly with the exact same (lack of) patterns that you'd expect from any regular-season sample of similar size.
If there was an ability to do so, that'd show up in the statistics. There'd be a correlation in year-to-year differences between regular season and postseason performance across a large body of players.

Nothing in there beyond the realm of statistics.

 

Horseshit. Wordy, ridiculous, unsubstantiated horseshit.

You are using a statistical argument in a failed attempt to prove that nothing is beyond the measure of statistics and you don't even understand how intellectually dishonest that is. It's like insisting that the bible is scientific prove of that G-d exists.

 

The fact that I can make a statistical argument about the point you brought up proves conclusively that the specific point you brought up is not beyond the realm of statistics.

Of course it doesn't prove that there is nothing at all beyond the realm of statistics. It just proves that whether or not Bonds was a choker earlier in his career is not beyond the realm of statistics.

Heck, you could make a statistical argument the other way, too. You could argue that the statistical record shows that Bonds choked in the postseason and therefore was a choker. It'd be a flawed argument, but a statistical one nonetheless.