Salon's Kaufman accuses Kindred of 'ignorance'

um, i think if you read back on this thread you'll see i was exposed to bill james first-hand long before you ever knew who he was.

i read his posts and discussed his approach to baseball stats for two years. if that is dismissive in your book, so be it.

 

EDIT: anger leaving. ignore button activated

 

I would like to give DD big ups for his post, and merely repeat what I said all election season:

One guy was willing to say that Barack Obama would win the Democratic nomination for president and that the Tampa Bay Rays would win the AL East well before anyone else this year. (And, lest we forget, Obama had plenty of smart math people who laid out EXACTLY how he was going to win the nomination after Super Tuesday, in the famous "leaked" spreadsheet, using a lot of the same formulas Silver was using.)

Ignore that shit at your own peril. Seriously.

If Nate Silver tells me it's going to rain frogs, my ass is headed to the store for an industrial-strength umbrella.

 

Wishing death on me. Clutch, clutch stuff.

 

If everyone had really read, considered and comprehended this one line, this thread may have been over after one page.

That's it. And that's not an indictment of modern sabermetrics.

It's -- get this -- common sense.

The absolute gall of something termed a King Kaufman calling out Dave Kindred ... well, that's something else altogether.

 

something to be said for that.

 

OPS is as good an offensive stat as there is.

 

James used to argue forever that clutch hitting did not exist. A batter who had a history of performance was just as likely to get a hit 298 times out of 1,000 in the playoffs or World Series as he was during the regular season. Then he changed his mind. Then, he wasn't so sure.
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Guess James never has seen the back nine at Augusta on Sunday.

 

Great breaking ball.....apparently it froze him for a called strike three.

 

Tell the surgeon performing a retinal reattachment there's no such thing as clutch.

Any chance James can trundle off and become an educator-poet in the classical sense? He might be a hell of a lot more interesting.

 

To answer the original post, I think King's argument is way off base.

If you watch the sport long enough, you don't need these senseless statistics to define degrees of talent. You might as well determine the stats of a player on nights when there's a new moon.

I detest these claims that because Player A is in the HOF with 350 career homers and lifetime BA of .300, every other player that comes along with 351 and .301 must therefore be a slam-dunk inductee.

My rationale for putting players in the HOF is like the Supreme Court justice and pornography: I can't define it, but I know it when I see it.

 

I think his point is excellent.

It's OBVIOUS by some of the Hall votes that people with the privilege to vote are a) flat-out ignorant or b) bent on trying to be humorous or contrarian just for the hell of it.

It would be nice to see sportswriters be more precise and knowledgeable. I haven't seen it in 20 years in the business, with the exception of a number of scribes I can count in one hand.