The Undefeated debuts

Where do I begin on that? I'll start with WAR, since I have been through this before. I can find at least three different ways to calculate a player's WAR from the first page of a google search -- each with their own set of biases. None of them are straightforward measures. They are contrivances that give you numbers that are all over the place. Using one measure, Player A may have a higher WAR than Player B, but using the next site's calculation you will find the opposite.

None of them are particularly meaningful measures necessarily, because they subjectively weight a small number of variables that were easily quantified, but are not necessarily the variables that have the biggest impact on making one player more valuable (from a winning standpoint) than another.

Those variables are things such such as "batting runs," "base running runs," etc. that someone likely gravitated toward precisely because they were easily quantifiable (the basis for a lot of junk statistics). Who is to say that those are the most meaningful variables for how a player contributes to a win, and who is to say that there aren't dozens of NOT easily quantified variables that may potentially be way more meaningful to how valuable a player is to winning?

On top of it, it does the second thing I was talking about with an attempt at introducing control variables: for example, "park" and "league" adjustments, that may overadjust or unnecessarily adjust -- there is just no way to know, unless you introduce control variables in a scientific way, not subjectively deciding that something needs to be adjusted for. The worst was one measure's "positional adjustment" (fangraphs) that weights position players differently (i.e. -- corrects), without any good explanation anywhere of who or what determined those weightings. ... or why.

It's a measure of some sort. But it's not a particularly meaningful measure, and there is no statistical soundness (for the purposes of analysis), if that was the intent.

 

Liked the piece on CM Newton.

Also like the one about Malcolm X and Jackie Robinson. Had no idea their relationship was so nasty.

 

I'd bet there are lots of people out there who have no idea who Malcolm X was -- as sad as it is to write that. I'd also bet that the vast majority of people who read that story weren't among them.

Still, the story definitely did a good job of covering what was forgotten tension / dislike between Malcolm X and Jackie Robinson, so it was very educational. I learned something about a piece of the sub-history of the civil rights movement that I only knew vaguely. It also did a good job of explaining the issues the civil rights movement faced with separatists like Malcolm X at odds with people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Jackie Robinson, who simply wanted equality of opportunity and saw peaceful resistance as the path. It was a good story.