Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
February 28, 2005
Abstract Interview

Rich Lederer went back and read all the Bill James Baseball Abstracts, then sat down with Bill for an interview. Part one is here. Bill doesn't believe there should be any tension between sabermetricians and scouts:

RL: ... On that subject, in the 1981 Baseball Abstract, you said "good sabermetrics respects the validity of all types of evidence, including that which is beyond the scope of statistical validation."

BJ: I'll be darned. I'm glad to know I wrote that back then. In the wake of Moneyball, some people have tried to set up a tension in the working baseball community between people who see the game through statistics and scouts. There is no natural tension there. There's only tension there if you think that you understand everything. If you understand that you're not really seeing the whole game through the numbers or you're not seeing the whole thing described through your eyes, there is no real basis for tension and there's no reason for scouts not to be able to talk and agree on things.


Posted by David Pinto at 01:22 PM | Interviews | TrackBack (0)
Comments

I'm not sure that I agree with Bill James. You obviously have to weigh what the scouts have to say...a little bit. Sometimes scouts rely on their "gut feeling" and support players with "the look." You cannot really judge a player by what he looks like, and decisions should be made on stats, which describe the performance of a player.

Posted by: Steck at February 28, 2005 07:41 PM

If there is a set of identical twins, and their weight is the same, their height is the same, their every single measureable physical appearance is the same, so much so that not even their parents can tell them apart, yet the next door neighbor can do it in a second, then there must be something that the measurements, and even the parents are missing that's there.

Perhaps that is what Bill James thinks that some scouts have the ability to do? To see beyond what the stats and the current info says to see something that nobody else can, either through a sixth sense, a good eye, or something else.

Posted by: Pierrot le Fou at February 28, 2005 10:52 PM
Post a comment









Remember personal info?