Quote:
Originally Posted by RonCo
I think we're saying the same thing, but maybe I'm wrong.
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I think it's similar, but if I can paraphrase, you're saying that the people who said that pitch framing probably wasn't a thing due to the lack of evidence were correct, and my issue is a pretty minor quibble, which is that I'm admitting that they *were* wrong, although I think I agree with you that they followed a good process. That being said, they were still, at least according to the current evidence, factually wrong, and in order to move forward there was a need to understand why the old evidence was incomplete. It doesn't mean that Bill James et al were bad, per se, but tey were wrong and there are reasons that they were wrong, reasons we can and ought to apply to future situations.
The thing that irks me about aspects of the sabermetric community is that there's no sense of skepticism. To me, skepticism isn't about proclaiming to the world that Bigfoot probably doesn't exist or that clutch is a load of crap in baseball, it is to me anyway personal and introspective. It's about having the humility to understand there is always a chance that you're wrong about everything. It's about understanding that other people are smarter than you are. especially when it comes to specialized subjects that you did not choose to specialize in, such as climate science or sabermetrics, and that you should both take the actual positions that these people have studied to heart but at the same time not make additional suppositions about what they said.
I'm not saying you're guilty of any of this; you just came into the middle of a conversation and were like "whoa guys, what's all the hubbub"? You've done a ton of great work with getting the stats to match up with real life in this game, and I felt you deserved an (admittedly long-winded) explanation.