Quote:
Originally Posted by Syd Thrift
The thing that irks me about aspects of the sabermetric community is that there's no sense of skepticism.
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People who are real statisticians and truer scientists (for the lack of a better term) are always quite skeptical. It's what allows them to study situations as they do.
If they were not skeptics, then those who were looking for catcher defense would have stopped at the first trials. But instead, they kept searching, kept questioning. Don't confuse those on either side of a debate who are mostly trying prove the others as being stupid with representing the values of those who are trying to determine truth.
That's why I'm asking the hard-core "no clutch exists" folks in this thread why they care so much as to say with 100% certainty that it does not. All you can say with certainty is that we cannot see it using today's methods.
Similarly, if you think true sabermetricians have no skepticism, I ask you what value you get out of that position, since it's so demonstrably wrong as to not really need defense.
But, yes, a lot of people have studied clutch hitting and not found proof of it. At present that's enough for me to say that if I were king for a day I would leave it out of my baseball sim.
Bottom line, I think: either I'm not communicating well, or you're not reading my stuff right, or both.
