Thursday, April 28, 2005
Underestimating the fog
A commenter, the first commenter ever in fact, mentions that Bill James' article Underestimating the Fog is available now. Check it out.
[Update]: After reading the article, I have a couple of comments. I guess, it's obvious, but we always need reminding that you can't prove the non-existence of something. With continued effort, you just make it more and more unlikely. This is how I feel about clutch hitting. It's not impossible that it exists, but I think it's unlikely. The main reason why this debate is still going is that people intuitively beleive in clutch hitting. If they didn't, this would have ended long ago. I see no reason (although I don't have any hard data for this) to trust mass intution. Not only that, but I feel that in order to suggest that something which is not supported by hard data be true it should at least make sense in terms of how we understand the world. Other people have gone through this before, so I won't do it here, but there is no good theory that would explain why clutch hitting should exist. I compare this to my own non-baseball pet peeve, homeopathy. There is no data that suggests that it works appreciably better than a placebo, yet many people swear by it. Again, we can't prove a negative. However, for homeopathy to work as it is described, it would have to break the fundamental laws of thermodynamics. As such, I don't beleive that it works, even though there's no way to absolutely prove it. I feel the same way about clutch hitting, regardless of what Bill James says now.
[Update]: After reading the article, I have a couple of comments. I guess, it's obvious, but we always need reminding that you can't prove the non-existence of something. With continued effort, you just make it more and more unlikely. This is how I feel about clutch hitting. It's not impossible that it exists, but I think it's unlikely. The main reason why this debate is still going is that people intuitively beleive in clutch hitting. If they didn't, this would have ended long ago. I see no reason (although I don't have any hard data for this) to trust mass intution. Not only that, but I feel that in order to suggest that something which is not supported by hard data be true it should at least make sense in terms of how we understand the world. Other people have gone through this before, so I won't do it here, but there is no good theory that would explain why clutch hitting should exist. I compare this to my own non-baseball pet peeve, homeopathy. There is no data that suggests that it works appreciably better than a placebo, yet many people swear by it. Again, we can't prove a negative. However, for homeopathy to work as it is described, it would have to break the fundamental laws of thermodynamics. As such, I don't beleive that it works, even though there's no way to absolutely prove it. I feel the same way about clutch hitting, regardless of what Bill James says now.
