Baseball: Is winning overrated?

I was aboutto do the same about passing Ruth.

Looks like Aaron is all that's left, besides Gibson and Oh.

What would you say is an acceptable sample? From a statistical standpoint I'd say that how a person performs over 100 AB is a good predictor of how he will do in 500 AB. If 117 AB is not a large enough sample to determine clutch hitting, then how do we rate the players who played before League Championship Series? It tookk several World Series to get 117 AB. If a person got 5 AB in a 7-game series, he would need four seven game series to get over 117 AB.

Originally posted by BirdstheBest
What would you say is an acceptable sample? From a statistical standpoint I'd say that how a person performs over 100 AB is a good predictor of how he will do in 500 AB. If 117 AB is not a large enough sample to determine clutch hitting, then how do we rate the players who played before League Championship Series? It tookk several World Series to get 117 AB. If a person got 5 AB in a 7-game series, he would need four seven game series to get over 117 AB.

350-400 abs at the least. Think about how small 117 abs really is? It's like taking everyone's BA after the 1st 5 weeks of the season, and calling it accurate. A 3 hit swing either way, is a difference of 26 points at 117 abs.. 3 line drives caught, versus 3 bloop hits. So a guy at .299 (35 for 117), can be .273, or .325 on a 3 hit swing.

Actually, that is not a significant swing. There are surveys all the time that are supposed to represent the opinions of the entire nation. Do you know how small the samples are in those surverys? Only a few thousand people, yet the percentage of error is less than 5%. Like it or not, 100 AB is an accurate representation. Let's check the stats for 2006 in a few weeks when the leaders have over 117 AB.

Originally posted by BirdstheBest
Actually, that is not a significant swing. There are surveys all the time that are supposed to represent the opinions of the entire nation. Do you know how small the samples are in those surverys? Only a few thousand people, yet the percentage of error is less than 5%. Like it or not, 100 AB is an accurate representation. Let's check the stats for 2006 in a few weeks when the leaders have over 117 AB.

.276 versus .325 isn't significant? And that's only a 3 hit swing, try 4 or 5.

Gallup polls use 1,000, with a 3% plus/minus margin for error. 117 is a long way from a 1,000.

117 abs simply isn't much to get excited about. Go ahead and keep the stats at the end of week 5 (roughly 117 abs). Look how many guys are hitting 350+ and 200. Look at the end of year where they end up.

You are looking at the percentages incorrectly. If 1000 responses can accurately represent 150,000,000 adults within +/- 3%, then undoubtedly 100 AB can represent how someone will perform with 500 AB. 100 AB is 1/5 of 500 AB. 1000 poll responses is 0.00067% of 150 million. Yes, I realize that a poll is not the same as hitting, but there is a comparison regarding what can be predicted.

Eric Chavez hit .194 in his 1st 93 abs last year. He finished at .269

Victor Martinez hit .210 in his 1st 157 abs last year. He finished at .305.

This is too easy. 117 abs can be very misleading.

You know, all our new guys, who've been having a lot of fun here, will have noticed the friendly way I tried to greet you back here.

YOU, instead, did as follows:

(1) Dug up a distant thread--one which was long mercifully buried, AND ON WHICH NOBODY HAD POSTED ANYTHING FOR 17 DAYS--BY FAR the most contentious and acrimonious one you could find from your period of absence, brought it right back into play--which I assure you neither of its main participants wanted--and started right in on your inane bullsh!t again in your myriad efforts to rationalize Bonds and his poisoned stats and "records";

(2) Picked a fight with others about clutch hitters--which I happen, however distastefully, to have to agree with you on--but your tone, as always, was gratuitously nasty; and

(3) This led you to get into a Math squabble with BtB, with you continuing to come back and back, and doing so in condescending tones you either don't realize or, as I believe, don't care about. That's a fight you don't want. He could chew you up and spit you out intellectually, even if he were drunk. And that's coming from someone who, like him, was blessed/cursed with what our society has comically misnamed a "gifted mind"--a fate I wish upon nobody, a fate which was one of two reasons, along with my alcoholism genes, I chose not to have kids with a couple of women I loved very much in my early-to-mid 30's.

Anyway, that's enough digression. You've been back 24 hours. Anyone who reads your return post can see how warmly I tried to greet you, including the way I supported you on "clutch hitting" and STRONGLY supported you on Bagwell, sincerely suggesting he may pass Foxx for #2 all-time at 1B when he's done--except on SABR's kneejerk formula. I particularly believe Foxx should be docked for getting to 500 HOME RUNS at age 32, then drinking himself into obvlivion (along with his sinus woes, as I recall).

And here you are again, like a broken record. Toejam--who, tragically, has been gone a long time now--is too good a man to SAY the things I'm saying here, but IA Clonz would sure say them. So may several others. What a boor.

BHN

[Edited on 4/25/06 by BaseballHistoryNut]

[Edited on 4/25/06 by BaseballHistoryNut]

There is no warmth about you. And i have never met anyone with a bigger head ( i love myself) persona then you. That is a bore.

As far as the 117 abs being a good sample size, bring it on.

There are countless studies to show clutch doesn't exist. Please enlighten us on the studies that show it does exist.

BHN, thanks for the support.

HOOTIE, again you are looking at the numbers incorrectly. Statistics are about averages and standard deviation. You referred to only TWO examples out of--what--600+ guys in the league who had over 100 AB. That is no proof. Sure, there are going to be some players who start off hot and finish cold (or vice versa), but ON THE AVERAGE the start (or finish) in indicative of the final BA. That's why it's called a batting AVERAGE.

By the way, to get this back on point, a long-forgotten (except by us B.H.N.'s) St. Louis Card named Pepper Martin had, in 1931, what was for a LONG time regarded as the greatest World Series ever.

The Cards were enormous underdogs. Connie Mack's A's had won 2 consecutive World Series and, more impressive, had beaten the Ruth/Gehrig Yankess--at that team's zenith--three straight years. Yes, the A's had Foxx, but the Yanks had Gehrig; yes, the A's had Mickey Cochrane (the great catcher) and OF Al Simmons, but the Yankees had Bill Dickey (the slightly less great catcher) and a whole slew of H.O.F.'ers in their lineup, including that Ruth dude, still very great at ages 34-36.

But the A's had Lefty Grove, who had gone 31-4 that year, and who had just concluded a three-year stint in which he was 79-15 and led the league in W-L %, K's and E.R.A. in ALL 3 YEARS. The last time I checked, only Walter Johnson had done that twice in his entire career. Grove, while going 79-15 in 3 years (true figure), had done it 3 years straight. AND THE CARDS KNEW THEY'D FACE HIM THREE TIMES.

Martin--whose career stats were not at all impressive, given the era he played in and the hitters' paradise which St. Louis's Sportsman's Park was--proceeded to go 12 for 24 in 7 games (despite being hitless in the last 2 games!)--and 12 for 18 in the first 5 games!!!--with a .538 on-base percentage and a .792 slugging average. Seven singles, four doubles and a home run, plus 2 walks, in 26 plate appearances.

Grove beat them in Game 1, but in Game 3--after 3 days of rest and rain--the Cards beat the great Grove, with a key Martin single playing a major role in the first two runs, and a none-out, man-on-first double by Martin setting up the 3rd run. This, remember, against Lefty Grove.

The teams split the next two games, and in Game 6, Grove was Grove again, winning 8-1. But the Cards got a quick 4-0 lead in Game 7, and the 1920's winningest pitcher, Burleigh Grimes, carried it into the 9th. The Cards held on for dear life as the A's scored 2 runs and had 2 more on base when leadoff hitter Max Bishop's smoking line drive was run down in the alley by--guess who?--Pepper Martin.

People have actually suggested Pepper Martin should make the Hall of Fame, which is baloney. He was a below-average fielder for his time and positions (OF and esp. 3B), and a modest hitter.

But serious baseball historians will always remember him as the guy who caught lightning in a battle and enabled his team to: (1) get that crucial ONE WIN out of 3 games against Lefty Grove; and (2) do well enough in the 4 non-Grove games to take a superior A's team and upset them 3 games to 1, winning the title 4 games to 3.

There is your basic case of an awesome "clutch hitter" who played way over his head in a World Series, giving what was for decades the consensus choice for the best W.S. performance ever.

But he had played against the Yankees' juggernaut in the 1928 Series, and would go on to play for the Cards against Detroit in a great 7-game Series in 1934. He was 0 for 1 in 1928, and 11 for 31--still quite good, but nothing at all like his figures in 1931--in 1934.

A lot of people seem to think he was a guy who'd have been great to pick up on waivers to have on your Series-bound team at year's end. I say those two seven-game series, 55 AB's and 60 plate appearances aren't enough to mean anything about his "clutch" hitting.

They earned a very mediocre player baseball immortality, and I'm glad for that, but they didn't make his 4,117-at-bat career any better than it was, and they certainly didn't make his a great "clutch hitter."

BHN

"There is no warmth about [me]?"

Again, no shame and an invulnerability to embarrassment.

Let's see, I have 5 close male friends (not a large number, but I mean very tight friends)... and at least 25 very close female friends, most of whom go back over 20 years. And those women love me (platonically) specifically because of my emotional depth and the fact I can--due to my almost all-female household as a child--understand their feelings and express my own like no other guy they've known. I'm also the only guy they've known who MEANT it when he said he wanted to be their FRIEND. I've only slept with 3 of those women, and the most recent was in 1988.

My problem with women is my wretched taste in women to fall in love with, an ongoing problem for almost 37 full years now. But as for emotional warmth, I could get more women than you'll ever know to speak up for my unique emotional depth... one of the 2 or 3 reasons they like me so much. They're my close FRIENDS, a concept I'm sure is lost on you, an angry guy with a belligerent personality like women don't tolerate.

If I'm not "emotionally warm" to you, you might want to look inward. There are several GUYS at this sight to whom I've been quite emotionally warm in U2U's, because I knew from their posts that they needed it. No, I'm not going to tell you or anyone else who they are, but it's the truth.

And as for my "big head," what am I supposed to do? Shave 60 points off my I.Q. by taking acid and/or drinking a quart every day for 6 months, so I can thereafter relate to you? I can no more do that than a 6'8" guy can cut 6" off his height to relate to me.

But I ABSOLUTELY do not believe that superior intellectual skills, any more than superior athletic or musical skills, make one a better person. And when you get to a certain point, it only makes you a tortured person. If you read one of BtB's posts on another thread, he essentially said as much there. I won't repeat exactly what he said, because it was pretty personal and I don't think he'll want you having it as a weapon, but I knew exactly what he meant because I've had the same lifelong problem, too, and I needed the same drastic step to deal with it.

If that seems like gloating to you, then I suggest that as usual, you are not listening, but instead going out of your way to pick out individual words and phrases you can be churlish and belligerent about.

To hell with you.

BHN

[Edited on 4/25/06 by BaseballHistoryNut]