Nivek wrote:I think consig raises lots of good points. Some of those may be valid reasons for a player to be less productive than he might have been somewhere else; some of them may just be excuses and warning signs. The whole stats vs. scouting thing is really strawman stuff anyway, at least for me. I think both are useful. .
I don't think it's straw man at all. Scouts fought against metrics math geeks a ton. They thought they were weirdo's that didnt know the first thing in baseball. Reminds me of my grandmother and grandfather at the racetrack. My grandfather would read through every racing forum, everything imaginable, my grandmother, would watch the animals, and ignore the books and mags entirely. She had all sorts of codes for animal behavior to help her decide on which horses to bet on. My dad as a kid asked her what DSO stood for when he was a kid, and she said, "---- sticking out. His mind aint on the race." Farm folk
. They were both highly successful but had totally different methodologies, my math prodigy grandfather loved researching, my grandmother, who had psychics in the family, including herself (take from that what you will) was much more into intuition, and instincts, reading the animals gestures and behaviors and signifyers.
Its an age old debate, but there's no denying the importance of it. The use of money in baseball, and metrics in baseball, and later hoops and now football (and now, shockingly, soccer) has absolutely revolutionized the ways players are scouted and viewed and paid. No longer can players get by on reputations and looks. If the numbers don't lie, what do they say? There s a real argument and debate here and value on both sides. My main issue is that the metrics aren't consistently reliable in inusual set ups like college basketball with all sorts of strange age issues (read gladwell, and hockeyplayers).
Its super interesting and not straw man. Its very real. Im fascinated to all hell by it because im very much a combo of my grandparents, a fiend for research, but also very instinctual too.
