Barnes, Coach wants to see you, now. So Barnes goes into the Skip’s office Sit down Barnes says the skip Barnes takes a seat. I am resting you today, Barnes WHY, he asked, I am hitting .678, and I have a 27 Game hitting streak going. Yea, but those numbers suck! See, look at mine. Barnes looks over the skips notes, and tries to figure everything out. See the stats don’t lie. What in the hell are you talking about skip as Barnes scratches his head. Look right there, all the numbers are in front of you. Skip, I don’t see anything except a bunch of columns with some numbers. Geez, do I have to show you everything. My Computer shows me that on the days when we play on real grass, with a cloudy overcast day, and when we face a lefty with the last name ending with an “H”, and when we wear our Blue tops with white pants and Black Shoes, and we have won 3 straight games, and when we come off a game that we played late last night. And when the First Television Commercial is a Beer Ad, And when the groundskeeper starts laying the field out from left field first, you are only hitting a .075 clip And those numbers don’t lie! But Skip, the first Commercial is going to be a spot for the All Star Game. Sorry Barnes, my mind is made up, and the stats do not lie.
And your .500 hitter has just struck out swinging for the 9th straight time, are you going to bench him? His stats show he does not do well against Randy Johnson, the next pitcher you face.
And what where David Wells stats against the Dodgers, he did not last 3 innings! And now because of his 2 and 1/3 innings pitched your bull pen stats are now all out of whack! They gave up how many runs?
H8R, Obviously you can't treat stats like scripture. They don't predict the future, they only tell me what the person is capable of doing. Furthermore, David Wells' specific stats against LA would be somewhat irrelevant because team make ups change from year to year, so it's not exactly the same team he's faced in the past. Obviously people have bad games from time to time (or good games if you're talking about someone who generally isn't that good) but stats give you a good indication of how they've performed as a whole. Just like you can't treat it like scripture to fully predict the future (like you're seemingly under the impression that i'm doing) you also can't completely disregard them (like you seem to want to do) Stats aren't just a bunch of random numbers some geeks threw on a piece of paper and assigned a player's name to. They're a record of what that player has accomplished thus far, ie an indication of what he's capable of doing. And yes stats can be padded. But anybody who is diligently studying the stats of specific ball players involved in a debate can tell which stats were padded and which stats are more relevant. Obviously they don't predict the future or tell us how so and so will perform in his next game, but they give us a good idea of how he might perform.
And that is what I have been trying to say all along. You cannot wrap yourself with Baseball stats. You cannot build nor can you maintain a team based on stats. And what a person is capable of doing versus what he is doing is 2 different things And I can accept this analogy using stats! “Coach, can you explain what you were thinking in the bottom of the Ninth with Jones up” “Well, they had James at second base, and with Jones hitting from the left side, he tends to want to pull the ball, so I had Tim concentrate on the outer 3rd of the plate, nothing above the belt. I do not know how he was able to hit that pitch around his knees on the outer portion of the plate for a homerun to win it, we did everything we wanted to do, Jones just went out and got it.”
