I Agree!

[clydepepper]

http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/2...s-killing-game

[irv]

I do as well, but it is not just limited to baseball, imo.

I think the same can be said (in a lot of cases) about those who are running businesses and companies, plus look at who we have running our Provinces, States and countries. It's sad and a friggin joke!

I know the changes I have seen at my work is unbelievable. Many supervisors, although they may have great educations, don't have a clue how to run a company nor how to treat their employees.

I won't get into it, but retiring early next summer can't come soon enough!

[KMayUSA6060]

I think there is certainly a place for sabermetrics, but what has been lost is the balance of sabermetrics to actual field experience.

[packs]

Or how about actually watching the game? I remember not too long ago I said that Bernie Williams was one of the most clutch hitters I ever saw. I watched him play every day for his entire career. Every day, every game. And then somebody came in with some absurdly inane statistic to try to prove to me, a guy who watched someone play every day, that I was wrong because of some obscure number.

[drcy]

I work in the philosophy of artificial intelligence, and my saying about AI is that the computer scientists miss the forest for the trees, while the philosophers miss the trees for the forest.

[egri]

I read Moneyball a while back, and thought the whole thing was a lot of bunk. In the section about the 2002 draft, Beane did everything short of shout from the rooftops about how great Nick Swisher and Jeremy Brown were going to be. Swisher was OK, but the pick after him was Cole Hamels. Brown’s career consisted of 10 at bats, and the pick after him was Jon Lester. Then at the end, when it looked like Beane was going to the Red Sox and it talked about moves he was going to make, he would’ve gutted the core of a team that two years later, won the World Series. He did a lot of complaining about how the playoffs were a crapshoot, but the Yankees were just coming off of four championships in five years, and other small market teams (Braves, Twins, Marlins) were putting together successful playoff runs while Oakland kept getting bounced in the first round. There’s always luck involved, but when it’s happening to everyone but Oakland, there’s something besides that going on.

[Peter_Spaeth]

I think the metrics work better for established big leaguers than for prospects. Until a guy has faced ML pitching for a while, you just don't know if he can hit the breaking stuff consistently.

I distrust almost any anecdotal assessment of a "clutch" hitter, sorry. Personal observation, however extensive, tends to be prone to a great deal of bias and subjectivity.