re jack morris maynard ramsey cs laurentian ca roger maynard writes we have no way of knowing because we cannot separate morris contribu tion from the rest of the team s there is only one way of determin ing best in baseball and that is by looking at the scoreboard at the end of the game each game determines which team is the best that day at the end of the season the team that was the best the most often is the best in the division the playoffs determine the best of the best but the point is that the only decision making pro cess used to determine the best is the score of the game and it re lates to the teams not the individual players there is no method inherent in baseball of comparing individual performances and that is how it should be because after all baseball is a team game and you know what there is no such method inherent in real life either so i would assume you would endorse the notion that we cannot state with any level of objectivity that mother theresa has accomplished more good in this world than joseph stalin after all life on earth is a team effort if you want to select a group of statistics and claim that clemens has done better with those statistics as a criteria then fine but you have to be able to prove that those statistics measure the individual s contribution to winning the ws because that is the only measure of best that has any meaning in the context of base ball so until you can prove that clemens contributes to a ws cham pionship more than morris your evaluation of clemens is totally sub jective and is mere opinion i have yet to see that any of you can predict a ws winner with any greater accuracy than jeanne dixon have you tried glasses i find them quite useful after all there must be some reason you choose to ignore the mounds of evidence we present it s too bad you feel it necessary to close your mind and eyes to knowledge you live a poorer life as a result of that choice heck i d wager that you could predict a ws winner with greater accuracy than jeanne dixon and you know why because i have full confidence that despite your protestations to the contrary you are quite capable of using the knowledge we can come up with through statistical methods to boost your knowledge level you don t have to be rude have you tried calling a kettle black for you to say that means that you have either missed the entire point of my argument or you yourself have committed a fallacy ignoratio elenchi i am not saying that morris is better than clemens because he has more rings although i have tongue in cheek claimed that in the past i am saying that it is impossible to isolate an individual s performance from that of his team s for the purpose of comparing that individual s performance with another individual s per formance in other words in your world you cannot objectively state that jack morris was more important to the blue jays than al leiter last year in your world that may indeed be true fortunately in the world the rest of us occupy it s not i hope you never serve on a jury roger i think the rest of the jury would have to kill you there s no way i can objectively judge the defendant to be innocent or guilty you see there are billion other people on this planet we have no way of knowing whether the defendant would have committed the crime if it wasn t for all the other people on the planet we have no way of knowing how the defendant would have acted had he been on a different planet because living on this planet is a team effort and no individual committs a crime totally isolated from his society he is a part of that society that being case anything i have to say on his culpability would be absolute subjectivity so i refuse to vote greg
