re jack morris in article apr ramsey cs laurentian ca maynard ramsey cs laurentian ca roger maynard writes not at all i am talking about morris winning with toronto last year you are about to launch into a fantasy about the red jays and how toronto would have done with viola on their team viola didn t play for toronto last year morris did the problem with your nihilistic approach roger is that it takes all the sense out of the game by your line of reasoning if a guy hits into a double play with one out and the bases loaded there s no point in saying that that was a bad thing to do if his team won anyway or speculating on what might have happened if things had gone otherwise so the double play is merely an event that happened in the course of a game that was eventually won or lost for unknown reasons after all any speculation involves constructing a fantasy about what would have happened but didn t roger do you ever worry that the next pencil you drop will fall to the ceiling instead or are you willing to consider empirical evidence teams go to the post season when they win more games than anybody else in their division if they don t make the post season they don t win the series will you agree that winning a division is a useful intermediate goal in ring collecting if so you must agree that winning games is a useful intermediate goal towards winning the division and our disagreements come when we consider how to win games in your viewpoint as expressed winning games happens for reasons that cannot be analyzed while many of us are thinking things like base runners are good outs are bad and therefore walks are better than double plays with the bases loaded you are thinking things like it s a team game so perhaps the double play will cause some mysterious team dynamics that will cause the team to win today the result is that it becomes impossible to say anything about individual players perhaps atlanta would have won the series with me playing left field after all perhaps in some way my knowledge and personality would have helped the team more than my complete lack of skill would have hurt it therefore i could be an extremely valuable player did dave winfield have anything to do with the jays victory probably but how do you know if you replace him with andres galarraga perhaps the jays would have won perhaps they would have lost perhaps they would have defected to alpha centauri bearing in mind that the flying saucers would not have landed in mid season had winfield been dhing for toronto was babe ruth a good player he played on some ws winning teams but did he have anything to do with their success it is generally accepted that ernie banks was a good baseball player and jarvis brown and dan schatzeder weren t it seems to me that anybody who would deny this needs to provide the proof now we have observed things about baseball over the years both empirically and by looking at the rulebook it is necessary to score more runs than one s opponent to win the game so it would seem important to score runs and to prevent one s opponent from scoring runs are scored while a team is batting and an inning ends after the third out so it would seem that making outs is bad while hitting home runs is good players have tendencies to hit or pitch at certain levels and these are usually somewhat consistent from year to year we do use these statistics to predict winners and so do you to make some flat predictions barry bonds will have a higher obp slg than gene larkin this year the braves will finish ahead of the rockies in the standings the tigers will score more runs than the royals but will also give up more i would be astonished if any of these turned out to be false and i suspect so would you as a matter of fact i am pretty sure i can predict all the division winners this year given guesses per division and this is certainly better than random chance and almost statistically significant if you will admit that the rockies and mariners are unlikely to meet in the world series you must admit that there is some sort of way to measure likelihoods however fuzzy it is impossible for all other things to be equal so your fantasy is totally meaningless so how about real life person a robs a service station with two people in it using a automatic pistol gets and is convicted and sentenced for three years person b with a similar criminal record robs a service station with two people in it using a revolver gets and is convicted since they used two different types of handgun are comparisons totally meaningless say you drop a pencil to see if the gravity still works my cats are always testing this they don t trust me to pay the gravity bill on time you have never dropped a pencil at that exact time of the century before so all previous evidence is meaningless or would you be surprised if it flew out the window instead of hitting the desk david thornley who has no replica world series rings but does have tickets to the world series in the metrodome
