re jack morris maynard ramsey cs laurentian ca roger maynard writes it sure does and it all depends on the definition that you use for better yours is based on what could have been and mine is based on what really happened well actually most of ours is based on what really happened and yours is based on some fantasy of how it happened but that s ok i understand you have a hockey background stats like plus minus make rbi look good is it viola s fault that boston had no offense is it because of morris that the blue jays had such a strong offense don t tell me that morris has this magical ability to cause the offensive players to score more runs this is the perfect example of your problem you are isolating viola s contribution from the rest of the team s efforts you can only do this if you can say for sure what the team would have done without viola only then can you compare but you cannot know how the team would have done without viola your analysis is fallacious ok how about a straigh answer then here s a very simele question to which i m sure a fair number of us are very interesed in the answer to please answer yes or no roger can a pitcher cause the offensive players on his team to score more runs al only please for anyone else following along it is a well known and demonstrable fact that a team s win loss record is closely related to the number of runs the team scores and the number the team allows it s not a definite hard and fast function but there is definitely a correlation in fact as a rule of thumb if teams a and b both score x runs and team a allows y runs for every runs fewer than y that team b allows it will win another game so for instance if we look at the toronto blue jays we find that they scored runs and allowed of which morris allowed all other things being equal if frank viola with his era had replaced jack morris for the innings morris threw plausible since viola threw for boston the red jays would have allowed about fewer runs or enough for more wins now that doesn t take into account that viola pitched half his innings in fenway which is a harder park to pitch in particularly for a lefthander than skydome so um roger unless you really do believe that a pitcher can somehow affect the number of runs his team scores could you enlighten us to the fallacy in this analysis clearly it would be foolhardy to claim that viola would necessarily have put up a if he had been on the jay last year but that is not the claim we look at what the actual performances were and evaluate viola s as better than morris in the sense that had morris performed as viola did his team would have been better off it takes an open mind to really truly understand what is happening out here in the real world guys this is true but not so open that your brain falls out mike jones aix high end development mjones donald aix kingston ibm com computer if you don t open that exit hatch this moment i shall zap straight off to your major data banks and reprogram you with a very large ax got that zaphod beeblebrox
