re jack morris in sdcc ucsd edu demers cs ucsd edu david demers writes in article apr ramsey cs laurentian ca maynard ramsey cs laurentian ca roger maynard writes the facts are that morris has shown us that he has what it takes to play on a ws winning club clemens hasn t what does it take to play on a ws winning club 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 to say that one player is better than another is to be able to say ab solutely that player a s team would have played better with player b in their lineup sheer speculation impossible to ascertain 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 the fact is that morris didn t win any ballgames toronto did in spite of morris contribution this has been explained to you exactly the jays won with morris pitching and boston wins with clemens pitching i am not saying that morris is better than clemens i am saying that individual comparisons between players are totally meaningless and that anyone claiming that clemens is better based on his era has missed the point of what baseball is all about many many times and you are either too stupid or too stubborn to grasp it you don t have to be rude you are completely consumed by the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy 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 the stats are a nice hobby and that s about it there is no new knowledge being produced so when a poster claims that morris is better than clemens because he has more rings the poster is no more nor less incorrect than the rest of you baying hounds cordially as always maynard ramsey cs laurentian ca so many morons rm and so little time
