never rat on your friends, and always keep your mouth shut

Friday, January 27, 2006

let's stay civil, please

Update: actually, now that i read ben's post, some more thoughts: OK, obviously we're not going to reinvent baseball. but the thing is, and moacir correct me if i'm guessing your reasons wrong, the reason i halt to ratify Team Omar’s drive for classic 5x5 is because classic 5x5 isn’t as *fun* as modified stats. And I don’t mean, it’s “not fun” in the sense that it isn’t sabermetric or progressive or indicative of stat nerd genius. I mean it’s not fun in that Rs and RBIs and Ws and S are weird stats to pick. Because they partially invalidate your attempts to predict them because they’re so team dependent.

Moacir’s tenacious about due process because he wants to keep the league competitively engaging. Classic 5x5 has an element of half-assedness to it, it makes fbaseball a bit less fun than it could be. i will say, for the 900th time, that I can deal with classic 5x5, but I’d like to point out that everyone who says that we should just do classic 5x5 because this is supposed to be fun is betraying themselves in a very minor way. And I wish you all would just chillax on the rhetoric.

by the way, carter, is this the kind of thing you were thinking of:

Offense:
Power (HR, SLG, OPS, etc.)
Power
Speed (SB... SB/CS ratio.... whatever)
Consistency (AVG, OBP, K/BB)
Consistency

Pitching:
Quantity (IP, -TB, K, ER)
Quantity
Special (Saves... something for relievers..)
Quality (K/9, ERA, WHIP)
Quality

6 comments:

Omar said...

im not all classic stats.... i want obp instead of average.

why is team independence important? we are drafting players who are parts of a team. theres something to be said for drafting players as individuals but they are , for better or worse, actual human beings who are actually on teams. you just need to take that into account when you draft (and draft all yankees).

ptb said...

Omar, team independence isn't a sticking point for the weird reasons you came up. the stickiness resides in that there is no way to "take that into account," when "that" is A) getting traded/having important teammates get traded or B) having teammates get injured. i agree that up to a point i'll accept the vicissitudes of fate as the reason why Guy X sucked, but when it turns out Pat Burrell's RBIs went in the shitter when Abreu tore his sack, that REALLY sucks, if i have Burrell, and i've done nothing wrong, other than not see through time. do you see my point?

Omar said...

injures are something that can't really be predicted so any way to eliminate injuries or the effect of injures on a player has dubious benefits in my opinion.

i agree that it sucks to lose value because of something your player had nothing to do with but to what degree are we trying to eliminate all random chance? there are times when a player with supposedly team independent stats can still benefit or be hurt by team (seeing more good pitches if you have a bad player behind your or vice versa, getting walked etc.) so trying to eliminate the team aspect of a team game is a little strange.

and getting traded is another thing that little can be done to predict so whats the point.

im not saying i think stats should all be team dependent but my point is that its still a team game, for good or bad.

and im not trying to stifle discussion on stats or railroad in a vote. im just trying to see where we stand.

that and you're either with me or against me.

ptb said...

omar, i'm guessing you weren't on the debate team in high school. the point, which i guess i didn't make absolutely explicit, is in fact reducing random chance, so it's more of a competition and less of a game of dice. obviously, there's still vast amounts of massive chance, like what if, say, a-rod pulls a todd helton and hits .240 next year. you know i'm on the side of expediency. but at least stop using rovian fact-claim shit on us. also, you can't really talk about degree when the verb phrase is "eliminate all"

Omar said...

the sad fact is, i was all-state high school debating. clearly, im not giving it my all in these debates.

i concede your semantic point first of all. but i did understand the point you were making, clearly or not. my issue is that what you are trying to do is not going to work. i don't agree to the premise of your argument. i dont agree that changing the stats will make the game any more 'fun' or lessen the degree to which chance effects the final outcome.

whats with the karl rove hate? the man gets it done. with or without wiretaps.

carter said...

this is a little late, but your category example is exactly what is was thinking of