Country Sad Ballad Man

Country Sad Ballad Man, originally uploaded by bmichaelpayne.

Over at Blastings! Thrilledge, our former ex-bff observes that

A lot of calculations and projections are necessary to prove anything,

which is as useless a thing as you're likely to read in the Internets these days. It's like saying, "Everyone agrees that the best way to convince someone of something is to make them agree with you," a double x double quadruple whammy if there ever were one. (There's not.)

This statement, which starts off a generally un-statty post (which we like over here) is the calling card of the whole troubled modern statistical movement in baseball. If the sports writers would just look at Burt Blyleven's numbers, man, then it would be clear to them that... Well it's not clear. And no matter how much data you sling, you're never going to convince anyone. Or, as Ben said to Jack back in season two, I don't want you to do the surgery. I want you to want to do the surgery. You have to change the whole worldview, not merely change a few data points. You have to make them want to want the data.

Thinking men from Plato to Kant to Wittgenstein (and even that baseball Nietzsche Yogi Bera saw this one) have seen through the sham simplicity of the naive worldview, a myth. If you're a Platonist, the formal world that is the real source of real meaning (wtf!?, right? What is that even like?) is the operative thing-like thing that most people miss out on when they're looking at the world. Or, the imaginative faculty that unifies the manifold of apperception (if you're Kant), is what makes the world make sense. Or the grammatical hinge propositions that structure your form of life, say Wittgenstein, are the things that give it meaning. The source of meaning, though, not to be an irrealist, is not the world itself, but rather the unique and capricious interplay of other peoples' worlds (i.e., intersubjective validities) with your own meaning-structure. And the Sabremetrician virgins living in their moms's basements eating the Doritos etc., etc. always fail to grasp (well not that FJM, master of irony) that most people remain impervious to the convincifying powers of numbers. Numbers numb us.

It's like saying that America spends X dollars per minute, which dollars could stretch to the moon and back five times. That doesn't mean anything to most people. And saying someone is worth x wins above replacement (it's a simple concept, but so is not smoking drain cleaner and pseudofed) fails to mean anything to most people. But watching Derek Jeter make one scraptastic, jumping-all-over-the-fucking-place, limited-ranged catch and putaway sticks in the mind. That's why analysts are fond of saying that seeing a guy play every day is an advantage w/r/t analyzing the game. It's not, if you're statistically inclined; but to the observer, the way he makes sense of it all is to remember certain special moments, and file the rest away (in the circular file). It's the same reason why ex-players sort of suck as coaches or general managers or whatever. They tend to universalize the few particular events that happened to them, and take this specific-universal knowledge as their starting point for analysis and decision making. Which, to the egghead stat doofus, is a poor way to go.

But while the pocket-protector-wearing, slide-rule-using populace fails to outnumber the red-blooded, girl-fucking majority, that's just how it will be.