Weinberg: Building better statistical incentives
From Neil Weinberg at The Hardball Times on January 25, 2018:
Statistics help us made sense of the world. We face a constant barrage of stimuli. Some of it is important, some of it isn’t. Even if we could record it all and play it back on demand, we would still struggle to glean anything terribly useful.
Baseball is no different. If you had the ability to watch all 2,430 games every year, you certainly would develop a sense of which players were truly exceptional and which teams were best crafted, but without processes for capturing and organizing data, you’d be at a loss when confronted with even the most straightforward questions.
<snip>
This is a long way of saying that building complex baseball statistics is a worthwhile endeavor. The game is complicated, and our efforts to summarize it should reflect that. If you’re asking a complicated question, your attempt to answer it should be sophisticated.
Read the full article here: https://www.fangraphs.com/tht/tht-annual-2018/building-better-statistical-incentives/
Originally published: January 25, 2018. Last Updated: January 25, 2018.