Someone hit the gong, this discussion is over.

“Your words do not constitute facts. Cannot, in fact, constitute facts. It would be impossible to prove lineup protection does, or does not, exist, because there can be no test of the alternative. You can only know what a player hits with, or without, protection, and cannot know what would have happened had the opposite situation occured under the same circumstances.”

Wow. Just wow. Everyone who read that paragraph is now dumber for doing so.

I also enjoyed the part where Elton mocks Gendo’s link by pointing out that it was someone else’s work. Does that mean that I can’t argue, for example, the theory of gravity because someone else came up with it? An iffy argument is not one like Gendos’ – which was supported by the study he linked to – but the ones by those he disagrees with, which seemingly were pulled out of their asses.

I think Gendo has been more than patient given what he has had to respond to. While everyone reading this site is “somewhat familiar” with sabermetrics, its pretty clear that a number of people don’t understand them at all.

You might have more success getting people to consider your ideas if you weren’t writing like a pompous condescending jerk. None of your ideas are that novel. Anyone reading this site is at least somewhat familiar with sabrmetrics.

You seem to fancy yourself as some brilliant baseball analyst. So far the only thing we’ve seen are some pretty iffy arguments and a link to someone else’s work you pasted. The posters disagreeing with you are making some valid points. You may be as well, buy they’re getting lost because of the smug nature if your posts.

Seems like youre itching for a fight or just out to try to impress peoe It aint working. Let’s have some discussion thats productive, theres enough trolls out there already.

You’re conflating concepts here. I never said anything about run production. If a player hits *after* other players who get on base a lot of course they’re going to get more RBIs just by virtue of more opportunities. That has nothing to do with the concept of protection which has to do with a given player hitting *before* a feared hitter.

The theory is that because the pitcher doesn’t want to pitch to that feared hitter he won’t nibble around our protected batter and will give him better pitches to hit.

This has not been able to be proved statistically. RBIs would have nothing to do with this. You’d want to look at a stat like wOBA.

Your Albert Pujols example is, since we’re continuing this trend, a straw man. You are defeating a point I never made. I’m not sure if that’s intentional or if you’re just misunderstanding me.

As for the corked bat issue I would encourage you to read The Physics of Baseball and to check out additional studies like this one:

http://www.kettering.edu/physics/drussell/bats-new/corkedbat.html

As for the comments I made on baseball players and their kooky beliefs that was of course silly, but all I was saying is them being baseball players does not give them the authority to say things are true just by virtue of that authority.

Certainly not in a sport with the wealth of data like baseball has.

And for the last point of course you can’t prove lineup protection doesn’t exist. You can’t prove a negative. However it would be accurate to say there is no statistical evidence to prove it exists, so we discount it.

It’s like I can’t *prove* there’s no God but that’s silly, we all know there’s no God.

An authority. I guess that’s a label you’ve never been accused of, eh?

“Baseball players think all kinds of dumb things. As an example basically every ballplayer you talk to will tell you corking the bat adds power. That’s been proven conclusively false. Corking the bat lowers the natural frequency of the bat and reduces the amount of energy that can be transferred from bat to ball.”

Oh really?

http://articles.sfgate.com/2003-06-05/sports/17495422_1_baseball-bat-corked-bat-barrel-end

“Baseball players think that wearing magical copper bracelets will align the ions in their blood stream and make them healthier.”

In the debate game we call that logical fallacy a non sequitur, gendo.

Some statgeeks were magical copper bracelets too, but I think we should examine what they have to say, rather than dismiss them based on a copper bracelet.

“The fact is that if protection was a real phenomenon there would be a spike in the stats to show it. There isn’t which means it is a statistically negligible factor.”

Your words do not constitute facts. Cannot, in fact, constitute facts. It would be impossible to prove lineup protection does, or does not, exist, because there can be no test of the alternative. You can only know what a player hits with, or without, protection, and cannot know what would have happened had the opposite situation occured under the same circumstances.

“The only thing the lineup around you can impact is RBIs which is part of why RBIs are a dumb stat.”

You have, indeed, just contradicted yourself. If lineup construction affects RBIs, then it has to, by definition, affect the number of runs scored. Or are you claiming that if a team had the pitcher hit in Albert Pujols spot, and vice versa, that St Louis would score exactly the same number of runs?

You sir, are a pompous jerk. What’s worse, you are a pompous jerk who doesn’t even know enough to argue intelligently.

Thank god. We can only stand so much asshattery on one thread.

In the spirit of preserving the high quality content of this site, I’ll refrain from further posts, since you clearly have baseball figured out to a degree that not even the players themselves do. And here I was, lil’ ol me, thinking MLB players knew more about the game than some self-aggrandizing know it all on a blog showing off that he likes advanced stats. I hope one day you can share your thoughts with some big leaguers and see how they react. I’d pay 10 bucks to see that.

I”m out, good luck.

Baseball players think all kinds of dumb things. As an example basically every ballplayer you talk to will tell you corking the bat adds power. That’s been proven conclusively false. Corking the bat lowers the natural frequency of the bat and reduces the amount of energy that can be transferred from bat to ball.

Baseball players think that wearing magical copper bracelets will align the ions in their blood stream and make them healthier.

The fact is that if protection was a real phenomenon there would be a spike in the stats to show it. There isn’t which means it is a statistically negligible factor.

The only thing the lineup around you can impact is RBIs which is part of why RBIs are a dumb stat.