Hairyducked Idiot

Bagent looks rattled

Panthers have decided they have absolutely nothing to fear from him over the middle or deep and are just clamping down on those quick outs he loves.

They're already jumping routes on Bagent tonight.

So I've more or less been following Carolina all season to keep tabs on our pick and because of Bryce young curiosity. If our defense can't have a good game against them, fire the whole unit into the sun. It's so bad. Young has all the traditional rookie QB flaws. He's foolable and gets rattled by pressure. Their offensive line is just as bad as ours has ever been, and their receivers are so slow even our dbs can handle them. If we lose this game it will be because of Bagentball

Those baseball people also value the difference at less than half a win per year in salary

Letting him play football is irresponsible. After that it's just a matter of degree.

Do you have any specific reason *why* you disagree? Or is it just a feeling?

Where has anyone in this thread expressed regret that Ross is gone?

Google is right there. People have been spilling pixels on this subject for at least 30 years that I can recall. You can find every one of your objections has already been asked and answered. The findings are still the same: There is a very small effect where the very best bullpens tend to overperform their Pythagorean record by about 1-1.5 wins per year, and the same in the opposite direction for the very worst bullpens. It does not explain the vast majority of Pythagorean deviation, which appears to be random and not intrinsic to the teams regardless of the quality of their high-leverage relievers. (Note that this does not mean that good bullpens aren't worth more than 1.5 wins per season, it just means that the rest of the bullpen's value is already accounted for in run prevention rather than sequencing.) People struggle with this concept because there's a lot of emotional baggage that comes with blowing leads. Our cognitive biases hate losing things we felt we already had, and we remember negative emotional events more strongly. So that time the bullpen blew a lead in the ninth will always stick out in our minds. The time the same bullpen turned a comfortable 5-run lead into a two-run doesn't feel as important. But it has just as much of an effect on Pythagorean variance. Since you brought up the April 2023 cubs specifically, here's some games that probably weren't the ones you were thinking of: https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CHN/CHN202304120.shtml https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CHN/CHN202304200.shtml https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CHN/CHN202304220.shtml https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CHN/CHN202304230.shtml Bad bullpen performances in these games actually improved the Cubs' Pythagorean variance by turning potentially close losses into blowout losses. Pythagorean variance just doesn't work the way it intuitively feels like it should, because our brains tend to fixate on certain scenarios and ignore others.

There's lots of plausible scenarios where it happens. There's very few where I think it's a good idea.

Bagent confirmed for tomorrow Just needs to keep doing what he's doing except instead of making bad throws he should make good throws

Yes, there is. I would absolutely think differently if given convincing evidence that managers have a strong impact. All I need is two things: 1) a repeatable measure of managerial impact that shows year to year correlation. You know how I know (mathematically, not intuitively) hitting home runs is a skill? Because if I split players into two groups, "good at hrs this year" and "bad at hrs this year", then historically it is overwhelmingly likely that the "good" group will be good at it next year. Even if they switch home parks or managers or get older, the skill persists. You wanna assert that a manager is responsible for the difference between his team's war and their records? Sure, that's a hypothesis. And it's one that's *really* easy to test. Split the managers up into good/bad groups each year throughout history and see if the good/bad groups persist. This isn't some incredibly esoteric and hard to measure voodoo. Sabr mastered this horsefeathers 50 years ago. Once you have that correlation, you've gone most of the way to changing my mind. All you need now is 2) a compelling, logical reason why the highly analytic, extremely dollar-efficiency obsessed world of modern front offices isn't taking advantage of this gigantic market inefficiency. A marginal win still costs about $10m on the open market last I checked. A 10-win swing should be a $100m value going for a marginal investment of a few million dollars per year. If those two things existed, I would *absolutely* believe that managers have a large impact.

Running correlations to see if there's any effect is pretty trivial. Identify an area you think a manager *might* make a difference. Split the managers into two groups for year N, the ones who appear to be good at it and the ones who appear to be bad at it. If there's a real effect at work, the first group will outperform the second on average in year N+1. A minute ago you said measuring managers' impact was fuzzy and difficult. Now you're asserting that it's easy and we just have to look pyth variance. Which brings us back to: if it's that easy, why didn't MLB franchises notice and pay accordingly? (Incidentally, counsell's career average pyth difference as a manager is +1.4 and he's been within 2 wins in 75% of his seasons. Hardly a convincing margin).

I have made two extremely clear and specific arguments 1) baseball teams have established a clear connection between spending and expected wins, and the amount they are willing to pay for managers implies an expected return of less than one marginal win per season. 2) it would be trivially easy to prove any of these things you want to attribute to managers is actually due to managers: we just have to measure them and check if they persist year to year independent of other changes. If managers have a special ability to make their teams outperform their war, we should be able to measure that fairly easily. But they don't. The difference between you and me is that if you can come up with such a correlation and it holds up mathematically, I *will* believe it. But when it doesn't (and it doesn't), you're not going to change your beliefs. You're going to pivot to some new reason why you were never wrong. You have neither addressed nor rebutted either of these arguments, and instead persisted in Gish galloping to equally bad logical assertions.

I made a very clear and specific argument that you lack the understanding or ability to rebut. Like I said, there's a certain amount of futility to this because you can't convince old boomer mentality that something isn't true if they gain an emotional boost from believing it's true. Might as well be talking to a flat-earther.

"It can't be true because I listed some names and if the best team doesn't win it must be the manager" That's your entire argument. Think about that.

MLB teams when a player worth five wins a season is available: "would a quarter of a billion dollars be enough?" MLB teams when a manager apparently worth five wins a season is available: "wellllll, it's kind hard to measure, best we can do is a few million" Yep, that's totally what happens.

I would have been 100% fine with sticking with Ross. I'm fine with firing him. It really doesn't matter.

Not really. It's the same money as a backup infielder or second-tier reliever. I'm perfectly fine with the rather meaningless move.

I have no idea what this sentence means tbh.

I think it's probably futile to try to convince people that something fun to believe isn't true. Given that believing in the strategic side of baseball is fun and the cubs just made a big splash managerially, there's going to be a lot of motivation to believe that the manager is a big-impact position no matter how untrue it is. Most people would rather believe what's fun than what's true.

This is 100% wishful thinking. If managers had a large impact it would be trivially easy to measure. Pull up every manager who switched teams, see if their new team performs closer to their old team or closer to the new team's previous standard. We have enough of a sample throughout history that if there's a meaningful impact, it would show up.

(Actually there's not a ton of correlation between bullpen quality and pyth differential. Good bullpens keep one-run losses from being multi-run losses, bad bullpen turn big wins into close wins. It really is mostly luck)

And nobody was willing to swoop in and offer $9m or $10m for this person who can give you more wins than any player?

The size of their salary difference tells you exactly how tiny those magnitudes are.