Hairyducked Idiot

They're starting a 23 game stretch where they play 22 games against teams with losing records, 17 of those games are at home. They could very easily pull off a 17-6 stretch. If the Cardinals cool down to a slightly less torrid 13-8 during the same period, the Cubs will pick up 3 games on them, and be only 5 games out for the last 3-game series against the Cards in St. Louis. No one ever could "very easily" play almost .750 ball for four weeks.

FYP

Soriano's reputation as a 40-HR guy continues to baffle me. He's reached that total once.

I thought it was generally assumed that every single elite track athlete is doing something. It'd be impossible to rise to that level and not be doing something.

Coincidence!! No correlation to pitch counts!! In this case, it probably is. I really don't see anything too awful about Cueto's workload the last two years. Certainly not in Prior territory.

Divisional race... back on!

Absolutely, positively (get it?) no way that he is clean. But even dirty (is it really dirty if everyone else is doing it too?), that's unbelievable.

Somewhere along the line, "taking responsibility" began to mean "saying you take responsibility" without any real actions or consequences necessary.

Two years? Wow.

Man, I wish for a world in which people didn't post fallacies for me to point out. Incidentally, Pie has gone 1-for-9 with a single and a walk since his cycle, wiping out a good chunk of his imaginary post-April improvement.

There's more than one way into the playoffs. The other way is probably harder at this point. Depending on which BP playoff odds report you prefer, the Cubs have a 10-12 percent chance to win the division (better than I would have guessed) and a 3-7 percent chance of winning the Wild Card.

http://escapethedrain.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/hand-waving-goodbye.jpg (you should have point out that I used "human nature" too and went for the triple.)

This is stupid. Time goes linearly. You know, April comes before May and May before June. Crappy April Better May Better June That shows a trend. Anyway, no one has thrown out his April. It was used as a point of comparison. I'd also like to add that Pie has always shown that he needs an adjustment period where he's getting regular playing time at every level. Will he be what we all hoped he'd be one day? Probably not, but your posts in this thread are really bad. Hmm, you stopped at June. I wonder why. If you look at any set of splits, there will always be a pattern. It's human nature to see patterns. That doesn't mean there's a real causation behind them. It's just random noise.

See, here's an example of hand-waving. IMB is going to try to talk about baseball now to avoid posting the pic he promised us.

Your opinion on this matter has been given its due notice. Saying that he may have figured something out because he's 24 and his April stats are different from his post-April stats is parsing his splits in an unnecessary way that leads to false, or at the very least unsupportable, conclusions. If you want to play semantics as to whether that counts as "throwing them out," feel free, but that seems a bit pointless. If it's not about the proper way to analyze Felix Pie's 2009 season, or at least tangentially related to the subject of Felix Pie, it's hand-waving. Think of a magician's hand movements that try to distract the viewer from what's really going on. In the end, the most recent relevant things said in this thead were: Why would we take out the 51 ABs in April? I still haven't gotten a good answer, but I've seen a lot of hand-waving.

It was rhetorical. "Why would we throw out his April stats?" is a nicer way of saying "There's not one good reason to throw out his April stats."

33-13 is a spectacular stretch.

I asked a simple question: Is there any good reason to consider his stats post-April as a separate set of data? The answer is no. Everything else you've said is just hand-waving.

I've been hearing the term "arbitrary endpoint fallacy" for years with regards to sports statistics, but google doesn't seem to think it's a thing outside of various sports message board posts. Hmm. You don't see any sort of potential logical problem with going back into the past, lopping off at an endpoint that makes the player look better than average, coming up with an explanation based on that endpoint, and going from there? If someone had asked you "What sample size would be the best way to judge how Felix Pie is doing right now," without looking, you would have never chosen "since May 1." So why choose it, other than to conveniently wedge the data into fitting the hypothesis? Anyways, you aren't sure what I'm arguing against? It's everything that sabermetrics has been about debunking: making assumptions based on poorly chosen samples, assuming that random variations must have some sort of explanation, and coming up with an individualized hypothesis that can't be examined for a larger body of players. It's certainly possible, but I'm not sure why we would project it based on the data at hand. If he has a hot streak, he ends up okay. If he has a cold one, he ends up looking awful again. There's definitely not enough real data to project a "trend" one way or the other. (And not relevant to the immediate point, but he's also being given a major platoon boost with his usage, making him look better than he is).

Why would you assume that just because he's 24 years old, when his stats have normal random fluctuations, that it must mean something? Every player has good months and bad months. The fact that one of his bad months was in April doesn't automatically mean that he's learned something since then.

That still seems incredibly arbitrary to me. It's just another "he was good except when he wasn't" arbitrary-endpoint fallacy. Either we take the data as a whole or we need to parse it down in a less biased manner, not intentionally slicing out when he was at his worst. For example, it's hard to make an upward-trend case when July was his worst month outside of April (and possibly worse than April if BABIP is taken into account). He was awful in April, decent in May, unbelievable in June, bad in July, and good to date in August.

Let's not forget that the bunt is statistically better under average conditions with 1st and 2nd and no outs, iirc.

If you take out his 51 ABs in April where his OPS was .461, Pie has hit .309/.351/.495 for an .846 OPS. Since June 1, granted in only 55 ABs, his OPS is a fantastic .961. If the O's continue to hit him between Roberts and Adam Jones, he could end this season with some respectable numbers. Why would we take out the 51 ABs in April?

So what you are saying is that it's a very satisfying experience?

1 ip 8 runs 7 hits 3 bb 1k So you are saying a 72.00 ERA and a 10.00 WHIP so far isnt good? It's cool, not all of the runs were earned. I think it's only a 54.00 ERA. Edit: Never mind, all earned. Yahoo's box score is stupid.