Quote:
Originally Posted by Dienasty
To say that advanced stats have nothing to do with success in Baseball is extremely ignorant. WOW.
If advanced stats meant nothing on a team level then guys like Epstein, Beane, Friedman, Luhnow would not get paid millions of dollars to run a franchise.
Also SF spits in the face of analytics?
"GM Brian Sabean and manager Bruce Bochy have reputations for being old-school baseball types, but it's not accurate to call them anti-"Moneyball."
San Francisco has a small, stable front office that doesn't talk much about analytics; that's to avoid taking credit from the players, CEO Larry Baer told the New York Times. But Sabean and others insist the Giants have always incorporated statistical information and resultant strategies.
For instance, Bochy utilized the stolen base and sacrifice bunt less than any other NL manager in 2014, saying, "I believe in going for the bigger inning." And one of the pivotal plays in Game 7 of the last World Series went the Giants' way specifically because of their use of defensive analytics.
Being so close to Silicon Valley, the Giants have built-in advantages that have helped -- they have happily served as a guinea pig for Sportvision, whose technology center is in Mountain View, California, and therefore had access to PITCHf/x and FIELDf/x data before any other team.
OK, the Giants aren't exactly the baseball embodiment of Google, but with three World Series titles in five years, who cares?"
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The thing is all those guys use advanced analytics to evaluate individual talent and help build a team, which I mentioned was effective. They don't use it to predict future results or what teams will be good or bad next year based on last years advanced stats.
You use it to evaluate individual players, which in baseball can lead to success since the sport is more designed to single events.
But at the end of the day it doesn't mean that the teams with the best advanced stats or the best analytics department is the best team. It also doesn't mean that advanced stats will predict which team is good or which team is bad.
Also I meant "the spitting in the face comment" more in the way that their advanced stats as a team are not the greatest but they still win. Much like this year the Flames are spitting in the face of advanced stats as they continue to win. Doesn't mean they don't use advanced stats, just means that they are successful in spite of their poor rankings by advanced stats measures.
In the end the point was more that while advanced stats are a great tool in both sports, especially when evaluating individual talent, they still have a hard time predicting future team success at the team level.
They can help you be successful by providing you insights when building a team but using them in retrospect to predict the future success of a team is still unreliable since there are so many changing factors.
Personally I am a supporter of advanced stats, and think as much info as possible is great, but I do think that they have some limitations in their ability to predict future events. I view them more as a tool that helps you evaluate past results, they can help you identify weaknesses in your team but I don't think looking at a team's advanced stats and saying they are good or bad for that reason is not effective.