I have a hard time believing it. The ump is trained to look at where the ball crosses the plate. I don't think catchers can pull some David Blaine shit to make them look at their glove instead.

I will respectfully disagree. Plus, Bucknor & Joe West are current proof that training for many, blew.

JORR, remember the long ago days when guys like Musburger locally or Jim McKay and Curt Gowdy (nationally) just broadcast games and reports without trying to prove that not only were they smarter and funnier than you and the guys that you know, actually played any games?

JORR, remember the long ago days when guys like Musburger locally or Jim McKay and Curt Gowdy (nationally) just broadcast games and reports without trying to prove that not only were they smarter and funnier than you and the guys that you know, actually played any games?

Yeah, and you know, it's not that players can't or don't say dumb shit. Many of them say dumb shit all the time. But to simply dismiss everything a guy like Joe Morgan says as if his experience as possibly the best second baseman ever is meaningless strikes me as the height of arrogance.

The lede here is that a guy like Rob Neyer could think he actually knew more about catching than a guy who played 21 big league seasons and caught Carlton and Gibson.

If a MLB pitcher came in here and told you W/L was meaningless, you wouldn't suddenly change your mind.

Wow, FF just made an excellent point.

All that means is that Neyer would be a great fit for this board. If a MLB pitcher came in here and told you W/L was meaningless, you wouldn't suddenly change your mind. Same here if some well respected NBA lifer came in and told us Hoiberg was actually a good coach. I'd laugh at him and call him an idiot. IMU thinks he can run a MLB team, and I'm not sure he's wrong after seeing Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn still employed. Etc, etc, etc.

That is the entire sports world. I still remember Bernstein trying to lead Sale down the path to saying he believed W/L was irrelevant in an interview. Sale immediately dismissed the notion.

"When thinking back on mistakes he’s made, Neyer recalls a long-ago postseason game in which “Tim McCarver was raving about pitch framing and how important it is.” McCarver, who caught in the major leagues for 21 seasons before becoming an announcer, talked at great length about how a catcher could receive the ball in such a way—catching the ball in front of his body, making sure not to jerk his glove—as to influence an umpire’s ball and strike calls. Neyer says he “wrote a typically arrogant column mocking the notion that major-league umpires could be fooled by a catcher,” citing his own experience as an unfoolable Little League ump. (This column, it seems, got lost in some long-ago ESPN.com redesign.) Neyer wasn’t alone in pooh-poohing McCarver’s hobbyhorse. In 1999, Baseball Prospectus’ Keith Woolner did a convincing-seeming study showing that catchers had no influence whatsoever on a pitcher’s performance."


http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/th ... ution.html

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/artic ... icleid=432

Not for nothing, but '99-'00 was around the beginning of statheads trying to be more than rotisserie jockeys, and meeting lots of resistance and ridicule from guys like McCarver, so there was, at times, a biasing of statistical analysis towards proving whatever these guys said as wrong.

Ultimately, it lead to (and still does) erroneous assumptions being made, lack of complete data being glossed over, and generally poor, though voluminous, analysis.

Sale dismissing the notion is meaningless, though. He may not really believe it, or he might, but either way, he has to say that W/L is important for PR reasons. If he didn't, he'd be construed as self-centered and only caring about his own stats.

The problem is they thought they did "prove" that McCarver was wrong. Now the conventional wisdom seems to be that not only was McCarver right, he was right to such a degree that pitch framing is regarded as perhaps the most important aspect of catching. Maybe that's wrong too.

Maybe the fetishization of the walk is wrong also. But by all means, keep arrogantly sneering at anyone who doesn't want to retroactively put Ferris Fain in the Hall of Fame.

I have fought against the saying, "a walk's as good as a hit". I have never seen a walk drive a player home from 2nd base.

Who has said a walk is as good as a hit with men on base, though?

Well, they're wrong: even with the bases empty, a base hit allows for the possibility of further advancing on an error.

I find it rather hard to fault them for not having data that wasn't available to anyone at the time.

Indeed, and that was my point. I argued that point here extensively. The only thing I was willing to concede is that a walk does have the value of using more pitches.