
Sabermetrician In Exile - robg
http://www.thepostgame.com/features/201101/sabermetrician-exile
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shawnps
I liked Moneyball a lot, very interesting read. I felt it encouraged me a bit
to take more risks, regardless of what others think.

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Travis
My two major takeaways were as follows:

1) value comes from exploiting market inefficiencies in many cases

2) separate results from process (cause from effect)

3) intangibles are generally a weasel term for fitting the data to a narrative

edit: formatting

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briancurtin
Interesting that he was the man behind the Red Sox 2005 draft -- it would be
fun to get a look at the stats and analysis he compiled for that. Michael
Bowden came right out of high school so I wonder how the difference in stat
keeping and obtaining at the high school level affected what he had to come up
with.

(anecdote: We went to the same high school but didn't play together. He was on
the freshman team when I was a senior on varsity. Stats were usually done by a
volunteer student and only kept on paper.)

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Travis
Everything coming out of the SABR community (SABR=society of american baseball
researchers) says that high school stats are 99.9% worthless. The reasons are
many, but mainly it's the following: inconsistent contexts (fields, opponents,
level of play) and small sample size. Most analysis suggests a full season
(~700 plate appearances) isn't really enough for a hitter; h.s. seasons are
generally around 100AB.

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michael_dorfman
On top of that, there is the difference in the pitching pool.

I used to do a bit of sabremetrics, back in the day, and I tried to do some
projections of AA and AAA players into the majors, and found it almost
impossible to get any decent correlations.

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Travis
I think the minor league (and Japanese league) translations are pretty well
nailed down these days. See
<http://www.baseballprospectus.com/statistics/minoreqa.php>

Of course, there is a huge amount of volatility, due to the changing true
talent level (most guys in the minors are young, and should be getting
better). In addition, there's the fact that MiLB seasons are shorter, and so
SSS abound.

But, in the community, these translations are seen as "pretty accurate".

