jfish26101 wrote:
... which is why sabermetrics is so misleading. They take tendencies and call them facts.

"They"? It sounds as if either you've been you've been hanging out with the wrong crowd of Sabermetrician wannabes, or you've been misreading/misinterpreting.

... not to mention the delightful irony inherent in the fact that, in lumping together all Sabermetricians under the collective pronoun "they," and stating "they take tendencies and call them facts," you've actually taken a tendency and called it a fact! Yee-ha!

It's a known fact image that virtually every statement that begins with the word "they" is false.

In all seriousness: No intelligent statistician would ever claim a statistical inference to be a fact. A "fact" has a 100% probability of being true. All statistical inferences have associated with them -- whether it's clearly stated or not -- a less-than-100% probability (commonly referred to as a "confidence interval") of being true.

Let's return to our beloved Reggie Abercrombie for an example that, while admittedly a bit rough around the edges, will suffice.

After lengthy and heated discussion and conjecture, it was ultimately revealed to us that Abercrombie's (as well as everyone's) RC data in Luke's spreadsheet is provided in proper percentile-rank format. Viz:

Percentile RC
90 26.2
75 21.3
50 16.5
25 13.1
10 9.6
What exactly does this data tell us, given proper and rational use of statistical-inferential methodology? In rough layman's terms, it tells us, for example, that there is a 10% chance that Abercrombie's RC will turn out to be (equal to or) greater than 26.2, as well as a 10% chance that his RC will be (equal to or) less than 9.6. And so on.

Here is a succinct and informative article on the topic at hand: Five Guidelines for Using Statistics. Note especially guideline number 4.

And here is an excellent ancient text that I was fortunate enough to stumble upon as my introduction to statistical methodology: How to Lie with Statistics, also described here. I highly recommend it.

Last Edited By: nemodomi 03/22/08 10:06 AM. Edited 1 times.