*Now* Plaschke finally gets it

I guess we'd have to go dig up his columns to see precisely what he wrote, but I recall a lot of cheap shots about sabermetrics and complete butchering of what they are and what they can accomplish.

No one - with the exception of maybe Michael Lewis - doesn't think that traditional scouting has a place at the table. A huge place. I've posted on this board repeatedly that, with all teams up to speed now on analytics, traditional scouting is again where the battles are being won and lost.

 

DePodesta was as wrong-headed as Plaschke.

 

I understand the Plaschke sobriquet "Google Boy" made it into the Moneyball film. Or maybe that was Simers who called DePodesta that. Who really cares.

 

Michael Lewis and Paul DePodesta then.

I think "Moneyball" was great as far as effectively advancing a point of view.

But I also think that Lewis stirred the base of resisters with as much red meat as he offered the hard-core sabermetrics crowd, particularly in his portrayal of traditional scouts as bumbling buffoons.

 

DePodesta comes off pretty poorly in the book. His (renamed) character is supposedly more of an impudent twit in the movie.

Any new religion needs believers. Paul DePodesta didn't create anything. He just got on the boat.

 

As I have been devouring everything Michael Lewis writes lately, I have also been noticing a consistent criticism that for as much as Lewis criticizes the Luddites for doing this, he also delves into the subject matter with a prior point of view and then hunts around for people and statistics that support that point of view. I enjoyed his article on Germany's role in the financial crisis immensely. Yet there were responses to it from very learned Germans that made this point very eloquently.

More eloquently than Joe Morgan did, anyway.

 

Malcolm Gladwell does it, too.

I guess we have to remind ourselves sometimes that they aren't scholars. They are essentially pop statisticians.

 

I thought one of the most general criticisms of the movie was how inaccurately DePodesta was portrayed? See here and here and here and here.

I don't know DePodesta and haven't seen Moneyball, but I have a hard time believing Plaschke is right on this one when these guys say he's so wrong.

 

Come on... Woody Paige isn't that bad.

 

I thought of Gladwell too. I guess that's what makes both such a great read. Scholarly works tend to be a little dry.

 

Yeah, DePodesta traded the steriods dealer.. BFD.

 

He'll always have a job in baseball as long as his buddies are still in the game.