If saying stuff like "I think a lot of this on-base percentage is taking away some of the aggressiveness of some of the young kids to swing the bat," and other disparaging things about something as basic as on base percentage is the traditionally approved way of doing things, no thanks.

With the retirement of Jeremy Brown this year, anti-sabremetrics people have been dancing on the grave of baseball analysis.  This conveniently ignores the fact that Brown was a late first-round pick, none of the marquee players (like Fielder) were available, and Beane couldn't afford to sign them anyway.  The good first round draft pick that year, Nick Swisher, is also conveniently forgotten.

The dumbest thing (and I don't mean to say that anyone is dumb, but that this argument is ridiculous) in the anti-sabr canon is that somehow Bill James has failed.  Bill James works for the damned Boston Red Sox, and Theo Epstein is a huge analysis guy.  No one ever said baseball analysis is limited to small market teams.

If you mean it literally, that PECOTA has not been deductively proven to predict Major League statistics, there's not much I can say to you. Of course other factors ("intangibles") make prognostication hardly an exact science, but if that's what's holding you back, you need to lower your standards.

I am pro-intellectual, and by that I simply mean I am pro-thinking, pro-rationality, anti-knee-jerk reactions, anti-emotion, anti-love, pro-robots, pro-Matrix, anti-human, pro-nihilism, anti-Christ.

Yeah?

The guy in the article probably hasn't read him, but he also probably couldn't name any of the others that have flourished in the trend that James led.

If he did read him, there is a good chance he would like him, as he is more conversational and willing to engage in questioning and discussion than many or most of the followers. Heck, James is often self-questioning without any prompting.

So when the guy knocks Bill James, my guess is that he is referring to all the noise, much of it illogical, that is created and associated as "SABR."

oh, and it's a good argument/opinion/feeling...you get the point :)

Right out of the gate, you define the debate as science versus GUT? Quite a battle.

And then you group anyone who would challenge the sabr crowd as old, lazy and stupid.

No logical fallacies there, I guess I'll move along.

Then more of the same - to criticize the hustlers trying to make money or the fans trying to prove they are smarter than the scouting and management staffs of MLB is old and lazy people trying to fight advancement?

Never mind that the science is often woeful and reasoning is often absent... its advancement.

Then its anti-intellectual because criticism is claiming disrespect. There's a brain twister.

And battlekow didn't really make a defense of PECOTA other than to claim that it is better than Marcel the Monkey which isn't saying much other than you're drawing conclusions from estimating tools. They aren't fingerprint matching.

And then you throw in the classic internet ad hominem of the mother's basement remark and claim that someone is equating "science" with witch-doctory. First, your side isn't science. Its often opposed to science. Its often sales pitches for consulting and writing contracts and its fans claiming superior knowledge along with people emotionally attached. And who knows what witch-doctory is, but a lot of science has proceeded from knowledge gained from people labeled as witch doctors. Of course they also represent tradition, observation and experience and all of those are deprecated by he Vorpies.

After all that crying that you're better, mixed in with yet another ad hominem about the sealed envelope (another irony), you want to agree to disagree?

And you wonder why people use "sabr" as a slur. You've done a great job of supporting the author of the article that started the thread.

is best being the enemy of better or some such.

Wouldn't a scientist examine the bad misses? Could it be that the basis of PECOTA is flawed and by that I don't mean how much revenue it generates for its creator, Nate Silver I believe.

Wouldn't a scientist question its application to creating a batting order based on nine individuals where slight misses would completely change the results? How about when a single "bad miss" that would completely invalidate the results. How about multiple bad misses? Ironically, two critical participants are Braun and Kendall and so far they are not very close to their PECOTA projections. The obvious cry would be sample size, but wouldn't a scientist observe all results and question the basis of his conclusions?

Hell, how does PECOTA define its success? What are the parameters that would justify application particularly to a batting order of nine?