Incisive analysis

I listen to sports talk radio when I'm in the car, which means, here in Middle Georgia, that I often hear the Bill Shanks Show. He didn't bother me too much until recently, when he was criticizing Atlanta Braves' manager Bobby Cox for platooning players at a certain position. "Platooning" means playing one player against right-handed pitchers and the other against left-handed pitchers. Shanks hates the idea, explaining, "Hitting is hitting, and pitching is pitching."

That's the kind of serious thinking that he gets paid for. Who can argue that hitting is not hitting? That sounds like the kind of paradox Zeno of Elea would come up with. Of course hitting is hitting. But right-handed hitting is not the same as left-handed hitting, at least not against the same pitcher. Baseball players usually hit significantly better against pitchers who throw from the opposite side of the plate, i.e., right-handed hitters bat better against left-handed pitchers. Often the difference is quite significant: a player might be an All-Star if he only had to bat against pitchers, who throw with one hand but would be back in the minors if he only had to bat against pitchers who throw with the other hand. Therefore, platooning makes a great deal of sense. You can probably raise your team's batting average significantly by platooning at one position. You might well platoon at four or five positions if you had enough players on your roster.

I admit that there might be other reasons against platooning. Perhaps players hit better if they're in the lineup every day, for instance. But "hitting is hitting" is not a reason. It may be that much of the audience agrees with his line of thinking, but I'd like to believe that the radio station could find someone a little more interesting to talk about sports for several hours a day. There may be good reasons why they can't, and I'd like to deal with those in another blog entry.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Science and Philosophy, Part I: Hume and Popper

I've been listening to a lecture series on philosophy recently, and, even though I haven't gotten past the Greeks yet, it has reminded me of a number of issues that trouble me about science. I want to take the opportunity to express my concerns here. Along the way, I will probably oversimplify philosophy a great deal -- not on purpose, but rather because I have only a simplistic understanding of it. I welcome responses to clear up my misconceptions. One of my issues with science is the famous idea of Karl Popper that it can never establish positive claims, only falsify wrong ones. The history of this goes back to David Hume, the 18th century Scottish sceptic. He shook up the philosophical world by claiming that science could never prove anything through induction -- that is, drawing conclusions about physical laws based on observations. The classic illustration is the sun's rising. Even though the sun has risen every day for our whole lives, and for countless human l...
Read more

Country Music

I noticed a long time ago that there isn't much difference between the sound of country music and rock music nowadays. If I'm surfing my radio and I come to a station playing jazz, classical, or rap, I recognize it right away; but if I come to a country or rock station, I often can't tell which it is until the song is half over. Country songs often have screaming guitars that would fit equally well in a hard rock song, and only a minority have a recognizably country instrument such as a fiddle or a banjo. All the same, no one could listen to a country music station for more than a few minutes without realizing that it is definitely not a rock station. What are the differences? There are some stylistic differences. Country songs are more likely to have a boogey beat or certain western-sounding bass lines. They also tend to be more formulaic: if you can't predict how a country song ends, you probably don't listen to much country music. But those things aren...
Read more

My privileged life

I have just read the article Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Level , and the comments, and the follow-up and its comments.  The author claims that straight white males (SWM, for short) don't like being told they are "privileged," so he is going to try to explain their advantages in terms they understand.  He then very condescendingly compares their lives to playing a game on the easiest difficulty level, whereas people in other categories have it harder, and black lesbians are playing on the hardest level of all. I understand that this is a metaphor, or an analogy.  I understand that it is not supposed to be a perfect model of reality.  There are, however, several reasons why I think it is a very poor and misleading metaphor. First of all, using the gaming-difficulty metaphor implies that SWMs have an easy life.  No one plays at the easiest level unless he is a total noob, and only college students with lots of time on their hands play at the hard...
Read more