I like stats, but I love baseball.

I’ve read a lot of the post you made the other day and I was initially annoyed by you calling out Nico and I, and I chose not to post in it because I didn’t trust myself not to make anything worse. I also know it was in many ways a reaction to what I helped drag out earlier.

I know I’ve had my problems with you and I think more of it relates to the attitude I read from you than anything else. Some others have reminded and/or pointed out that some of it is just the way you write here, the way you keep things generally unfiltered with your thoughts, opinions, points and so on.

I can respect that, and I can respect how you want AN to be or how you want your posts to be treated, handled and so on. You come here for your reasons and I come here for mine.

I don’t agree with everything you say and I can’t always argue or debate enough to convey why, so there are often times where I get defensive and go with the “Whatever, this is the way I feel about it and I don’t care what you or anyone else thinks about it” line. To a point, that’s true. Sometimes it’s just me getting tired of the way things are going and trying to step away from it. I’ll be the first to tell everyone I have my moments where I realize “Okay, I could have handled that better.”

Take the situation where you and RRS got into it. My gut instinct was to tell you I thought you were out of line in that thread but I second-guessed myself and mentioned it in the DLD after seeing Sirbed say something. That was a mistake. If I’m going to say something I think about you, you deserve to see it where it’s actually happening.

I think both you and RRS could have handled the exchange that took place better, but I saw RRS get pretty upset in the game thread yesterday so I don’t know if he’s just letting some frustration get to him or what. Hopefully it passes, but it doesn’t excuse his role in all this.

Either way, I’d like to put it in the past and leave it there. To that effect I want to apologize for calling you out in an unfair way. I also know that since we have some pretty fundamental differences of opinion that often lead to us going back and forth with each other in an unproductive way, I’m going to try to do a better job of not going that route.

I saw you mention you enjoy the stats side of baseball about 90% compared to the rest or something like that, and that’s very different from my focus. I’ve always enjoyed watching and being around the sport much more than all the rest while using some stats to compare this or that, but I’m not a formulas person and I don’t use stats in general as my primary way of judging anything about the game. I’ll use some of them for a variety of reasons, but mostly up to a point that doesn’t go as deep as your uses for them do.

Anyway, this is an olive branch. If I don’t agree with you about something but I can’t really articulate why, I’ll try to just stay out of it. Truce?

from where it all started when I have the time. But I probably won’t comment unless I see where you were provoked. I really don’t want to start anything between you and I as we seem to be enjoying a level of peace for the time being.

But if I can see where you’re correct that your method of discourse was advantageous or that you were provoked in any kind of way, I probably will comment…further extending the olive branch [for the lack of a better term], but not that you really need that from me.

something like the Mulder trade timeline, please.

the entire thing was getting chastised by nonstat posters who were acting like jackasses

You’ve got me in that list. Am I one of the nonstat posters acting like a jackass?

2) I pointed out good defense helping Cahill out.

And no one disagreed, that I can see. Though someone did ask, probably rhetorically, whether or not all the team’s pitchers were also outperforming their metrics.

3) Someone asked me why I hated Cahill

This is where I think you should have insisted that you didn’t hate him but just felt that he was lucky and that you really didn’t think other fans should place their trust in him. But the silence about not hating him spoke volumes, probably. And the thing is, people were still being pretty cool (civil) about the whole thing in spite of that.

5) Waddell and I make arguments about ways that Cahill could be helped by the park/defense he plays with.

WC was coming hard with the snark, it seemed. And people were still keeping it cool.

7) Flashfire says that im too cold and logical and missing intangibles (which he doesn’t clarify.)

He would have been better off trying to give you an argument but at that point he might not have known where to go. I’ll attempt to explain this later…where I would have gone, that is.

8) Nico says well you cant actually predict the future

This is the nub of all the strife, IMO. I agree with Nico here. Stats are a decent predicter of things that are mechanically performed or can be shown to be normally distributed. Baseball players and what they do (how they perform), I believe, vary way too much from season to season to accurately predict anything with confidence. One can reduce the risk of variability with the use of stats in a lot of cases but it is not fool proof. Reliance on stats to attempt to accurately predict future performance seems like it becomes its own faith-based pursuit: something that the stats were used to get away from. No metric is perfect, either. The good one explain a lot. But every once in a while a metric shows that it can make type II errors even though more than 99% of the time it will not.

Let me stop here and pick up where I’ve left off, later.

9) PT and I explain how you can

Both of you make great points. To each other, you both probably believe that what you’re discussing cannot be disputed at all. But as I read it, i’m not convinced the metrics are accurately measuring things properly as it relates to Cahill. This is what I mean when I said that perhaps FlashFire might not have been in the frame of mind to actually state/convey this. I’m not sure where the argument would have gone if he (or anyone) had stated this. Because at this point, it comes down to a faith-based arguement on both sides.

11) I show flashfire h/r splits which show Cahill pitching much better at the coli and why the coli uniquely helps cahill

He lets it go [in Internet debate, that’s the same as a consession, isn’t it]. FF does write the he takes it. At this point I would probably argue that building a team to utilize/exploit the park is probably pretty smart. It could be one reason why Beane has done such a decent job of building a pitcher’s success and then flipping them for talent. Though he hasn’t managed to do so well in acquiring FA pitching, building their value, and then flipping ‘em. though I am convinced that that’s what he tried to do with Sheets and was going to flip him at the deadline if all worked out the way it didn’t.

12) Nico then diggs up the Eveland/Braden flamewar from last year saying that I clearly cant know what Im talking about because I was on the wrong side of that.

I have no idea how ugly that got since I don’t recall this. It must have been bad because I was thinking [as I was reading it and based on what I read you state in this post that I’m replying to] you were being a little to sensitive about it.

15) the comment I show explaining why my view is preferable.

I’m glad I was not there to participate. Because at that point I would have known that you were wed to the stats and I wed to the idea that the stats/metric just might be wrong in this case. It may have gotten ugly after that or it may have gotten ugly as I continued by writing something like, “Dude, why is it so important for you to convince us to jump off the Cahill bandwagon?” That probably would not have been helpful, but it might have led to a discussion that I would have wanted to participate in.

18) Nico says that he likes my comment before basically reasserting all of the things that he says Im wrong about and says that Im tearing down Cahill and should just appreciate what Cahill is doing which is basically implying Im a bad fan.

So basically the entire thing was getting chastised by nonstat posters who were acting like jackasses in a unfortunately non CGV way IMO

This is where our filters, and how each of us, interprets things we read, is likely very different. That’s all I’m willing to say.

as used by Mahan, was “the area between Arabia and India”.

I have already acknowledged that no definition includes India; I am objecting to your exaggerated assertion that India “has nothing to do with” the Middle East, which is not correct.

If you’re using Urdu as the definition of non-Middle East, you are excluding Pakistan, which is contrary to popular journalistic usage today and also contrary to the definition used at the G8 summit.

Those who would exclude Iran from the Middle East are deviating from all traditional use of the term and are changing it from a geographic term to a linguistic or cultural term, which is unnecessary since we already have "the Arab world" for that.

I can hardly even discuss misuse of the term "the Caliphate" without writing a lengthy essay, so I will just note that referring to the Caliphate as a political power is historically meaningless in either of the eras that you cite. The Umayyad caliphs of Cordoba were never recognized by anyone outside of Iberia, and at no time in history did any other caliph ever hold the least bit of political power over Spain.

My point in noting all this – aside from overwhelming you with intellectual bullying ;-) – is that you have no business being dogmatic about your brother’s friend’s creative definition of the term "Middle East" when (1) it’s a vague and flexible term anyway, and (2) you’re not very clear on all the definitions yourself.

its wikipedia, but it gets you there

Also, anecdotally people I know who were born there.