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Originally Posted by westofyou
He's basing his opinion on when he played is he not?
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He's basing his opinion on the value of coaching from his experiences in the game. But his criticism regarding the treatment of the topic by sabermetrics is very clearly meant to be current. The whole article is basically:
- Sabermetric types things if you can't measure it then it doesn't matter
- But guess what? They're wrong. Coaching matters.
- Here's what good coaches do: help good players stay good
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What coaches do cannot be quantified, which makes it very difficult for some to comprehend and appreciate their contributions, but the importance of a good coaching staff cannot be overstated.
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Really, people can't comprehend the value because they can only comprehend value if it's quantified? Just because sabermetricians don't have a stat for something doesn't mean they think it's of negligible value. That's a classic canard. It just means they can't measure it.
Regarding the bolded part, I know it's a figure of speech. But if I say "the value of a good coach is 50 wins", I've overstated their importance and I doubt CJ would disagree. The impact of a good coach is probaby greater than zero and less than 50. Nitkowski has argued strongly that coaches have a non-zero, positive value. Good for him. But the value of his article was not in this conclusion. It was the detailed window in to the coaching role itself. Why the value canard?
Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if CJ Nitkowski just wanted to talk about good coaching and a BP editor decided that it would be a stronger article if placed in the context of "coach value" and the shortcomings of sabermetrics. But to lead the article with an attack on a largely straw man attack on sabermetricians and then never actually address the issue is kind of lame in my book. It was a very good article about the role coaches play and how they help players. But the conflict presented at the beginning did nothing to better contextualize the bulk of the article and, ultimately, was not resolved in any way.