Quote:
Originally Posted by LouGehrig
You are starting to INSULT me. There is a difference between comprehending a concept and ACCEPTING it.
Players do not play with the same intensity at all times. Why don't you respond to the 1984 Tigers, the 1955 Dodgers, or to the fact that players really do bring it up a notch in certain situations. To think that a player's intensity is constant throughout the season is naive and worse, unrealistic.
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That is assertion on your part and if you have some data to support it I will take a look. I'm assuming that you don't have any scientific backing for players "taking it up notch" and in that absense, I am not going to take such a claim seriously.
You are not thinking this through very clearly. If there was such an ability, if a player did have an on/off switch for going to maximum talent, then it would make zero sense to reserve this only for "clutch" situations. If they could actuallly crank up their ability simply by will power, they would be so damn good that it is likely that they would never face a clutch situation, they would massacre all the opposition all the time.
Things happen in baseball and thanks to the massive amount of stats kept, those things leave tracks and can be counted. If the ability you claim exists, did actually exist, it could not help but leaving tracks. We could study hitters from year to year in clutch and non clutch situations and see if the better year was determined by increased clutch chances, while some other player's poor year may be explained by a coincidental drop in his clutch opportunities.
And of course no one has ever found any such thing.....which leads to the conclusion that it isn't there. Study after study has concluded that "clutch" abilty does not carry over from year to year and no pattern exists which can account for anything but randomness at work. Against these studies we have you simply stating it because....well....why? You are making it up and expecting me to embrace your imagination over science. I will of course not be doing that, and again, if you find that insulting, sorry that I have insulted you.
Finally, and you really do not understand this...even if there was an ability to have a hitting streak (beyond the general qualification of being a hitter who gets lots of hits) ...this is not a desired ability at all. No GM or manager has ever tried to obtain a player because they were confident that this player could string together an impressive hit streak. No one knows in advance exactly which games, which innings or which at bats, are going to be the more important ones. And even if you did know, you still don't know exactly when your streak hitter is going to be on that streak.
Don't you see? 200 hits is great, that really helps a team generate runs. That they come all at once, one at a time, mostly in the first half, mostly in the second half, in wheelbarrow loads in June but thimblefuls in August....IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE if it is still 200 hits. You are not going to know in advance when you will need them the most, so planning a 56 game hitting streak does you no good.
It has no value past being a remarkable oddity. It has nothing to do with intensity, it has nothing to do with the '84 Tigers or any other irrelevancy you have introduced for reasons that elude me.
Stated flatly.....you are indeed not understanding. If you did, you would no longer be arguing these unsupportable things. So, if me saying that to you is insulting to you, then sorry, but I'm insulting you.
So...two points you have to wrap you mind around and recognize as valid:
1) The streak was a fluke.
2) Even if it wasn't a fluke, it added no value to the Yankee's season. If you had removed some hits from the 56 game streak and redistributed them to other games, it would have not changed a thing in terms of offensive value.
Really.