By Brian Joura
Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.
This Maya Angelou quote is often used as one of those “how to live your life” mantras. Turns out we can apply it to our little corner of the world as sports fans, too. The greybeards among us grew up in a time period when we were told that there were certain stats that were better than others to determine who the best players in the game were. And we both learned and applied those lessons.
We were doing the best we could.
But in the last 40 years, there’s been a ton of advances in understanding what makes for a good MLB player. Some fans and organizations embraced these changes. Some were eventually pulled along. And some still refuse to adapt. My guess is that this is no different when it comes to baseball evaluation than it is with any other field you can imagine.
Back around the time that the revolution in baseball statistics was gaining traction, there was an article in Scientific American about N-Rays. If you’ve never heard of N-Rays, don’t worry, you’re not really missing anything. The Wikipedia entry on N-Rays defines them as this:
were a hypothesized form of radiation, described by French physicist Prosper-René Blondlot in 1903, and initially confirmed by others, but subsequently found to be illusory.
Unfortunately, the article is beyond a paywall, so the conclusion of the article will have to be summarized, rather than attributing with an exact quote. If memory serves, the article closed with a scientist saying words to the effect of, “We used to believe in X but then all of the people who believed in X died. Now we believe in Y.”
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