Washburn new team leader, other ephemera

DMZ · February 18, 2007 at 4:02 pm · Filed Under Mariners 

(photo by ms.Tea, generously licensed)

From an ESPN spring training article:

“I’ve always been on teams where someone said what needed to be said. Last year, we didn’t have that,” Washburn said. “Now, I’m more comfortable [doing that].”

Really? Wasn’t that Ibanez’s role? Or Bloomquist’s role? Or even Hargrove?

Teh Times: “Ichiro’s next step subject of speculation“

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57 Responses to “Washburn new team leader, other ephemera”

  1. El Laberinto on February 19th, 2007 9:37 pm

    Cause you know nothing about being condescending.

  2. El Laberinto on February 19th, 2007 10:05 pm

    Leadership may not be quantifiable, but again there are other methods to assess it on besides reputation or common sense. Such as outlining the elements to look for in common sense (kinda like the DSM in psychology), and using objective consensus (like Dial’s defensive awards, I believe thats who does them). Bill James compiled several managerial statistics in his handbook, which is another good place to start, and it outlines different managerial styles; and there are probably tons of correlations you could figure out between how a team did before and after a certain event. To say my argument is “fatuous” at best is just as condescending as you accused Ralph, its not really constructive. Decisions will have to be made either way based on perceived leadership, so you can ignore it, or attempt to make a consensus out of qualitative observations (and I’m not talking, just because it can’t be quantified. I don’t know if there is a logical fallacy named for this, so I’ll just take the quote from a site, but its relevant here. “Science, by its very nature, is never capable of proving the non-existence of anything.” It’s too late for me to wrap my head around this (know, I’m not a super genius like others), but there it is FWIW.

  3. El Laberinto on February 19th, 2007 10:07 pm

    that should be “no”. Ha ha you win Harvard law school graduates.

  4. El Laberinto on February 19th, 2007 10:32 pm

    Or what Ralph was implying, its just pure sabremetric arrogance to think only what is quantifiable is what is important and relevant.

  5. DMZ on February 19th, 2007 10:50 pm

    To say my argument is “fatuous” at best is just as condescending as you accused Ralph, its not really constructive.

    No, it’s not. I made this argument:

    Here’s my point, w/r/t leadership: I’m entirely willing to accept that a team could be better, or worse, with a manager who fires them up or lets them play. For instance, we can go back and see that hard-ass managers who take over for players managers tend to get temporary improvements, and when the hard-ass managers get fired, the team usually goes the other way, you get the same effect.

    But there are two factors at play there: one’s the it’s-the-change effect. Like in the Mythical Man-Month: If you’re trying to study the effects of lighting on productivity and you turn them down, productivity goes up. If you turn them up, productivity goes up. It’s the study that’s having the effect, not the lighting.

    The other thing is that managers tend to get fired after particularly bad or unlucky seasons, and the team probably will fare better the next year.

    My point on leadership is this: if there’s no way that we can reliably measure a player’s leadership ability, or the different effects that having someone “speak up” or “lead by example” have, if we can’t find a way to show that some player, well-regarded by his peers, makes his teams better in some tangible way, than this isn’t something we should worry about or consider significant.

    And if we’ve learned anything from the last years of Mariner ineptitude, there’s no way to reliably evaluate or hire for clubhouse leadership, much less ensure that bringing any player in will help with those things.

    and you reduced it to

    We can’t measure it, so we should act as if it doesn’t exist.

    Which is absolutely not what I said at all. Calling that fatuous – silly, complacently foolish – is not all condescending. You took a substantial argument into something you could more easily mock but which didn’t represent my views.

    Why is that okay?

    Why is my getting annoyed about it, and pointing out that that happened, arrogant, or condescending?

    As to this –

    “Science, by its very nature, is never capable of proving the non-existence of anything.” It’s too late for me to wrap my head around this (know, I’m not a super genius like others), but there it is FWIW.

    That’s not a logical fallacy in itself, and I don’t know what you’re saying.

    My point is not, nor has it ever been, that any of these things – leadership, clubhouse chemistry, whatever – don’t in some form exist. But if you can’t define them, if you can’t identify them, if a player known to be a leader will not reliablly be a leader the next year, if there’s no way to see in any form the effect of something, my question is – what use is the concept? How can we do anything with it?

    Or, as James put it, sometimes the fog is so thick that we can’t tell if something’s out there or not. I think that’s the case here.

    This is the same argument, in many ways, as protection in the batting order. If it exists, and there are many logical arguments why it should, it doesn’t show up in the statistics. That doesn’t mean we stop looking, or asking questions, or say “there is or isn’t something out there”.

    You acknowledge the problem. And the problem, right now, is that we don’t know what the attributes of leadership are, how to find them, or any of that good stuff.

    That’s all.

  6. DMZ on February 19th, 2007 10:53 pm

    Or what Ralph was implying, its just pure sabremetric arrogance to think only what is quantifiable is what is important and relevant.

    And here’s the other thing – this has come up earlier in the thread, but you don’t know me, or any of the other authors here. You don’t know what we do the rest of the day, or who we love, or what causes we champion, or what drive us.

    To imply that I, or really, anyone, thinks that only the quantifiable is important or relevant is making a huge jump from an argument about the effects of player leadership to the personal that is entirely unwarranted.

  7. DMZ on February 19th, 2007 11:06 pm

    Actually, after some thought, I’m going to declare that I’ve lost, in one sense if not another, and close this thread, adding customer service to the list. If you guys want to continue complaining about me, or USSM, you have our email. Thanks.