Baseball is a game that lends itself to comparing era’s. People will always do so because baseball is a game of repetition, not of brute strength or pure athletic ability. It is also a game of endless debate, one where numbers and anecdotal evidence frequently clash, both sides of the fight forever trying to silence the other.

Well, here’s to the death of anecdotal evidence ala Joe Morgan!

From the NY Times comes THIS!

“A new camera and software system in its final testing phases will record the exact speed and location of the ball and every player on the field, allowing the most digitized of sports to be overrun anew by hundreds of innovative statistics that will rate players more accurately, almost certainly affect their compensation and perhaps alter how the game itself is played.”

It figures to be cheap to install and will solve many of the problems that both scouts and stat heads (moi included) face when trying to eval defense. This is a marvelous development!

I think that people will misinterpret anecdotal evidence with scouting, so let me clarify: Scouting requires writing what you see with your eyes down. I love scouting, I love swing mechanics and pitching mechanics and feilding mechanics, the sound of the bat, the pop of the mitt, the whole nine. I just also like to write those things down instead of relying on my faulty memory. I also like to combine that with what the numbers tell me to properly evaluate players.

Anecdotal evidence is crap, and I HOPE this will deal a serious blow to that noise.