When the truth is found....to be....lies
And all of the joy within you dies
Is there anything about baseball that you thought was an absolute truth, but which you later found out was a lie, a distortion, or a misunderstanding?
When I was a younger analyst, a few times I thought I'd found a statistical key to player evaluation, but it turned out to be no more or less effective than any other method, just one part of the whole rather than a Holy Grail. A few times I've thought I'd discovered a scouting method that traditionalists had ignored, but it turns out that they either didn't, or that the method wasn't always reliable.
This is a big part of the reason why I try to publically evaluate my work from time to time, to make sure I'm not missing something or misleading myself, and to try to improve what I do. Sometimes this results in a bit of epistemological despair (can we ever really know anything?), but I'm not a nihilist and while I don't think truth can ever be completely known about many topics, we can get very close. Shaving off the edges of the unknowns is the goal I guess.
So, is there something about baseball that you thought you knew, but that turned out to be wrong? I'm not thinking so much of something about a specific player and more about the game itself, but if there is a specific player example you want to discuss, go ahead.
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