Lulz Cowherd

And to be fair is anything he said not true? Compared to football and basketball I would think there is a lot less 'thinking' in baseball. See ball. Hit ball. And how often have we looked at our own pitchers throwing up 0-2 pitches over the heart of the plate and complain how stupid they are?

Intelligence matters in all aspects of life. And I think those who are 'smart' do tend to out peform their talent level. But baseball isn't complex as compared to some other team sports.
 
thewupk said:
So what makes baseball more complex then?
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I didn't say that Baseball was more complex, just that it wasn't any less complex than Football or Basketball (for example).

What makes you think that's the case?
 
Hawk said:
I didn't say that Baseball was more complex, just that it wasn't any less complex than Football or Basketball (for example).

What makes you think that's the case?
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The context behind Cowherd's comments involved managing baseball as opposed to coaching basketball or football. It is undoubtedly obviously which of the three involves the least amount of thinking.
 
chop2chip said:
The context behind Cowherd's comments involved managing baseball as opposed to coaching basketball or football. It is undoubtedly obviously which of the three involves the least amount of thinking.
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Kind of, yeah, but he was all over the place:

The flap stems from Cowherd's comments on Thursday, which were made while debating whether it was difficult for a front-office executive to take over managerial duties -- using current Miami Marlins general manager/manager Dan Jennings as an example.

"It's baseball," Cowherd said Thursday. "You don't think a general manager can manage? Like it's impossible? The game is too complex? I've never bought into that, 'Baseball's just too complex.' Really? A third of the sport is from the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic has not been known in my lifetime as having world-class academic abilities. A lot of those kids come from rough backgrounds and have not had opportunities academically that other kids from other countries have.

"Baseball is like any sport. It's mostly instincts. A sports writer who covers baseball could go up to Tony La Russa and have a real baseball argument, and Tony would listen and it would seem reasonable. There's not a single NFL writer in the country who could diagram a play for Bill Belichick. You know, we get caught up in this whole 'thinking-man's game.' Is it in the same family? Most people could do it. It's not being a concert pianist. It's in the same family."

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I don't find it 'undoubted' or 'obvious' that managing a football/basketball team is more complex. If anything, the rote simplicity of those games is understated (from a managerial or player experience standpoint).
 
Hawk said:
I didn't say that Baseball was more complex, just that it wasn't any less complex than Football or Basketball (for example).

What makes you think that's the case?
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Offense in football is way more complex than baseball. I don't see how anyone could believe otherwise.
 
thewupk said:
Offense in football is way more complex than baseball. I don't see how anyone could believe otherwise.
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Okay -- but that's just one component of the game.

The notion that one sport is expontentially more 'complex' than the other is almost as tired as the 'thinking man's game' fallback. It's a lazy, pointless argument.
 
Hawk said:
Okay -- but that's just one component of the game.
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Defense isn't the same way? I feel defenisve schemes in the NFL are quite a bit more complex than shifting in MLB. There is only so much strategy or thinking that can help you at the MLB level. In the end talent is what wins out. Not what your manger does or doesn't do. I feel that is not the case n the NFL where great coaches can overcome a lack of talent to a certain point.
 
thewupk said:
Defense isn't the same way? I feel defenisve schemes in the NFL are quite a bit more complex than shifting in MLB. There is only so much strategy or thinking that can help you at the MLB level. In the end talent is what wins out. Not what your manger does or doesn't do. I feel that is not the case n the NFL where great coaches can overcome a lack of talent to a certain point.
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Maybe. I think of advanced metric analysis and how they have heavily influenced/changed defensive positioning in MLB over the past half-decade. That's a lot of data to process (whether or not your manager chooses to process it is a completely different story) and I just don't think see that level of number-crunching going on in the NFL right now. Parsing that information is tedious and not purely formulaic -- there are so many different dynamics.
 
yeezus said:
I don't think it's totally unreasonable for Dominicans to get offended by what he said, though.
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Would you be offended if someone from another country made a comment about Americans being fat? Is it reasonable for me to be offended by that?
 
He touched on the language barrier at some point during that bit and made the argument that you can bring in guys from Latin America and Asia who do not speak the language and they don't miss a beat, but you could never do the same for football. That was sort of my takeaway from the whole argument, which is why I didn't think it was all that offensive. I think he would have argued that if the DR had a pro football league and pro baseball league, an English speaking American would have an easy time making it in the baseball league, but not the football league. I believe that was more at the heart of what he was trying to argue. I do agree with Hawk that Cowherd was a bit all over the place on what he was trying to say.
 
Hawk said:
Maybe. I think of advanced metric analysis and how they have heavily influenced/changed defensive positioning in MLB over the past half-decade. That's a lot of data to process (whether or not your manager chooses to process it is a completely different story) and I just don't think see that level of number-crunching going on in the NFL right now. Parsing that information is tedious and not purely formulaic -- there are so many different dynamics.
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I think that's a different animal. That's mainly about percentages and the increasing your chances of where a player generally hits the ball. And as you said even if a team has the data it doesn't mean your manager is going to use it (as we saw with the Angels earlier this year). I don't really think that's about intelligence either as pretty much every team has this data. It's not hard to find or figure out. The real issue is geting managers to get away from a century of thinking that baseball has to be played one way when there is evidence to the contrary.
 
weso1 said:
Would you be offended if someone from another country made a comment about Americans being fat? Is it reasonable for me to be offended by that?
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Honestly? No. Isn't America statistically the most obese country in the world?
 
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