Re: An American View of Cricket (longish)

Randy Myers  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>In rec.sport.baseball Blair P. Houghton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> Randy Myers  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> >Being better athletically?  We're talking about being better at
>> >playing baseball and there is only _one_ way to determine who is
>> >the best at playing baseball and that is to look at the final
>> >score.
>
>> And?
>
>> You forgot to add this:
>
>> "...of a large number of games played between the same two teams."
>
>> One game is a statistically insignificant sample.
>
>But the quality of a team is not determined through statistical
>significance.  It's determined by the score of the last game they
>played.

You're highly challenged in logic and semantics.  Whenever
anyone proves anything to you, you change the wording of
the topic to make it a new topic that usually - though
not always - means something different.  But usually -
almost always - you don't understand the new thing either.

Anyone who wishes to make a wager on tomorrow's game
had better pay attention to a lot more than who won
yesterday's, or they will be betting in ignorance.

What they find is that the statistics are their best
guide to which team is the "stronger", "better", or
"higher-quality" choice.

>The best team in baseball is found by looking at the winning score
>of the last game of the year.  Whether that tean matches the stat
>fan's choice as best team is wholly immaterial.

Only to you.

The quality of a team and its winning a given game or
series are not perfectly correlated.  The worst team has
beaten the best team on many occasions.  The worst team
has even beaten the best team in entire series.  That has
not made the worst team the best team.  It has only made
them the winning team, for that contest.

Your insistence that there is no randomness immanent in
baseball simply ignores the real behavior of the system.
There is randomness in every sport.  Being able to adapt
to the deviations from expected results produced by that
randomness is one of the talents that converts good players
and teams into winners on a given day.  But sometimes,
the lesser team gets easy breaks and doesn't have to work
as hard to win, while the better team gets bad breaks that
no team could overcome.  Then the best team loses.

                                --Blair
                                  "Now to try to redefine 'logic and
                                   semantics' to evade this one."