The Jeanne Questions

The lovely and talented Jeanne, who I knew back in the day, which, as Dane Cook tells us, was a Wednesday, decided to leave me a few questions.

I knew Jeanne 20 years ago. She will correct me if I'm wrong, no doubt, but it has to be close to that. Back then, she was utterly lovely, phenomenally talented, whip smart, and younger than me. She's still all those things, only neither of us is as young as we were then. Or, as Bob Dylan once put it, "we were so much older then-we're younger than that now."



So, then-Jeanne's questions:


"If you could only watch a single movie for the rest of your life, what would it
be?" 

Ken Burns' "Baseball" is kind of cheating-it's like 18 hours long. You could call it one long movie, I guess. Assuming that's out of bounds, I would say something like "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" or maybe "A Few Good Men" or "Shawshank Redemption"-something that I have seen dozens of times and am not tired of. "Bull Durham", maybe.

"What was the hardest lesson you ever learned? Are you wiser or just sadder?"

You have to accept people for what they are, not what you would wish them to be. Not realizing that has wasted a lot of my time, and I am deeply sadder at some of the poor choices that resulted.

"Moneyball. No doubt you've read it. What's your take? On base percentage...is it the most important stat?"

This is a misunderstanding, though a very common one, so I don't blame you for it. Moneyball was about exploiting inefficiencies in the baseball marketplace. OBP happened to be one thing that was undervalued at that time. It isn't anymore-hence no more inefficiencies to exploit. (Speculation is that the current one is defensive range-but since much of the work being done now is proprietary, no one really knows what the inefficiencies are these days.)

Bill James says that baseball statistics are simplifications of very complex realities. There is no "most important stat". There are bad stats, and good stats, and better stats. Batting average is a bad stat-not bad if it's all you have, but there are better ones. OBP is better than batting average. OPS (OBP plus slugging percentage) may be better than OBP. None of them give you an entire picture of a player or team's abilities.

Thanks for the questions, though!