NCAA Bball is the only league in the world where games are played with several different brands of balls; Nike, Wilson, Under Armour, Spaulding, Adidas etc. depending on who and where you play; all are different. The NBA plays with 1 ball, FIBA plays with 1 ball, why can't we?
Duncan Marsten's first career start for @WakeBaseball:
• 5 IP
• 1 H
• 1 BB
• 10 K
• 71 p / 51 s (71.8 Strike%)
• 13/16 first pitch strikes
• Up to 99 mph
Of course that’s your contention. You’re a first-year analytics intern. You just got finished reading some Sabermetric historian—Bill James, probably. You’re gonna be convinced of that ’til next month when you get to the latest Pitching+ update, and then you’re gonna be talkin’ about how SIERA is the only "true" measure of skill because it accounts for the complexity of the batted ball profile to CSW rates.
You have no thoughts of your own. You’re just looking at a movement plot and trying to sound smart. You’re gonna realize in a couple of years that you spent all that time calculating "Expected FIP" based on a "Skill-Interactive" ghost, when you could’ve just looked at the K/BB ratio and seen the whole picture.
The sad thing is, in about five years, you’re gonna realize you’re not that bright. You’re gonna be talkin’ about Skenes’ "Expected ERA" while the real experts are just looking at a box score and realizing that if a guy doesn't walk people and he misses bats, he's gonna be fine.
You dropped $100,000 on a Data Science degree to learn how to run a regression on a pitcher's "luck," when you could’ve gotten the same predictive value for five cents in late charges by looking at a K/BB leader board at the public library.
I've already seen several "whoever voted for Markakis for HOF should have his vote taken away." Well, that would be me. I revealed why in this piece last week & I stand by it: A hat-tip vote for a guy who stood for the right things in the game. He didn't deserve to be shut out.