quote:
Nah, all these dudes here were in the dugout and know exactly what we had and why those decisions were made. These guys know baseball and understand there are no nuances at all.

They all say they were bad decisions, and of course we lost so they are right.

Fire Jay, Hire Rantards.

The fallacy in your argument is that you believe one must know with absolute certainty what result will follow a decision, in order to make a judgment on said decision. If the world worked that way, I could send 10 people walking across the interstate, blindfolded, and after several were run over, and some managed to make it across because cars swerved around them in time, I could conclude that the survivors made good decisions.

Or... I could just say, without waiting for the end result, that this is clearly not a good idea, and regardless of how exactly it plays out, the percentages say that the chances of it working out aren't good.

Because we won, you believe it was great coaching, apparently. There is nothing about that situation, based on over 40 games of this season worth of data, that suggested it was a good idea to play the lefty/righty matchup game, which was almost sure to backfire. In case you missed the point of my above analogy, yes, the possibility exists that anyone could have blown that game, if different decisions were made. We manage uncertainty in life, and in coaching or business decisions, based on reasonable expected outcomes. In other words, logic, experience, and reason. In matters outside of sports, I put faith ahead of all of those things. In sports, there are percentages you have to play. And then you live with the results.

Yes, there are nuances. Such as "why is so and so closing, and not this other guy?". Because not everyone is mentally adequate to handle that situation. Coach, in my opinion, over-managed by playing the matchups, instead of trusting his better relievers. You know... Nuance. He only lets Ack pitch to one batter, goes for the matchup with Guidry, let's him face two batters, yanks him for a matchup with a guy who's not getting outs from lefties or righties with any consistency, and he walks a guy. Now we're holding on with Thatcher Hurd, not knowing which Thatcher we're going to get. Fortunately, we got the good Thatcher.

I trust his decisions most of the time, but sometimes a coach can overthink it, and I don't owe it to anyone to pretend otherwise. Some people give coaches way too much credit. They're human beings just like the rest of us. We all have something we're good at, that we still manage to mess up on sometimes.

This post was edited on 4/30/23 at 9:44 am