Hahahaha!
Nice, that is a Spies Like US quote, Dan Aykroyd before he sucked.
Funny, funny stuff.
I could dig in to the stats if I wanted to.* I've the education and intellectual tool set to do it, even very advanced stuff (I'm not a theoretical physicist or mathematician but I did stay in a few Holiday Inns). I just am not looking for too much of that that sort of thinking in baseball, also I think the game is too complex for math.
You are into stats, that is great, BUT you know, there is the rest of the world, right? Like, if you're autistic, that is cool, but just because the whole world isn't like you, that doesn't make the world better or worse than you or vice versa. Difference is just difference.
Obviously, the notion that one kind of thinking is the be all end all of intelligence (especially when that kind is the kind one likes best) is one of the clearest signs of idiocy.
Here is a better quote from the movie:
"Did you hear that?"
"Yeah, it's a dickfer."
"What's a dickfer?"
"tapeewith."
My issue with the use of stats, and many others is that you often fail to contextualize them with either other stats or their significance (A), and along with that (B) they are cherry picked ass hell.
Here is a good quote for you:
Chapter I — The One Thing Needful
“NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!”
The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a schoolroom, and the speaker’s square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster’s sleeve. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside. The speaker’s obstinate carriage, square coat, square legs, square shoulders, — nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it was, — all helped the emphasis.
“In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!”
The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.
Mr. Gradgrind eventually learns the failing of his philosophy, as readers knew he would.
Today the failure of his facty approach might not be so easy to take.
Put another way: " Alright. Stop right there... and I'll bring back the sun."
;-P
* Stats aren't really that hard to grasp, very rarely are the beyond the ken of most folk, they are generally just logic. Familiarity with them requires that one be interested in gaining that familiarity in the first place.
