Mark Worrell's delivery gets the best of him

It would have only been ironic had I continued to harp on how stupid the original post was after KennyWang made his clarifying post (the second one in this thread) saying that it was sarcasm. Instead, I wrote that I was “sorry” and had misconstrued his original post.

This is exactly what you didn’t do. Better get your “irony” detector tuned up.

stop the anecdotal and specific prediction and start with a systematic classification of pitchers. You’ll never convince anyone based on 20 examples. It’s time consuming but otherwise your prone to selective sampling and a biased data set.

and you certainly do not acknowledge the role of anatomical abnormality. i find it nowhere on your site. consider this post from this month:

I was catching up on the latest news over at Yahoo Sports when I came across a blurb that mentioned that Brandon McCarthy was having shoulder stiffness and had to be scratched from a start. The blurb was accompanied by the photo below, which makes clear the root cause of Brandon McCarthy’s problems.

you went on to attribute his stiffness to “scap loading.” you make no acknowledgment that his problem could very reasonably be the natural conformation of his shoulder — you attribute it immediately, based on one photo and a “blurb”, to his mechanics. you lack any basis to rule out all the other potential causes. that is what i was complaining of: you teach people that injuries come from bad mechanics, and you act as if nothing else could.

there’s nothing particularly scientific about your predictions. science is proceeding through a defined method to create hypotheses and test them. your procedures are undefined and largely justify events that have already occurred.

most of the pitchers that you “pan” you panned after they experienced injuries. so, you say chris carpenter is an injury risk; aj burnett is an injury risk. everybody who posts to this blog knows that. you praise greg maddux and roger clemens — what a risk, to praise forty-something pitchers! you praise only a handful of young pitchers whose injury risk is unknown, although since you are happy to distance yourself from your francis predictions and as recently as 2006, you “didn’t know what you were doing”, so I doubt you would stand by any other predictions (tell me, did you return any money that you got from clients in 2006, since you didn’t know what you were doing?). and you pan several pitchers that haven’t had substantial injury yet: i am still waiting for the season ending surgery for anthony reyes, who you called a trainwreck and indicated he would not last out the

re: mulder and francis: how about this quote now that you “know something”?

If you look at the picture above of Mark Mulder, which is from Monday 6/30/2008, you will see the same basic thing but with some subtle, and possibly significant, differences.
     Mark Mulder’s PAS elbow is still significantly below the level of his shoulders, as if he is still trying to ease the stress on his shoulder. However, his PAS elbow, while low, does seem to be higher than in the past, which may mean that his injury has healed to a degree. Also, it looks to me like Mark Mulder’s arm is dragging less than it did in the past, which is good.
If you compare the photo above of Mark Mulder to the photo above of Jeff Francis, you will see more similarities now than in the past, which is probably a good thing.

so in that section you indicate that in late june 2008, mulder’s pitching indicated improvement in his condition … particularly since he looks like jeff francis. you also said this:

10/10/2007: While I haven’t seen enough of Jeff Francis to render a verdict on his elbow, from what I have seen of his arm action (IOW his lack of Inverted W), I think his shoulder should hold up.

and

After analyzing Jeff Francis’ pitching mechanics, I think he is more Greg Maddux than Mark Mulder, which is good for both him and the Rockies.

of course, shortly after his injury you wrote:

Back in October of 2007, I took a quick look at the pitching mechanics of Jeff Francis. While I mostly liked what I saw, at the time I stated that I had some questions about Jeff Francis’s arm action, and in particular his low Pitching Arm Side (PAS) elbow, and wondered whether he was going to end up like Greg Maddux or Mark Mulder.
     I now think that Jeff Francis is fairly likely to end up like Mark Mulder because they are both LHPs who share a common problem; they both pull in early with their Glove Side (GS) elbows which creates a subtle timing problem and increases the load on their shoulder. Their low PAS elbow is the result of this problem, more than the cause.

which was more or less a total distortion of what you’d previously written. you stated affirmatively that you thought he was more maddux than mulder.

what defines science is having a testing process, something that gives you a final answer. a yes or a no. not having 19 different bet-hedging answers. if you’re selling yourself as a predictor of pitching performance, then stick by your predictions.

what’s more science just doesn’t do any of the things you want it to do. even for relationships that are strongly supported by evidence — the link between cigarettes and cancer, or the link between obesity and diabetes — doctors don’t look at a picture of someone who is smoking and say “he’s going to die in three years” or see an obese person walking down the street and say “he’s going to get diabetes in five years.” Science is good at making general predictions. it is terrible, by and large, at making individual predictions — hence, the George Burns’s of the world who smoke like chimneys and live to be 100.

the only cases where you see individual level predictions being made come where physicians have a great deal of information about individuals — test results, mri’s, scans, etc. — and issue a prognosis. but no scientist seeks to work off the minimal information that you do: here you analyze several prospects based on a single photo. in the comments on homer bailey and garza, it’s clear you’re not relying on anything else.

i have my personal doubts about the legitimacy of your promoted mechanics, but you are claiming that mechanics can predict the immediate future of individual pitchers whom you have not examined, whose medical history you have no access to. you can’t possibly claim that is a scientific process.

and this is not the case. I like reading the stuff, and I think it’s cool to get a look at the way some people think about and coach mechanics.

I see too many oddities in the Pitch f/x data to trust their data set.

I have the same concern with some of the ASMI data (e.g. I think they overvalue the role of internal rotation), although it seems to be better of late.

I think ASMI’s data on Marshall’s pitchers is quite good in terms of correlating well with what you see in high speed film (and quite damning of many of Marshall’s claims).