Well, counterfactuals are, by their very nature, impossible to determine, but if the only change was losing Varietak, and all the other players remained the same, i would be quite comfortable saying, “Yes, i think they could have won those same two championships.”
Why do you always feel the need to misrepresent the ideas and the motivations of stat people when you talk about baseball? You do it almost every time, and it gets really old.
It is simply not true to say that providing leadership “does not matter” to stat people. It cannot be quantified, but that doesn’t mean that stat people feel it’s completely irrelevant. What they generally argue is that, in a team full of professionals making millions of dollars a year, nebulous qualities such as “leadership” and “chemistry” are nowhere near as reliable predictors of success as players’ actual performance.
And to say that defense doesn’t matter to them demonstrates nothing except that you must not ever have read single thing produced by people like Bill James, the folks at Baseball Prospectus, etc. Hell, the BP people have written long articles about the best ways to evaluate defense, and have put hundreds of hours into finding ways to correct for things like park, position, age, and a whole bunch of other factors when determining a player’s defensive contribution.
Hobostew, it’s one of ElvisL1ves’s little peccadilloes that he loves to take any opportunity he can to shit all over stats people in baseball threads. Every time he does it, all he demonstrates is that he actually doesn’t understand the people he’s criticizing. Here’s one of his more egregious recent examples:
Don’t you see? Statheads, according to Elvis, aren’t even interested in watching the game! They’re all probably sitting in their mothers’ basements with multiple Excel spreadsheets open, masturbating over OBP and sticking pins into the Intangibles doll.
I think RickJay offered one of the funniest critiques of Elvis’s position in that same thread: