[vhawk01]

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Saying that someone may be end up the greatest baseball player off all time, but that isn't much else, when being the greatest player of all time is enough imo is that point.


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Being the greatest baseball player of all time does not equal being a World Series champion, DUCY?

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LOL. Its called EV dude. Seriously. Having aces does not equal winning the pot either.

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The probability of all past events is 1.0. EV has nothing to do with it.

The greatest player is the one who has achieved the greatest performances. The only quibble is what the definition of greatest performance is, whether it involves having won a championship. A player who hits 250 homeruns in a season but doesn't win a championship can not go back and argue that his 250 homeruns is more likely to have won his team a championship, unless he has a time machine.

If you ask me what hand I want tomorrow, it will be aces. If you ask me what hand I wanted yesterday, it may not be aces.

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This is very wrong. If I were to ask you what hand you wanted yesterday in anything but the most INCREDIBLY trivial sense, I would be asking you something more like "assuming we ran it again and things were random, what hand would you have preferred to have." In the sense you are talking about here, any discussion of who was the greatest is a useless recitation of facts. There can be no argument. ANY sports argument worth having is essentially predictive. We argue about who was better, Mays or Ruth, but what are we REALLY arguing about? Certainly not about their past results. We USE their past results to speculate and THAT is what we are arguing about. So, when I say Ruth was better than Mays, what I'm really arguing is that, in a hypothetical world in which Ruth got to play on the same teams Mays did against the same players, he would have performed better.

Thats why its about EV. What is the EXPECTED value of being Ruth, put into the opportunities and environment of Mays? What is the EXPECTED value of being David Eckstein in the environment that Arod has played in for the last 13 years.

Being results oriented is so boring.