Posted by: BHL (Knight1285@aol.com) on Fri Oct 13 19:51:06 2006

Your posts raise other questions concerning how to address topics of relevance, mainly your practice of editorializing. The latter term refers to occassions where individuals offer opinions on a subject, and fail to sustantiate it with any hard evidence, such as statistics. If you, for example, opine that X or Y is true, then where is the numerical evidence that substantiate it?

Also, where is the critical context thar establishes your premises as important? Melvin, if you are going negate past baseball theories, you have to first point out what such theorists promulgate. This will allow you, in turn, to establish general arguments against the diamond logicians that you feel polarized to.

Furthermore, in debating baseball critics, you need to state your reason for vindicating, partially agreeing with, or opposing criticism that you have encountered. Just agreeing with one or more theorist does not establish and particular relevance. To the contrary, doing so just repeats what other individuals have already said.

For example, when I began writing about my PFO model in 1994, I noticed that hardly any baseball coach encourages a player to pull all pitches, although that 1) the shortest distance to a home run is to the natural field, and 2) pulling pitches generally have the most exit velocity when they leave the bat. From that, I concluded that 3) there are many single hitters that can clear the pull field consistently, and could rise to the rank of a home run hitter if they learn to pull all pitches. I then used dimensional and batspeed statistics--and later added geometric arguments--to substantiate my viewpoint. Although my theory is viewed as flawed by many individuals today, the initial reception to my argument was that it suggested a logical alternative to the others approaches, such as spray hitting, hitting to all fields, and pulling the ball consistently only on middle-in pitches.

By contrast, I noticed how one of your posts concerning how shoulder rotation is of more significance than hip rotation was a post that Jack held in high esteem. Although I feel that it was well articulated, I felt, after reading that post, that you were just repeating ideas that Jack had espoused already. Perhaps, though, this proclivity can improve with practice.

Please keep everything that I pointed out in mind.

BHL