From MVN.com (Most Valuable Network), a social web site, this thoughtful argument about “The Problems of Sabremetrics,” with a reference to Sam walkers Fantasyland.
Upshot:
…the work of Bill James, Ron Shandler and their ilk has brought a new dynamic to our understanding of how baseball players succeed and fail on the diamond. Yet despite their best efforts, the finest statisticians can still only accurately project the performance of around 65 to 70 percent of batters and 40 to 45 percent of pitchers from one year to the next. Mathematics always fall short in painting a complete picture and that uncertainty creates problems for the fantasy player.
and
If we cannot fully trust the numbers and if we acknowledge that some parts of the game are determined by dumb luck, that leaves a significant portion of our decision-making up to common sense and instinct. Just as we know that life as a slave must have sucked without a statistic telling us so, we know that the performance of baseball players will sometimes defy all attempts at understanding and decisions have to be made accordingly. So we draft players earlier than we should, we try to catch batters on hot streaks and, despite the best efforts of sabermetricians to convince us otherwise, we sometimes buy into the myth of first-half/second-half players. All of these strategies (and many others) fly in the face of the stat-heads who want all decisions arrived at through mathematical means, but they make up an important part of the arsenal utilized by successful fantasy players.
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