Aimless Outlook wrote:I actually think "Gut Feel" today compared to 20+ years ago looks very different. The concept of Analytics wasn't in a manager's mind in the 90's, they only trusted tradition and their gut. Managers today have a new "gut feel" based on their understanding of today's analytics. Their gut tells them to replace a starting pitcher early - like in the 3rd time through the order scenario you suggested - because of generalized stats across all scenarios throughout the whole league might say this is a statistically better option. However, the statistics for the actual scenario, and the actual players involved, says otherwise.
Exactly, and the fact that gut feel changes is a really important element here. Baseball isn't a solved equation, it's the product of the sorts of players that teams prioritize, how they develop them, etc. The game-optimal decision will consequently change over time, as will the conventional wisdom/'gut feel'. Analytics exist in order to stay ahead of the calcification of 'gut feel' based on once-sound choices into bad decision-making when the meta changes.
Because one era's decision-makers tend to have learned baseball in the previous era, their 'gut feel' tends to bake in a lot of presuppositions that are by that point 20 years out of date. All the dudes that played or joined front offices as mailroom sorters in the 1980s that became GMs in the late 90s/early aughts favoured defense and speed because much of the baseball in the 1980s was basically played on concrete: artificial turf of that era created an incentive to field a bunch of fast dudes who put the ball on the ground, but by the early aughts most of that awful turf was gone. But what had been the analytically-sound choice in the 1980s then became the calcified conventional wisdom that the Moneyball A's exploited.
Ironically, though, even that isn't really an explanation for Schneider's gut feel. At no point has throwing a left-handed pitcher with big platoon splits in to face a guy who hits right-handed far better ever been considered analytically-sound. Platoon splits have been known for well over a century now, basically since the advent of baseball as a professional sport. It's the very reason that switch hitting exists! It's one of the few pieces of century-old conventional wisdom that actually holds up!
