A Thursday Quiz: A Little Perspective for Phillies Fans

I was about to make the same observation – I don’t see a logical reason why the Phillies should feel these effects as a group while the other teams they are playing at the same stage of the season do not. Each year there have been different players out for injuries at the beginning of the season. Perhaps the year-to-year similarity is really just a coincidence that happens at approximately the same time each year. On the bright side, there is nothing about an early season hitting slump to prevent a team from having a good season and eventually succeeding in the postseason. Witness the last two years’ results and the fact that the last time the team was shut out three games in a row was in 1983.

The point I suppose is to say that they are other forces at work than merely variance. Not to downplay variance in the game but to attribute this Phillies phenomenon to coincidence seems easy. The extent to which it effects other teams is hard to say as I feel the best way to determine this is by observation and that comes with alot of familiarity with your team. For the most part the Phillies are still the same personnel wise and they all uphold Manuel’s hitting philosphy at the dish. They practice the same way, have all have similar work loads and their circadian rhythms are on the same scheledule so it is reasonable to hypothesize that a portion of players can experience adrenal fatigue within intervals close enough together to account for the differiental between varing degrees of fatigue according to each players unique body chemistry . Baseball, because of the everday play is unique so no speed/technical model is a perfect fit . It is however a speed/technical sport such that variance does not exempt it from the the same rules that govern other athletic endeavours and thus to assume a viable dynamic between poor performance and adrenal fatigue is reasonable. But fatigue is physiological phenomenon that is inherently complex without clear cut, easily defined intervals and boundaries so conclusions drawn by performance metrics alone would be suspect – not necessarily wrong but not necessarily right. Your form would be logically false (committing McNamara Fallacy), but you might get lucky and your conclusions may be factually true. Instead I believe you need actual physiological data to develop a model that in turn is compared to performance metrics to see if their is any correlation Or, perhaps you could employ more Bayesian statisitical methods but that data requirement might be huge with all the conditional probilities invovled. And most likely the data would not be symmetrical and so would require a logarthimic regression. I do feel however that it is a reason along with variance for why players slump and stay in them for long stretches, esp. power hitters. As to how it affects other teams, it’s hard to say due to the difficulty in measuring it but over a six month season every team will undergo it to a degree but may navigate out of it better by resting players more frequently or adjusting their games. There is also the issue of when the benefits off season preperation may wear off because baseball’s scheledule prohibits proper maintainence of the gains made from said training. Example: any benefits you gain from sub maximal to maximal strength training will last for 6 weeks unless maintained with the same workout at least once week with similar load and intensity. So there is also that to take into consideration. I could go on and on. I think my point was to say their is another dynamic (one founded on sports science) behind these slumps other than just variance and we can’t simply write them off as chance or regression noise because we lack the means to measure it or accurately define its parameters by the data available to us.

Firstly, if the problem is adrenal fatigue, why have the Phillies pulled out of the slump almost like it never happened the past two years

  If you don’t recover from it then you probably have Addisons Disease (bad) or maybe you had the mitochondria disorder that Rocco Baldeli suffers from. Or your dead. It’s not like the body stops producing these neurochemicals , it just can’t keep up with the demands the athlete requires over a period of time. Your body has a resting state (homeostatis) that won’t permit you to use what it needs to its perform basic housekeeping to keep you alive. So your body will hold out on you. That why players took greenies to override those those safeguards when their ten gallon hat was feeling 5 gallons low. And remember it combination of things not just adrendal fatigue. It is just a possible element of a slump. It doesn’t mean that players suffer from bad luck or don’t get lucky during these stretches. Or just do some stupid as shit like Ibanez did last night. Or get out played by the opposition. Or happen to get a good match-up.