Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth
Re overrrated, I have a logic question. Nobody of course has any trouble with the concept of being underrated. Is it a zero sum game? If 10 players are underrated, does that necessarily mean 10 are overrated?
|
I don't think it is; because the two aren't on an even scale. Both terms are unspecific, general measures that are not tied to a standard delineator, so there's no 'slider' where putting 1 player from a pool into a bucket necessitates another player being put into the opposite bucket on the scale. Even if we remove the 'not tied to a standard delineator' aspect, we can still end up with a non-zero sum game. If we evaluated every player in baseball and correlated them to "average", we probably would not have an equal number above and below the average. While the total performance of the two halves below and above must be equal, extremely good or extremely bad players account for multiple players performance gaps who are slightly better or slightly worse, and so our numbers will vary based on the extremely good and extremely bad.
I would guess though, that if we looked at a large group of players, we would end up with more in the underrated than the overrated categories. I think there's a 'soft sum' effect; the attention fostered onto a handful of players takes away from many others; the top 10 overrated will account for significantly more underrated players who don't get the attention they deserve because the focus is always on the same 10 or so players. Our bias towards representative examples will usually produce this effect in such a dataset of people, whether it's overrated or underrated baseball players, generals, physicists, or middle school janitorial staff. The extremes lean to overrated, so quantity of underrated tends to be higher.
But that's just my opinion