It appears a bit of a feud has sprung up between Richard Justice and a personal favorite of mine, Mickey Lichtman. Full disclosure: a while back (before I was hired by the Red Sox) when Mickey and Tommy Tango were kicking around the idea of a book, they asked me if I wanted to join. I'm not sure I ever said no, I just never said yes for whatever reason and it ended there. I know and respect both of them, so my defense here may just  be a reflection of that.

The criticism Mickey gets here is along the lines of "if the final answer is 'I don't know,' why did you just waste my time with the ins and outs of the mathematics of the sacrifice bunt?"

Well for starters Mickey finds the pursuit of the answer far more interesting than the answer. The process is what interests him and people tend to write about their interests. I don't see why he should be criticized for that.

"I don't know" is a lousy answer for scripture and a lousy excuse for not doing research. But it is a perfectly acceptable answer as a result of research. You simply have not researched enough things if you haven't had an occasion where all of your best research and efforts yield an inconclusive result. Whether you're studying baseball or physics or psychology, trying to shoehorn inconclusive results into conclusive ones is bad practice. Inconclusive results are, of course, just the sort of thing that angers baseball teams. Spend several months on a project to come up with something that doesn't provide you with much other than "we still don't know," and people will start questioning your value to the club. Like most other businesses, telling the boss what he wants to hear is often better for your job security than the truth.

The key is that it isn't always that way. Sometimes you do wind up with tangible results with real world benefits and you do so by engaging in the same process that didn't yield them before. If Mickey is to be blamed here, it's for not recognizing that some people view what he did as killing a cow without producing a steak. It's difficult (lord I know it's difficult) to patiently try and explain things to people who are yelling at you, but yelling back at them is not going to make them any less angry. It's taken me years to learn to drop the subject with someone who doesn't seem interested in your point of view, and I I still fail as often as I succeed. But maybe it would be best to just drop it at this point.