I currently work in education and one of the subjects I used to teach was fifth-grade social studies. Something I would work on with my students is spectrum thinking. The idea behind this is that there are multiple perspectives when it comes to historical events. Instead of simply telling my students an event from one singular perspective, I tried to provide for them the multiple perspectives in the hopes they could draw their own conclusions about why certain events occurred and which positions were more justified. Admittedly, this was not always effective with all my fifth-graders as some of my students were not developmentally ready for this type of critical thinking. I imagine this would be more effective at a high school level.
The point of bringing this up is not to reminisce about my days as a teacher. In history, things are rarely black or white: there is a lot of gray. When evaluating players, the same can be true. Even when we are right about our predictions, this doesn’t mean that the prediction had an absolute certainty of happening or not happening. There are probabilities for certain things happening and nobody is 100% correct when making their pre-evaluations. I imagine this is not a new concept to those reading this. And even if it is, hopefully you will learn something new from this perspective.
Today, I am going to look at two first basemen who may become relevant depending on how deep your league is. It would be easy for me to dismiss their recent performances, which would make the point of this article pretty useless. I am going to attempt to go through some spectrum thinking by looking at the highs and lows of both hitters. More likely than not, I won’t be able to make any concrete conclusions, but you will hopefully be able to gain some additional perspectives on what values these players could potentially provide. Read the rest of this entry »
