The arbitrators aren’t required to know anything about baseball or statistics. And, as a result, simplistic statistics win the day. The “July” argument is the classic cherry picking fallacy; however, the idea has some surface appeal (if you don’t look at it from a statistical standpoint), and I’m probably guilty myself of falling for similar arguments in other situations. It’s like arguing,“X pitcher is a good (or bad) pitcher if you remove his results from these four games.” I have read previously that Tal Smith has been known to use thinly sliced split type stats, which one would guess are subject to sample size problems. But I don’t think that kind of statistical testing enters the picture.

 As I mentioned in the main thread, I was persuaded by Maury’s argument that Wandy may have asked for too much. Perhaps if Wandy’s agent had asked for $500,000 less, he might have won, and gained $1.5 million over what he will end up with.