1. Arguably the best bullpen in the majors.
2. Four solid starters in the rotation, and the fifth being acceptable enough to get us a win 50% of the time.

Moving Hughes to the pen will seriously undermine #1, and has no guarantee to improve #2.

Then there’s point 3:

3. We’re better than 99% certain to make the playoffs, as is.

Yeah, there’s a small chance we pull a Flushing, but if that happens it won’t be the fault of the fifth starter. So working with the (very safe) assumption that we make it, we need THIS bullpen in the playoffs. We don’t need a #5 starter. Why risk screwing around with Hughes’ arm or head in order to improve something we don’t really need until, at best, next season?

With regards to 1 its a legitimate point to make even if empirical evidence in such areas is weak. Just as you say there is such this as psychology you should also remember the effects of cognitive bias!

Point 2 is silly.

You, and a few other of Bo’s defenders, want us to treat him BETTER than he treats us.

Screw that. I’m done with that crap.

You’re welcome to your opinion. I prefer to read comments for what the words state, not for what I assume the writer’s motivation to be.

Saying that Bo isn’t appealing to emotion and arguing against a strawman when he uses well-known buzzwords and loaded phrases like “the game isn’t played on computers” is like saying that Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin don’t mean anything inflammatory or alarming when they talk about “government death panels”.

Bo knows what he said, and we all do as well.

This is not a debating competition, it’s a blog where we use plain english and cut each other slack. There was nothing stupid, strawman, or rash about what Bo wrote; it made perfect sense.

As for the team “taking off” when Phil entered the bullpen…yes, taken in isolation, that’s an obvious overstatement. But a substantial improvement in the strength of the bullpen relative to where it was during April and much of May has mattered in the Yankees dominance since then.

You guys sit there waiting for Bo to write anything, and then you pounce.

Sometimes, the comments here are from the “bizarro world” of baseball. Let me explain–In the real world, people overstate the importance of things like ‘mental toughness,’ ‘clutch ability,’ or ‘winning mentality,’ and even flat statistical things like the importance of batting average, or the importance of relief pitchers relative to starting pitchers. Thank goodness we have the sabermetric revolution to have corrected our errors and misconceptions in these areas.

But here, in occasional forays into the bizarro world, people try to act as if something like psychology or intuition doesn’t exist at all. Just as we can be stupid about calling a player a ‘winner,’ it’s possible to go overboard and be stupid with quantifiable facts and data, too. Bo brings up a very legit point – namely, that Hughes is having great success as a relief pitcher, and that we don’t really know whether that success will translate if he is switched to a starter now. Maybe he likes being a reliever, and wants to stay there. Maybe he would worry about the different requirements of starting pitching, and would lose confidence in some of his pitches as a starter. There are things which exist and are real but which are not definable or explicable in terms of data or other quantitative analysis. There IS such a thing as psychology.

The importance of ‘intuition’ or psychology or philosophy or whatever you want to call it may be small in baseball, but it does exist. It’s ok to talk about it.