Landis

• From: Brian Rostron <blr85_at_brostron1.yahoo.invalid>
• Date: Tue, 07 Nov 2006 02:27:04 -0000
• Message-ID: <eioqto+7mcn_at_...>

Following up on my previous post, it's interesting to look at the events
that they describe.  Part of it, of course, is schadenfreude at CBI's
expense, something that many people experience (the Region 15 organizers
giving teams the questions that end up being used just strikes me as
amusing just in terms of irony), but it's also interesting in terms of
historical perspective.  One of the things that the editors alluded to
was Bill James's work (and those Techsters, or whatever they call
themselves, were an erudite bunch), and these events and the response
remind me of some of the "difficulties" that baseball experienced in the
1910s.  Some important things were amiss, and the integrity of the
enterprise appeared to be at least challenged, but things improved in
some critical ways because people (in this case ACU-I) stepped in and
made sure that responsible people were appointed to positions of
responsibility.  The system kind of worked.

Now, there were probably other areas of concern such as question quality
and difficulty that CBI was not going to fix, given its format and
business model.  As such, people developed other formats and
organizations to better address those desires.  Good for them!