ROTO: The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy and You

Cell phones don’t cause cancer. There is no Verducci Effect. Nostradamus didn’t predict anything. And players don’t play harder or better in contract-year seasons.

All of these theses are examples of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. The name derives from the fictional gunslinger that shoots randomly at the side of a barn. He then finds a cluster, circles it and pronounces that he is a sharpshooter.

In statistics, this illogic runs rampant through all fields of analytics, and fantasy baseball is no different. When people have large sets of data to analyze they often look for patterns after the fact. We see a pattern, assume that there has to be a cause for the pattern and then create a reason for it.

Sadly, scientists are just as...

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