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Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Major League Baseball career double plays as a right fielder leaders

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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was merge‎ to List of Major League Baseball career double plays leaders. Consensus is trending towards merging these by-position lists to a single comprehensive one, perhaps with fewer listed per position, as a viable ATD. I am also closing the other nominated by-position lists similarly. Editors are welcome to BOLDly merge the lists mentioned here but not currently nominated, or start a discussion on the target's Talk page. Owen× ☎ 13:13, 2 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

List of Major League Baseball career double plays as a right fielder leaders

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List of Major League Baseball career double plays as a right fielder leaders (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)
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Looked at the sources, and besides baseball-reference, there isn't much to justify the list as a group. If this included all double plays, then it might be more notable as a group, as Baseball Almanac covers it. Since it is only the one position, I think WP:NOTSTATS comes into play. Edit Including the bottom two for the same reason. Conyo14 (talk) 03:47, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

List of Major League Baseball career double plays as a left fielder leaders (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
List of Major League Baseball career double plays as a center fielder leaders (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: Opposition to the merger has been raised, and to allow a full week for the added articles.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Star Mississippi 02:45, 18 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: Relisting, opinion is divided between Deletion and Merge. However, the merge target article is Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Major League Baseball career double plays as an outfielder leaders which is also up for an AFD discussion. So, this discussion can't close as a possible Merge until the fate of that article is determined. You might consider participating in that discussion, too, so it can be closed.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Liz Read! Talk! 02:41, 25 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep. Dear me. Let's see.
WP:SALAT has nothing to do with this situation. Besides some housekeeping notes, it gives three annotated examples of the types of lists to avoid:
  • "list of brand names" (Way too broad, could have millions of entries)
  • "list of one-eyed horse thieves from Montana" (Of no interest to anyone)
  • "list of shades of colors of apple sauce" (Does not contribute to the state of human knowledge)
This list is not remotely like any of those, not even close.
Another editor wrote "I am not sure that double plays by right fielders is inherently notable", but then why would you want to want to be in this discussion if you don't know that? (Narrator: they are.)
WP:NLIST, c'mon. If you think that this dataset has not "been discussed as a group or set by independent reliable sources" very many times, you must not read much in depth about baseball, in which case why are you trying to erase the work of editors who apparently have. It's late, and I shouldn't have to go get refs to prove the sky is blue.
And in addition to that, the nomination might be malformed. Not sure. I'll leave that that to an admin to decide. I got here from the center fielder article and that is confusing and it took me a bit to figure out what was going on -- apparently it was made into a group nom midstream, which is not a deal-killer but tricky, and not made clear enough, all the articles in the class are supposed to right up top, and that might be important enough that we want to start over. And if so well we have a wikiproject on baseball and maybe there would be the place to start with a discussion on the general question of "should we have these types of articles generally"? We're not going to be deleting or merging the shortstops DP article (if we are, just shoot me), so why are we singling out outfielders in particular, etc etc etc. Herostratus (talk) 06:06, 27 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The premise of that argument can be summarized with WP:THEREMUSTBESOURCES, WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS, and proof by assertion. Also, the examples provided in WP:SALAT are just that, examples, it's not meant to be exhaustive; the concept or principle is what matters. Left guide (talk) 23:47, 27 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Echoing Left Guide, I'd like to see the sources. Conyo14 (talk) 01:22, 28 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wait the nominator said that Baseball Reference is a source (which it is, altho you might have to have a subscription). Extremely reliable source. We don't need multiple sources I believe.
I don't know what so say about WP:SALAT thing. It doesn't say or imply "You should avoid these sorts of things, but... um there are lots of other things you should avoid but we aren't gonna say, wink wink, use your imagination". You could invoke SALAT against literally any list if you liked.
I'd prefer not to be SHOUTED AT thanks. And no I'm not going to stop washing my cat and look up sources for you when WP:BEFORE has not been done into the corpus of books, many available thru the Internet Library and library loan, which is a lot of work but for a group of articles of this calibre would be called for. Since you are taking it upon yourselves to participate here, you ought to know that the rubric for keeping is not "is the article ref'd" but "can the article be reffed with reasonable effort".
"Other stuff exists" only applies if that other stuff should also not exist. Right? Am I wrong there? As to proof by assertion:

Proof by assertion [is when] a proposition is repeatedly restated regardless of contradiction and refutation. The proposition can sometimes be repeated until any challenges or opposition cease, letting the proponent assert it as fact, and solely due to a lack of challengers

How dare you. This would be insulting if it wasn't so obviously just throwing words so it looks like you have an actual argument. Way to turn this into a playground fight. I wrote one gosh-darn post, cogent enough and not terribly prolix I don't think.
Look. It's apparent that you guys are looking for an excuse to delete these perfectly good articles, to the point where it's a problem. If you are making a regular practice of this it's a big problem. You obviously didn't read my post with the position "Hmmm let's see what this guy has to say and maybe consider it" but rather "I'm not changing my mind, I am here to eradicate this work, period, for reasons of my own, so I'll only read it to look for ammo to achieve that end." Sheesh.
I also would like to remind the closer that it's not a vote. Herostratus (talk) 03:08, 28 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, Baseball Reference is a source for this list, but secondary sources are required to establish notability. WP:SECONDARY:

A secondary source provides thought and reflection based on primary sources, generally at least one step removed from an event. It contains analysis, evaluation, interpretation, or synthesis of the facts, evidence, concepts, and ideas taken from primary sources.

Can you indicate where in that source there is thought, reflection, analysis, evaluation, or interpretation? Left guide (talk) 03:29, 28 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Or alternatively, if you are unable to identify secondary coverage in Baseball Reference, can you please provide other sources which show secondary coverage of this list topic? Left guide (talk) 10:01, 28 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I did a thorough search of sources, but found nothing on this subject nor its sisters in the bundling. Baseball reference is a good source, but it's also the only source to which I say it's not enough. Also, calm down. I just want to see the sources you're talking about and then analyze them. If you did a WP:BEFORE, which should be done by voters too, then please provide. Conyo14 (talk) 05:14, 28 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
First of all, thank you for being polite and making cogent points, good improvement.
Anyway, so here's the rub, and it turns out we're just having a terminology mismatch. Not anybody'ss fault really. Another term for "outfield double play" is "outfield assist", and that's more common. Annnnd... another term -- more modern and informal-- is "baserunner kills". This is pointed out in the lede, bolded, but way down. I can see where one wouldn't know to search on that, particularly if they don't know the subject.
So, searching on "baserunner kills" gets me this article at something called Batter's Box. Long article specifically on the topic, starts off:

BaseRunner Kills -- It's one of my favourite plays in baseball. And it's always a big play. When an outfielder throws out someone, at a minimum he's turning an opposition base runner into an out. He's not retiring a hitter, he's removing someone who's already reached base and is therefore a threat to score. When an outfielder throws out a runner at home plate, it's the next best thing to actually taking a run off the scoreboard...

And it goes on and on, paragraph after paragraph, long article, lots of info. Has a table with outfield kills as a rate stat -- kills per 1,000 innings. Much more informative IMO. Hopefully someone will come along and add that table after the existing one, also he points out that the list should be split into pre- and post-1920. And the article renamed. These're content issues tho.
I stopped there cos that's plenty.
I can see where searching on "outfield double plays" is not going to throw too many results. I searched on "outfield assists" and did get, not a lot, but enough to hang an article on, especially considering we've got the Batter's Box article.
I found in the The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, here,

Outfield assists, like catcher's assists, are inversely related to team performance. A bad team will have more outfield assists than a good team.

More than a passing mention anyway. Used in computing win shares I think.
This book has

While infielders record hundreds of assists per season, 10 is an excellent total for an outfielder. Tris Speaker, a legendary center fielder... holds both the single season (35) and career record (449)

There're some more, small, but if you pile them up they add up.
So hopefully terminology problem cleared up and Bob's your uncle?
So, but, couple things, it occurs to me, is this even a list article? It's got several paragraphs of text and then the list after. Name of the article doesn't matter, it could be renamed. The text isn't ref'd, but its all true and the writer didn't make it up, so there're sources out there. Tag that part of the article for lack of refs, that'd be fine.
As to original research... a lot of our lists are original research, and it's just not a problem. It doesn't detract from the Wikipedia. Don't worry about it. In fact the list rules tell you how to make a list. I made List of statues of Queen Victoria and I had to find and add them in one by one -- there's no existing list (that I could find). Is it bad article? Would it be better to 404 on readers searching for a list of statues on Queen Victoria? Of course not. What was I supposed to do instead of making that good article? Browse Reddit? How would that be adding to the sum of organized human knowledge? I wouldn't get overly attached to rules that don't help what we are trying to do here. Seriously. It's not a game where we try to win by finding some rule that lets us destroy OK articles. (Well I mean it is, but it shouldn't be).
(N.B. I added the above later than the following comment in order to keep the thread together.) Herostratus (talk) 05:40, 30 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for providing those. Unfortunately, it appears those sources discuss assists and not double plays (for Wikipedia's purposes they're distinctive terms since we have distinctive sets of articles for them), so I'm afraid you're at the wrong set of articles with those sources. However, your efforts are not wasted since those sources can be used to help establish notability at articles like List of Major League Baseball career assists as an outfielder leaders, List of Major League Baseball career assists as a right fielder leaders, List of Major League Baseball career assists as a center fielder leaders, List of Major League Baseball career assists as a left fielder leaders. Left guide (talk) 06:55, 30 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Another term for "outfield double play" is "outfield assist", and that's more common. No, that's patently false and you know that based on how much you know about baseball; double plays and assists are fundamentally different concepts. That's an attempt to sneakily twist and gerrymander what the sources say in an WP:OR/WP:SYNTH manner when sources that directly discuss this topic don't exist. Left guide (talk) 12:37, 30 September 2024 (UTC) struck some bits that may be too harsh Left guide (talk) 05:04, 1 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not gonna disparage your research, but it appears that double plays and assists are different things according to the MLB. [1], [2]
But I think you may be somewhat on the right track? Conyo14 (talk) 03:31, 1 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's close enough that there is no need for a second article. The double play totals can be included in the assist article. Spanneraol (talk) 03:35, 1 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Canvassing notice: An attempt was made to notify WikiProject Baseball of this discussion in a blatantly non-neutral manner in contravention of WP:CANVASS using the following language:

Heads up, attack on assists articles

Some editors are wanting to destroy the lists of outfield assists, here (left, center, and right in the same AfD): Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Major League Baseball career double plays as a right fielder leaders as a bad list (altho it is a full article also) -- They seem quite determined and unamenable to persuasion (although having no idea what an outfield assist is) so this looks like not a "let's together consider these articles" situation which is why I use the word "attack".

And I suppose they will succeed, assuming that the closer mainly relies on headcount or giving particular weight for certain rules.

(Infield assists are not under the gun -- yet. I see that for instance List of Major League Baseball career double plays as a shortstop leaders is tagged for lack of notability and I suppose will be attacked sooner or later.)

Is this OK? Are outfield assists just garbage trivia not worth including among our 7.6 million articles? What about shortstop assists? What about doubles, strikeouts, GIDP, what? I'm not a project member, just a casual fan, so I don't know where the line is. I don't see anybody from this project coming to the AfD to defend the articles. Maybe you all also don't care for these articles, and fine, but if it's just a matter of not noticing this happening to baseball stat articles, consider this a heads up, thanks.

Left guide (talk) 06:44, 30 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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