Why It's Important to Do Your Own Research

    It is always important to do your own research for anything, but especially with something like baseball where emotions play such a huge role and statistics can be twisted to make a certain, irrelevant argument. What you'll see sometimes is this - 

They have to put Patsy Donovan in the Hall of Fame. He played 17 years in the Majors, batted over .300 for his career with well over 2,000 hits, stole over 500 bases, never hit into a double play, hit like blazes in the World Series, and was a premier defensive rightfielder of his time. 

If you do your own research, you can see a problem with almost every one of these statements. All of them are true, but you have to put them in a context, and you have to ask certain, other questions about the player, such as "well, why isn't he in the Hall of Fame then?" In the case of Donovan, it is painfully obvious why he is not in the Hall of Fame, if you care to look it up. (By the way, I wrote the above quote about Patsy Donovan, and as yet haven't read such a "career summary" about Donovan in particular.)