Matt Pitches a Nutter
1) There *is* such a thing as productive outs.
Yes, Virginia, there is. But that doesn't mean you should consciously give outs away. If I'm in the home half of the ninth and I need only one run, yeah, OK, let's talk about bunting or a good ol' sac fly. If I have an absolute butcher at the dish, but I need his glove, then, yes, let's talk. But the idea that you should run about blithely giving away outs is dumb.
2) Base stealing is *not* stupid or worthless.
No, it's not stupid or worthless. I don't recall anybody saying it was. As a matter of fact, I seem to remember Neyer, a kool-aid drinker if ever there was one, saying that the SB was actually a case of a free market at work in "nature." That league-wide SB% tended to settle right at the break-even point of the SB's value. So maybe what's stupid and useless is Mo Vaughn ever trying to steal.
3) Ichiro *is* a wonderful, upper-echelon player, even though he has the bad manners to express much of his value by hitting singles, and the whole we-need-to-take-him-down-a-peg attitude is just fucking irritating schoolmarmism. The little people, they don't understand that he's probably overrated. Fuck that. He plays great baseball, is a positive joy to watch, and there is reason to suggest that he is slightly better than his numbers indicate.
Umm... Ichiro leads the league in RCAA, is 3rd in VORP, and 8th in WARP. Is that what you're bitching about?
4) "Short sample size" is NOT the only explanation for the Beanthletics' failure in the playoffs. They have generally played pretty awful baseball -- bad defense, terrible baserunning, Little League-level mental breakdowns. "My shit don't work in the playoffs" should be mocked daily as the whiny CYA bullshit it is, not celebrated as a triumph of Math over Irrationality.
Maybe "(s)hort sample size" is an explanation. Over the past four postseason series the A's have been outscored in only two of those series, outscored by an aggregate of 81 to 79 and have a record far below the expected norm, 8-12. But suppose you're right, so what? Lewis' book wasn't about how Beane had unlocked the secrets of the Rosetta Stone, it was that there was a marketplace, baseball, where a few guys had decided to scrutinize the prevailing wisdom and had found gross inefficiencies. Billy, Theo, Paul and the gang haven't just stopped crunchin the numbers, it is an evolutionary process. I know you know this, but again, you're lashing.
5) Garret Anderson, at least until he got hurt this year, has been a very good baseball player for most of his career, even though he has the bad manners to draw fewer walks than Mickey fucking Tettleton.
How on earth you can use the same metrics to villify Mickey Tettleton that you use to laud Bobby Grich is beyond me... (You may consider the gratuitous use of "villify" and "laud" your punishment for being such a dunderhead.)
6) I fucking *hate* Jeremy Giambi. H-a-t-e. He's fat, he's slow, he's stupid, he can't play adequate defense at unchallenging positions, and he usually can't hit. This is not the baseball I enjoy.
I'm fat and slow and stupid, do you hate me? OK, forget that... Of course you hate him, we all hate him. And I can assure you that nobody in the Oakland front office was throwing around high fives when they got him. His BA and SLG are average, and his OBP is not nearly sufficient to compensate for his "fielding." His primary value is his cheapness.
Which leads me to, 7) Why the fuck should any baseball fan root for Jeremy Giambi or Erubiel Durazo over Ichiro Suzuki or Garret Anderson?
I think we've more or less addressed this, though I will admit to a certain fondness for ED.
7 continued) OK, that's a *somewhat* of a strawman, but only somewhat. I like baseball to be played intelligently & with variety. I love watching Adam Kennedy play defense (or Bobby Grich before him); I love watching Dallas McPherson work the count to 2-0 and then guessing cutter down & in and turning on it for an RBI. I like the hit&run play executed well, I like Pudge & Bengie Molina picking off guys from first on pitches in the dirt. I love watching speed disrupt the defense. The walks-homeruns-shittydefense teams are painful for me to watch, and not only when they're beating our brains in (which is often enough). I *loved* the Yankee teams from 1996 to 2000 or so; and have grown to hate the versions since, because they play ugly, crude baseball.
Agreed. This, too, we've kinda addressed, though.
I don't hate the Sox (my shit-stirring comments yesterday notwithstanding), but I despise their brutal defense, and think it will sink them in the playoffs unless they get serious about starting Pokey at second.
I can not believe you're criticizing a team that just traded away Mr. Hamm, the city's most beloved athlete since Larry Bird and the team's most beloved star since Yaz, in return for two gold glove fielders with a combined OPS of about .675. Quite simply, Fuck you, assclown.
The caricaturized version of Moneyball ball (which, I'll happily admit, the A's are not playing this year) is just not pleasing to me, and I can't see how people would actively *prefer* it to a more cleanly played & varied approach.
The caricaturized version of Moneyball is no less ugly than your caricaturized reaction to Moneyball.
I don't believe in Progress, I believe in Baseball. And the Rally Monkey. Also, being both an Angel fan and a Primer lurker is not unlike being a Masshole forced to view every Sox-Yanx game through the lens of Michael Kay. Shit wears on you after a while. Especially when you're about to blow the playoffs because fucking Scioscia doesn't read enough Bill James to realize that leaning on a tired & injured first baseman who doesn't even have power when he's goddamned healthy is fucking suicide.
Matt
The Rally Mnkey is gay. Not "gay" like happy. Not "gay" like homosexual. Rather "gay" like two kids on the playground taunting one another, as in "You are so gay."
You have no idea how wretched Kay is. And John Sterling is even worse. I once heard Steriling brag about how small the crowd at the Stadium was.
Do you want you're team using sabrmetric analyis or not? Or are they proudly defying the new math when they win the WS? Or not heeding the revised wisdom when they suck wind? Pick one.
Finally, Matt, I would like to say, "Well Played." You're e-mail was just sensible enough to warrant a response and just flawed enough for me to tee off on you.
Yes, Virginia, there is. But that doesn't mean you should consciously give outs away. If I'm in the home half of the ninth and I need only one run, yeah, OK, let's talk about bunting or a good ol' sac fly. If I have an absolute butcher at the dish, but I need his glove, then, yes, let's talk. But the idea that you should run about blithely giving away outs is dumb.
2) Base stealing is *not* stupid or worthless.
No, it's not stupid or worthless. I don't recall anybody saying it was. As a matter of fact, I seem to remember Neyer, a kool-aid drinker if ever there was one, saying that the SB was actually a case of a free market at work in "nature." That league-wide SB% tended to settle right at the break-even point of the SB's value. So maybe what's stupid and useless is Mo Vaughn ever trying to steal.
3) Ichiro *is* a wonderful, upper-echelon player, even though he has the bad manners to express much of his value by hitting singles, and the whole we-need-to-take-him-down-a-peg attitude is just fucking irritating schoolmarmism. The little people, they don't understand that he's probably overrated. Fuck that. He plays great baseball, is a positive joy to watch, and there is reason to suggest that he is slightly better than his numbers indicate.
Umm... Ichiro leads the league in RCAA, is 3rd in VORP, and 8th in WARP. Is that what you're bitching about?
4) "Short sample size" is NOT the only explanation for the Beanthletics' failure in the playoffs. They have generally played pretty awful baseball -- bad defense, terrible baserunning, Little League-level mental breakdowns. "My shit don't work in the playoffs" should be mocked daily as the whiny CYA bullshit it is, not celebrated as a triumph of Math over Irrationality.
Maybe "(s)hort sample size" is an explanation. Over the past four postseason series the A's have been outscored in only two of those series, outscored by an aggregate of 81 to 79 and have a record far below the expected norm, 8-12. But suppose you're right, so what? Lewis' book wasn't about how Beane had unlocked the secrets of the Rosetta Stone, it was that there was a marketplace, baseball, where a few guys had decided to scrutinize the prevailing wisdom and had found gross inefficiencies. Billy, Theo, Paul and the gang haven't just stopped crunchin the numbers, it is an evolutionary process. I know you know this, but again, you're lashing.
5) Garret Anderson, at least until he got hurt this year, has been a very good baseball player for most of his career, even though he has the bad manners to draw fewer walks than Mickey fucking Tettleton.
How on earth you can use the same metrics to villify Mickey Tettleton that you use to laud Bobby Grich is beyond me... (You may consider the gratuitous use of "villify" and "laud" your punishment for being such a dunderhead.)
6) I fucking *hate* Jeremy Giambi. H-a-t-e. He's fat, he's slow, he's stupid, he can't play adequate defense at unchallenging positions, and he usually can't hit. This is not the baseball I enjoy.
I'm fat and slow and stupid, do you hate me? OK, forget that... Of course you hate him, we all hate him. And I can assure you that nobody in the Oakland front office was throwing around high fives when they got him. His BA and SLG are average, and his OBP is not nearly sufficient to compensate for his "fielding." His primary value is his cheapness.
Which leads me to, 7) Why the fuck should any baseball fan root for Jeremy Giambi or Erubiel Durazo over Ichiro Suzuki or Garret Anderson?
I think we've more or less addressed this, though I will admit to a certain fondness for ED.
7 continued) OK, that's a *somewhat* of a strawman, but only somewhat. I like baseball to be played intelligently & with variety. I love watching Adam Kennedy play defense (or Bobby Grich before him); I love watching Dallas McPherson work the count to 2-0 and then guessing cutter down & in and turning on it for an RBI. I like the hit&run play executed well, I like Pudge & Bengie Molina picking off guys from first on pitches in the dirt. I love watching speed disrupt the defense. The walks-homeruns-shittydefense teams are painful for me to watch, and not only when they're beating our brains in (which is often enough). I *loved* the Yankee teams from 1996 to 2000 or so; and have grown to hate the versions since, because they play ugly, crude baseball.
Agreed. This, too, we've kinda addressed, though.
I don't hate the Sox (my shit-stirring comments yesterday notwithstanding), but I despise their brutal defense, and think it will sink them in the playoffs unless they get serious about starting Pokey at second.
I can not believe you're criticizing a team that just traded away Mr. Hamm, the city's most beloved athlete since Larry Bird and the team's most beloved star since Yaz, in return for two gold glove fielders with a combined OPS of about .675. Quite simply, Fuck you, assclown.
The caricaturized version of Moneyball ball (which, I'll happily admit, the A's are not playing this year) is just not pleasing to me, and I can't see how people would actively *prefer* it to a more cleanly played & varied approach.
The caricaturized version of Moneyball is no less ugly than your caricaturized reaction to Moneyball.
I don't believe in Progress, I believe in Baseball. And the Rally Monkey. Also, being both an Angel fan and a Primer lurker is not unlike being a Masshole forced to view every Sox-Yanx game through the lens of Michael Kay. Shit wears on you after a while. Especially when you're about to blow the playoffs because fucking Scioscia doesn't read enough Bill James to realize that leaning on a tired & injured first baseman who doesn't even have power when he's goddamned healthy is fucking suicide.
Matt
The Rally Mnkey is gay. Not "gay" like happy. Not "gay" like homosexual. Rather "gay" like two kids on the playground taunting one another, as in "You are so gay."
You have no idea how wretched Kay is. And John Sterling is even worse. I once heard Steriling brag about how small the crowd at the Stadium was.
Do you want you're team using sabrmetric analyis or not? Or are they proudly defying the new math when they win the WS? Or not heeding the revised wisdom when they suck wind? Pick one.
Finally, Matt, I would like to say, "Well Played." You're e-mail was just sensible enough to warrant a response and just flawed enough for me to tee off on you.
3 Comments:
Gee, I'm sorry, I didn't realize it was of such a personal and sensitive nature...
greetings, gentlemen (ahem, cough).
first, to he who answers the assclown - ?fat, slow, stupid? well, i don't know whether or not your largeness of size necessarily qualifies you as "fat", nor do I know if your largess of manner merits the designation "slow," but you simply cannot meet ANY qualification whatsoever for stupid.
second, to he who IS the assclown - love of watching an exciting game, as determined by excellence of glovework, baserunning and timely hitting is a quantity that as yet, statis geekicus has been unable to formulate. I must congratulate you, sir, on successfully hiding your anti-TTOism from our fellow Primates.
I remain, dear sirs,
very sincerely yours,
lisa gray
p.s. if you gentlemen would like the return of your sweet little Texan, just holler. (i mean, request.)
But the idea that you should run about blithely giving away outs is dumb..
.
.
The idea that guys who make productive outs run about blithely giving away outs is even dumber.
Again, Ichiro hits like a pussy.
Re: the A's lack of post-season success - the truth lies somewhere in between. Bad luck, choking, you name it. But let's not bicker and argue about who can't win in the playoffs. Let's just hope they keep failing to get out of the first round, because it's hilarious to see the disciples go into meltdown mode.
The take and rake style is pretty damn boring to watch, but definitely worth it if it's your team winning. Given the choice, I'd rather my team won like the 2002 Angels, because that was a fun team to watch. The A's and Red Sox are boring, but frustrating as hell to play against because they don't swing at anything close. Effective, but boring.
If the Angels fail to make the playoffs, I couldn't help but root for a repeat of last year's playoffs. Another A's choke in the first round to drive the worshippers nuts. Another Cubs choke to piss off all of the total assholes that live in my neighborhood. Another Sox choke just because it's funny, and as far as visiting fans go, there's no lower form of life than a Red Sox fan.
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