Murray Chassclown
I know that as a life-long member of the Nation I may be predisposed to unfairly criticizing the New York Times' baseball writers. I read Vescey and Araton and all the rest, but none of them get under my skin like Murray Chass. The Chassclown was in rare form today. The main body of his column today is about "(p)itchers (who) have been disappointing..." and offers a list that includes Kelvim Escobar.
I'm not sure how Escobar's been a disppointment to anyone who can read and use a four-function calculator. He was among the league leaders in a slew of stats: 208 IP (14th), 191 SO (4th), 3.93 ERA (10th), 19 QS (7th), , WHIP 1.29 (11th). The only thing in which he lead the league was his 7 losses in quality starts. Maybe The Chassclown was disappointed by Escobar's 3.93 run support, good for 41st in the AL. His inability to look past Escobar's 11-12 record should preclude him from writing about baseball professionally.
Further down he takes on the MVP race in the NL. I mentioned the other day The Lip's declration that Beltre was having a better season and his subsequent inability to provide a single piece of evidence to substantiate his claim. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but humor me...
Murray, c'mon, are you even trying? All those RBI for which you laud Beltre? They don't happen without any body on base. OK, the 48 from home runs do, but he didn't just pull the other 73 out of his ass. For decades men like Chass have felt, for reasons I can't comprehend, that an RBI is more valuable than a run. Let's pretend for a moment that the two are of equal value. Remember the old runs created formula, Runs + RBI - HR? Bonds 185, Beltre 177.
Remember that dopey stat I used to compare Ichiro and Hafner the other day, the total total bases divided by outs? Bonds 2.288, Beltre 1.075. Even if the stat is inaccurate in measuring value by 25% and we had to adjust Bonds down and Beltre up by the max, Bonds 1.716, Beltre 1.344.
Let's ignore the walks, which are almost the exact same as the differnece in AB, and subtract Bonds' stats from Beltre's:
If I'm reading Chass correctly, he would prefer to have this level of "production" in his line up than 220+ walks.
Pretend for a moment that Bonds' walks never happened, just elimnate then from his record. He would still lead Beltre in OPS by over 150 points. That's the difference between Beltre and Derek Lee.
If I promise to stop will you promise to write the Chassclown an angry letter?
I'm not sure how Escobar's been a disppointment to anyone who can read and use a four-function calculator. He was among the league leaders in a slew of stats: 208 IP (14th), 191 SO (4th), 3.93 ERA (10th), 19 QS (7th), , WHIP 1.29 (11th). The only thing in which he lead the league was his 7 losses in quality starts. Maybe The Chassclown was disappointed by Escobar's 3.93 run support, good for 41st in the AL. His inability to look past Escobar's 11-12 record should preclude him from writing about baseball professionally.
Further down he takes on the MVP race in the NL. I mentioned the other day The Lip's declration that Beltre was having a better season and his subsequent inability to provide a single piece of evidence to substantiate his claim. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but humor me...
With both players being crucial to their teams' success, in this view, Beltre should win the award because he has had more opportunities than Bonds to affect the outcome of games, and he has affected them.
With Bonds, the players who follow him in the lineup have to hit to make his walks mean something for the Giants.
Murray, c'mon, are you even trying? All those RBI for which you laud Beltre? They don't happen without any body on base. OK, the 48 from home runs do, but he didn't just pull the other 73 out of his ass. For decades men like Chass have felt, for reasons I can't comprehend, that an RBI is more valuable than a run. Let's pretend for a moment that the two are of equal value. Remember the old runs created formula, Runs + RBI - HR? Bonds 185, Beltre 177.
Remember that dopey stat I used to compare Ichiro and Hafner the other day, the total total bases divided by outs? Bonds 2.288, Beltre 1.075. Even if the stat is inaccurate in measuring value by 25% and we had to adjust Bonds down and Beltre up by the max, Bonds 1.716, Beltre 1.344.
Let's ignore the walks, which are almost the exact same as the differnece in AB, and subtract Bonds' stats from Beltre's:
AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI TB SO SB CS AVG SLG
225 (25) 65 5 0 3 20 73 45 1 1 .289 .324
If I'm reading Chass correctly, he would prefer to have this level of "production" in his line up than 220+ walks.
Pretend for a moment that Bonds' walks never happened, just elimnate then from his record. He would still lead Beltre in OPS by over 150 points. That's the difference between Beltre and Derek Lee.
If I promise to stop will you promise to write the Chassclown an angry letter?
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