Hey, man. Congrats on the saves record. That's pretty cool, capturing the record while performing no better than the fifth best closer in the league, figuring generously.
Allow me to make a suggestion. Your post-save celebrations are kind of a little bit much. That is: they're batshit insane, morally abhorrent, and unbecoming high-order, or even middling order, forms of life. They cause hives to break out on my soul.
Please curtail the arms-to-sky madness, before terrorists weave images of your displays into a recruitment video depicting the wicked permissiveness of American society. Stop it now.
Thanks. I really appreciate it. Keep lodging those saves. You'd totally be my MVP vote if I were under the influence of large quantities of alcohol and larger sums of money.
Regards,
J. Klompus
Friday, September 12, 2008
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Monday, September 1, 2008
Crime against humanity
John Sterling just called Ivan Rodriguez "the pudge-a-roo." If the Hague court ever adopts the death penalty, I'm funding Sterling's European vacation.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Lowrie > Lugo
When Julio Lugo soon gets healthy, we'll find out the mettle of Terry Francona and the Red Sox front office. Because there's no way they should play their $9 million per year stinkfest over his rookie fill-in, Jed Lowrie.
Lowrie, as of yesterday, is sporting a .357 OBP and .451 SLG, good for a 110 OPS+. Lately he's been a doubles machine albeit with help from horrendous Rangers pitching. Lowrie's at-bats are still few, at 122, and if league pitching adjusts and sends him into a deep slump, Lugo's return as starting shortstop could be justified. But Lugo's 88 OPS+ this year, after a 65 mark last year, makes better offense more likely to come from Lowrie for the foreseeable future. Defensively, both players seem below average, but I'd be less surprised to see caches of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction than good evidence that Lowrie's fielding significantly outreeks Lugo's. In short, Lowrie seems quite promising, while Earl Weaver would have justly deemed Lugo "lucky to be in fucking baseball, for Christ's sake."
So we appear to have a perfect test-case: do the Red Sox value objective baseball performance over the avoidance of egg on face?
(Of course, they could also sign Barry Bonds, for the league minimum, and at the least acquire the best ever pinch hitter ever, and also piss off all of New England. Yes: there's no downside.)
Lowrie, as of yesterday, is sporting a .357 OBP and .451 SLG, good for a 110 OPS+. Lately he's been a doubles machine albeit with help from horrendous Rangers pitching. Lowrie's at-bats are still few, at 122, and if league pitching adjusts and sends him into a deep slump, Lugo's return as starting shortstop could be justified. But Lugo's 88 OPS+ this year, after a 65 mark last year, makes better offense more likely to come from Lowrie for the foreseeable future. Defensively, both players seem below average, but I'd be less surprised to see caches of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction than good evidence that Lowrie's fielding significantly outreeks Lugo's. In short, Lowrie seems quite promising, while Earl Weaver would have justly deemed Lugo "lucky to be in fucking baseball, for Christ's sake."
So we appear to have a perfect test-case: do the Red Sox value objective baseball performance over the avoidance of egg on face?
(Of course, they could also sign Barry Bonds, for the league minimum, and at the least acquire the best ever pinch hitter ever, and also piss off all of New England. Yes: there's no downside.)
Monday, August 11, 2008
Marvin Gaye Joins Earl Weaver in Godness
You may have heard Marvin Gaye's 1983 rendition of the national anthem in recent Olympic ads, but Jesus H. Christ.* If anything bears repeating, it's this. Read a little about it here.
*What does the H. stand for? Humphrey? Humbolt? Did God decide the appellation or did Mary? Or both together? God: "I'll tell you what would be absolute perfection . . . " Mary: "You blew my chance to have hot unprotected sex, and there's no way you're now getting naming rights, pal."
I'll say this for the United States of America: its national anthem is a good song, which an inspired performance can make brilliant. I can't say as much for any other country. The pompous, soulless, and silly Chinese national anthem, for instance, makes me want to lobotomize myself and stick my brain up my own ass.
*What does the H. stand for? Humphrey? Humbolt? Did God decide the appellation or did Mary? Or both together? God: "I'll tell you what would be absolute perfection . . . " Mary: "You blew my chance to have hot unprotected sex, and there's no way you're now getting naming rights, pal."
I'll say this for the United States of America: its national anthem is a good song, which an inspired performance can make brilliant. I can't say as much for any other country. The pompous, soulless, and silly Chinese national anthem, for instance, makes me want to lobotomize myself and stick my brain up my own ass.
Friday, August 8, 2008
Redundant stats: the lowest of the low
Those who seek to think clearly about the game of baseball can not only develop good ways of evaluating performance but also figure out how to treat the old, inferior ways.
Stat savants know, for example, that batting average and RBI are worse metrics than OBP and SLG. But they are more than just worse. They are redundant. They belong to a class of redundant stats: completely useless when better and equally simple stats are at hand, they deserve no place whatever in any kind of analysis.
Flawed stats are not necessarily redundant. Stolen bases is a flawed stat when it's deployed, as so often, to show a player's contributions to offense via the steal; stolen base percentage is vital to include because getting caught stealing hurts offensive production. Yet stolen bases is still a useful stat. It's raw data, for one, and together with caught stealing shows the magnitude of the baserunner's addition or subtraction to offense. Similarly, runs allowed per nine innings has long been seen as a flawed depiction of pitching performance because it punishes pitchers for fielding errors that lead to runs. Thus the "earned run" was invented and with it ERA, which exclude such run-causing errors. This was progress -- I suspect ERA is usually truer than RA. Still, runs allowed is worth attending to because better pitchers will record outs after errors instead of getting shelled. And so on: ERA is flawed for reasons that ERA+ addresses, but ERA remains somewhat useful (if only for being simpler). Any stat becomes a "flawed stat" when unjustified conclusions are drawn from it.
A few stats, however, are not only flawed but redundant, so bad they have no reason to exist. The ones that come to my mind happen to be the stats most often used to measure offensive production: batting average and RBI.
Batting average sort of, kind of, sometimes, hints at the thing OBP states precisely: how often a hitter gets on base instead of making outs. Now if walks, which batting average treats as non-events, were wholly the doing of the pitcher without regard to the batter's presence and actions, then batting average would be a fine stat. But walks are obviously the work of hitters too. Most hitters maintain stable walk rates over many years. That's because walking results from certain skills: the ability to tell balls from strikes, the ability to make contact to foul off close pitches, and the ability to hit for power, causing pitchers to nibble. If walks flowed solely from pitchers' mistakes, the difference between OBP and batting average would over time equalize for everyone, so it wouldn't much matter which stat is used. But some hitters consistently have large differentials between OBP and batting average, and others small.
Point is, batting average is redundant. If you want to know on-base ability, OBP is the stat to use. If you want to tell how often contact yields a hit, use batting average on balls hit in play. I can't see any purpose to which batting average should be put -- unless you're the agent of a hitter whose high contact rate produces a batting average more impressive than his OBP.
The redundancy of RBI is more obvious and less interesting. I'm not exactly sure which dimensions of offensive production RBI are supposed to show -- maybe clutchyish hitting plus slugging plus the crucial ability to hit a sac fly and exchange high-fives for making an out. At any rate, all those dimensions can be measured more effectively and still simply, without falling prey to RBI's glaring deficiency, its dependence on teammates getting on base. On the Big Red Machine, I might have had decent RBI totals, though only because I'm short enough to draw the occasional bases-loaded walk and humble enough about my baseball skills to know to kidnap members of the opposing pitcher's family, Jack Bauer style, in order to get pitches to hit. In retrospect, RBI is somewhat problematic as a redundant stat, since it's hard to tell what RBI even purports to signify and therefore which stats should replace it. In that way, stupidity is the RBI's own best defense. I hate the RBI.
Are there other redundant stats? I hereby put this question to Primarily Baseball's horde(s) of fans.* One important quality of redundant stats is that they can't be too much simpler to calculate than the stats that replace them. Otherwise very complex stats, like runs created, could be argued to render almost every offensive stat redundant, and furthermore there's value in simplicity.
*According to the OED, one fan can comprise a horde, if he maintains facial hair and habitually walks around wielding a hand-whittled club. So: stop shaving and start whittling. It's probably not a terrible tradeoff if you whittle fast.
P.S. Suzyn Waldman, August 9, 12:20 a.m., announcing a Yankees pitching chage: "And here comes Joe Torre . . ." She corrected herself after the commercial break, saying, "I'm a dope" and "I knew I would do that at least once this year." I agree with the former and share in the latter, but nice recovery, Suzyn.
P.P.S. I can't permit myself to type the name "Suzyn" without forswearing any intent to approve of the spelling.
Stat savants know, for example, that batting average and RBI are worse metrics than OBP and SLG. But they are more than just worse. They are redundant. They belong to a class of redundant stats: completely useless when better and equally simple stats are at hand, they deserve no place whatever in any kind of analysis.
Flawed stats are not necessarily redundant. Stolen bases is a flawed stat when it's deployed, as so often, to show a player's contributions to offense via the steal; stolen base percentage is vital to include because getting caught stealing hurts offensive production. Yet stolen bases is still a useful stat. It's raw data, for one, and together with caught stealing shows the magnitude of the baserunner's addition or subtraction to offense. Similarly, runs allowed per nine innings has long been seen as a flawed depiction of pitching performance because it punishes pitchers for fielding errors that lead to runs. Thus the "earned run" was invented and with it ERA, which exclude such run-causing errors. This was progress -- I suspect ERA is usually truer than RA. Still, runs allowed is worth attending to because better pitchers will record outs after errors instead of getting shelled. And so on: ERA is flawed for reasons that ERA+ addresses, but ERA remains somewhat useful (if only for being simpler). Any stat becomes a "flawed stat" when unjustified conclusions are drawn from it.
A few stats, however, are not only flawed but redundant, so bad they have no reason to exist. The ones that come to my mind happen to be the stats most often used to measure offensive production: batting average and RBI.
Batting average sort of, kind of, sometimes, hints at the thing OBP states precisely: how often a hitter gets on base instead of making outs. Now if walks, which batting average treats as non-events, were wholly the doing of the pitcher without regard to the batter's presence and actions, then batting average would be a fine stat. But walks are obviously the work of hitters too. Most hitters maintain stable walk rates over many years. That's because walking results from certain skills: the ability to tell balls from strikes, the ability to make contact to foul off close pitches, and the ability to hit for power, causing pitchers to nibble. If walks flowed solely from pitchers' mistakes, the difference between OBP and batting average would over time equalize for everyone, so it wouldn't much matter which stat is used. But some hitters consistently have large differentials between OBP and batting average, and others small.
Point is, batting average is redundant. If you want to know on-base ability, OBP is the stat to use. If you want to tell how often contact yields a hit, use batting average on balls hit in play. I can't see any purpose to which batting average should be put -- unless you're the agent of a hitter whose high contact rate produces a batting average more impressive than his OBP.
The redundancy of RBI is more obvious and less interesting. I'm not exactly sure which dimensions of offensive production RBI are supposed to show -- maybe clutchyish hitting plus slugging plus the crucial ability to hit a sac fly and exchange high-fives for making an out. At any rate, all those dimensions can be measured more effectively and still simply, without falling prey to RBI's glaring deficiency, its dependence on teammates getting on base. On the Big Red Machine, I might have had decent RBI totals, though only because I'm short enough to draw the occasional bases-loaded walk and humble enough about my baseball skills to know to kidnap members of the opposing pitcher's family, Jack Bauer style, in order to get pitches to hit. In retrospect, RBI is somewhat problematic as a redundant stat, since it's hard to tell what RBI even purports to signify and therefore which stats should replace it. In that way, stupidity is the RBI's own best defense. I hate the RBI.
Are there other redundant stats? I hereby put this question to Primarily Baseball's horde(s) of fans.* One important quality of redundant stats is that they can't be too much simpler to calculate than the stats that replace them. Otherwise very complex stats, like runs created, could be argued to render almost every offensive stat redundant, and furthermore there's value in simplicity.
*According to the OED, one fan can comprise a horde, if he maintains facial hair and habitually walks around wielding a hand-whittled club. So: stop shaving and start whittling. It's probably not a terrible tradeoff if you whittle fast.
P.S. Suzyn Waldman, August 9, 12:20 a.m., announcing a Yankees pitching chage: "And here comes Joe Torre . . ." She corrected herself after the commercial break, saying, "I'm a dope" and "I knew I would do that at least once this year." I agree with the former and share in the latter, but nice recovery, Suzyn.
P.P.S. I can't permit myself to type the name "Suzyn" without forswearing any intent to approve of the spelling.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
"Colon sees light at end of tunnel"
I'll bet you $1,000,000,000 trillion dollars, and the lives of all my relatives, distant as well as close, but especially close, that that MLB.com headline writer, having experienced (no less than generated) an effusion of creative genius equaled in music only by late-period Beethoven and in literature only by post-prison Dostoyevsky, thought up that cutie months ago and has since had it ready to deploy, quivering in its fully taut bow, awaiting the first sign of healing by the prostrate lower back of the Red Sox' fat backup plan. I mean, god damn, if my job were to think up headlines for Bartolo Colon news (if only!), I'd be prepped for every scenario short of alien invasion. Aliens Probe Colon. Make that, every scenario, without exception.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Is it Fair to Consider Home Run Derby Perfomance in MVP Deliberations?
Because that was super-awesome.
Monday, July 7, 2008
David Simon Doesn't Suffer Fools Gladly And In Fact Kicks Fools' Asses
It's good to see a person you like affirm the value of a thing you love and revile someone you hate. To wit: this interview with David Simon, co-creator of The Wire, in which Simon expresses a great passion for and knowledge of baseball and a fantastic loathing of toad-like commissioner-extraordinaire Bud "Exposing My Penis Would Actually Be More Merciful Than Making You Look At My Face" Selig. (My nickname, not Simon's, though perhaps I should be going for maximum ambiguity on this.) I bring you the fantastic-hatred part:
"But let me say this about the official side of Major League Baseball: They can kiss my pale, white ass. Seriously. Although that sequence reflected in no negative way on baseball itself -- a reporter was making up a story about a handicapped fan for his own benefit -- MLB considered our request to film on stadium property and use MLB logos and then denied the request. Unless our drama pretty much exalts baseball as the greatest game ever played by the greatest bunch of people ever to play a game, MLB will not allow the use of its logos or facilities in any act of storytelling. I find this cowardly and venal and offensive. A game that claims to be the national pastime should be confident enough and respectful enough of independent storytelling to allow itself to be seen within the context of ordinary American life. The script that we showed to MLB said nothing at all negative about the game itself; it showed a reporter being dishonest. But even that dynamic was too scary for the gutless, lawyerly humps who surround the commissioner's office. Apparently, baseball can only be depicted as a part of American life when it is glorified or marketed in the most wholesome manner. Pro football is just as bad by the way, but I somehow expect more integrity of baseball in such matters, given that it seeks to hold such an elemental claim on the American experience. So we shot the sequence anyway, just off the stadium grounds on Conway Street. And, lo and behold, those interviewed by the reporter -- in the revised shooting script anyway -- trashed Bud Selig for the steroid scandals and other foibles. And later in the run, during one of the newspaper's budget meetings, the steroid mess is revised with another dollop of disrespect for the commissioner's inaction heaped on top. Did MLB do better or worse for its wimpery? Hey, when you try to control everything, you control nothing."
"But let me say this about the official side of Major League Baseball: They can kiss my pale, white ass. Seriously. Although that sequence reflected in no negative way on baseball itself -- a reporter was making up a story about a handicapped fan for his own benefit -- MLB considered our request to film on stadium property and use MLB logos and then denied the request. Unless our drama pretty much exalts baseball as the greatest game ever played by the greatest bunch of people ever to play a game, MLB will not allow the use of its logos or facilities in any act of storytelling. I find this cowardly and venal and offensive. A game that claims to be the national pastime should be confident enough and respectful enough of independent storytelling to allow itself to be seen within the context of ordinary American life. The script that we showed to MLB said nothing at all negative about the game itself; it showed a reporter being dishonest. But even that dynamic was too scary for the gutless, lawyerly humps who surround the commissioner's office. Apparently, baseball can only be depicted as a part of American life when it is glorified or marketed in the most wholesome manner. Pro football is just as bad by the way, but I somehow expect more integrity of baseball in such matters, given that it seeks to hold such an elemental claim on the American experience. So we shot the sequence anyway, just off the stadium grounds on Conway Street. And, lo and behold, those interviewed by the reporter -- in the revised shooting script anyway -- trashed Bud Selig for the steroid scandals and other foibles. And later in the run, during one of the newspaper's budget meetings, the steroid mess is revised with another dollop of disrespect for the commissioner's inaction heaped on top. Did MLB do better or worse for its wimpery? Hey, when you try to control everything, you control nothing."
When Idiots Attack II
On a serious note, this is awful. A New England man suspected a guy with New York license plates of being a Yankees fan, so, naturally, he beat him with a metal baseball bat. The victim is now being hospitalized (and for the record doesn't like baseball that much). The incident follows a Sox-Yanks altercation in May in which a 43-year-old Yankees fan ran her car into taunting Sox fans, leaving one dead, another injured, and herself charged with second-degree murder.
These perpetrators were probably drunk, but assaulting fans of a rival baseball team shouldn't even be a drunk urge. I mean, there's a reasonable case to be made -- unpersuasive to me, but reasonable -- that it's pathetic to care as much as I do about teams composed of players I don't personally know, to whom I have no attachment beyond the mere coincidence that I live where they play. To physically attack someone for being a Yankees fan or a Sox fan, or for owning license plates from a neighboring state, home to the largest city in the world, is total fuck madness. Both organizations should consider addressing the issue.
Whew. Okay. That was no fun. Let's see. Hmm. Curt Schilling is rotund like a state capitol.
Better.
These perpetrators were probably drunk, but assaulting fans of a rival baseball team shouldn't even be a drunk urge. I mean, there's a reasonable case to be made -- unpersuasive to me, but reasonable -- that it's pathetic to care as much as I do about teams composed of players I don't personally know, to whom I have no attachment beyond the mere coincidence that I live where they play. To physically attack someone for being a Yankees fan or a Sox fan, or for owning license plates from a neighboring state, home to the largest city in the world, is total fuck madness. Both organizations should consider addressing the issue.
Whew. Okay. That was no fun. Let's see. Hmm. Curt Schilling is rotund like a state capitol.
Better.
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