Lucky Sevens
It's no secret that Murray Chass is -- how to put this delicately? -- hopelessly out of touch. Once upon a time he was a groundbreaker, pioneering coverage of the business side of baseball back in the 1970s. For that he received the J.G. Taylor Spink Award, the Hall of Fame equivalent for writers, back in 2003. But lately, poor Murray's brainpan has been dripping.
You may recall that last February, Chass took a break from feeding the pigeons by the lake to take aim at Baseball Prospectus, complaining about those big mean acronyms like VORP which cluttered up the big bad daily emails he had signed up for by virtue of a complimentary subscription. He made himself look
quite the fool, and
we all had a good laugh at
his expense (though surely, his editors deserved
some opprobrium for letting him make such an ass of himself). It was rather like watching
The Daily Show's clips of Alaska senator Ted Stevens combining his talent for
self-immolation on the job with
a laughable ignorance of technology.
That almost certainly wasn't Chass' only public gaffe in recent years, but it couldn't have helped his cause much when it came time for the
New York Times bean-counters to reckon with their dwindling inventory of staplers and paper clip holders.
Reportedly, Chass is in the process of being bought out (he
refuses to characterize it as involuntarily), potentially ending a run at the paper that began in 1969, the year I was born.
Now, I was prepared to forego dancing on Chass' professional grave by letting this pass without comment, but then I saw
his latest diatribe. The deathless topic of Bloggers versus Mainstream Media has been in the news again; along with many a stressed-out beat man taking his swipes, higher-profiler hacks like
Bob Costas and
Rick Reilly have been taking their hacks at the blogosphere, apparently unanimous in belief that their status as high priests of sports media is threatened by (talk about a lack of originality -- they all use this one) guys in their underwear. Costas, generally the most reasonable of this bunch (and also the one for whom the written word isn't a meal ticket), was forced to
chug a mug of
STFU and admit he'd overstepped in his generalization.
Anyway, Charley Steiner of XM Radio's
Baseball Beat had Chass on his April 3 show, and amid the conversation, Murray the Grey got a bit cranky when it came to a certain medium:
"I hate bloggers." "Worst development in media business, anyone can be a blogger." "No credentials required, just spouting off their opinions." "Our wives could go on and do it if they wanted to." "I know they're not going away but I wish they did."
Oooo-kay. Not sure why he introduced sexism into the equation, but clearly Chass feels even more threatened now that the wolf is at his door. One wonders how well his attitude will go over when his next employer asks him to augment his next column by keeping a blog.
Chass' segment was followed by one from Dodger Thoughts' Jon Weisman, a man well equipped to understand the blogger/MSM fry, having spent a few years as a baseball beat reporter long before building one of the best blogs around. Weisman
elaborated his take on Chass and the issue in general:
Today on Baseball Beat with Charley Steiner, I was asked to offer my perspective on the issue of blogger credibility and credentialbility. I understand what's prompting the questions: There's increasing discussion on whether bloggers should be allowed locker-room access, in a world where moments before my introduction, New York Times columnist Murray Chass had expressed the all-too-common view basically comparing bloggers to the Ebola virus. Nevertheless, it's fascinating to actually find a need to defend an entire class of people -- especially when the attacks are coming from a class of people that is supposed to be professional, insightful, objective and open-minded. (Yes, that passes muster with the Irony Committee.)
...But beyond self-preservation, it's important to realize that condemning a medium, at least in this case, is bush-league. The medium doesn't decide whether to tell a story in a thoughtful, responsible or entertaining fashion; the messenger does... trust me: There are good and bad messengers everywhere.
...If I've done a good job as an outsider looking in, I expect respect, not dismissal. First, some of the analysis done by bloggers is flat-out better than anything you'll see from a major paper -- and it's done without the support system of a major paper, often without any renumeration whatsoever. In some ways, it's harder work.
Second, while there's value in interacting with the players and management of a baseball team, I can testify that there's often value in not interacting with them. It can give you a level of objectivity that is often missing from mainstream reporting. And at a minimum, many kinds of analysis don't require a locker-room presence, yet can be of tremendous value when done right.
There is no good reason for an Us vs. Them mentality when it comes to mainstream reporters and bloggers. The readership benefits from their combined presence, and really, short of the sportswriter who doubles as a great blogger, one isn't going to take the other's job away. (You certainly won't see me on the Dodger beat for a local paper anytime soon.) Bottom line: A multitude of opinions and a more open debate of the issues are good things. We aren't witnessing the downfall of written baseball coverage; we're witnessing a flourishing, a tremendously rich era to live in. We should cherish this time.
Bless Weisman for rising above the fray while some of the rest of us are content to snark away. While I'm still tempted to
tappa-tappa-tappa over Chass being run out of the
Times, the larger point is that the days when the traditional media held the key to understanding in any field -- or at least sports, politics, and entertainment -- have been over for quite awhile.
Access and a budget don't add up to automatic insight, and the fragmentation that's taken place via the rise of the blogs is a reaction to the mainstream media's limitations of space, and a lack of respect for its constituency. In broad terms, to the extent that baseball fans read blogs, it's because they -- I mean
you -- are not getting that kind of coverage from the mainstream outlets at your immediate disposal (exemplars like
Pete Abraham and
Joe Posnanski notwithstanding). Perhaps you're bored of the jock-sniffing quote monkeys or the soapbox derby champion columnists who bore you to death with their righteous pontifications on the local nine. Perhaps you're hungry for analysis using sharper tools than batting average, RBI, pitcher win-loss records and manager hunches, wiling to search for a bit of innovation in the service of insight. Or perhaps you simply want to have a few laughs to puncture the staid seriousness of the sports page. If so, it's not hard to find a handful of good blogs that fill the requisite niches, particularly as the medium has matured.
As the seven-year anniversary of this site arrives today, I'd like to think this blog remains one of them. It's no secret that The Futility Infielder ain't quite what it used to be, given how much of my energy is devoted to my paid work at Baseball Prospectus and Fantasy Baseball Index, not to mention projects to be named later. Particularly as I've backed away from covering the Yankees so closely, a good chunk of this site's regular readership has found other outlets for its fix, and deservedly so, as there's good coverage to be had out there.
In the dead of winter, weeks between entries, I pondered whether keeping this blog running was still a worthwhile venture. The conclusion I came to in my heart of hearts was a resounding yes. While it's not going to supplant the work I'm doing at BP or beyond, there's no place where I feel more at home than when I'm writing here. As the
exhaustive season previews give way to the peanuts and Crackerjacks of the regular season, wrangling even a short blog post or two is an exercise I'm planning to maintain on a daily basis. I hope you'll continue along for the ride.
Labels: anniversaries, Senility
Stick a Fork in the 2007 Yankees
"Kick in the idiot box and wait for the news in the history books/ It's like junkies who hate their heroin." -- d. boon, lead singer of the Minutemen, "Shit You Hear at Parties"
I give up. I'm done. To hell with the 2007 Yankees, and while I'm at it, to hell with the managerial reign of Joe Torre. I'm not spending one more iota of energy fretting this sorry-assed team's demise after Tuesday night's debacle in Baltimore. Stick a fork in 'em, they're cooked.
I don't like to lose perspective about one game -- I'm usually the one counseling friends and readers to crawl off the ledge -- but this one was emblematic. If Torre couldn't be bothered to use a rested Mariano Rivera in the face of a sudden-death bottom of the ninth to thwart a potential three-game losing streak and 1-6 slide, then this team, this season, maybe even this regime is beyond redemption. Torre inexplicably chose to pitch Scott Proctor in that situation, and despite a terrific play to snare a pop-up bunt, Proctor walked two men, including Ramon Hernandez to force the winning run home with the bases loaded. That came moments after a wild pitch/near-HBP which should have done the job one way or the other.
Not calling Rivera's number was an indefensible decision, even moreso because Torre's made
the same mistake before. Absent a note from the doctor or a visibly detached limb, there's no reason Rivera shouldn't have been in the game -- he hadn't pitched since Friday, so Torre's
explanation about the length of Mo's previous outing doesn't wash. The man's thrown 1.2 innings, 20 pitches, in the past nine days! If the team is disguising a Rivera injury, what's the point? The Yankees might as well put their heads between their legs and kiss their asses goodbye, because they'll go nowhere with Proctor and/or Kyle Farnsworth closing things out.
Eleven games behind the Red Sox in the AL East, eight back in the Wild Card with six teams ahead of them, the Yanks can ill afford to fritter more games away. But they seemed content to do exactly that Tuesday night, so I'm officially now Beyond Caring. No more objects thrown at the TV, no more Tivoing their games so I can cling to a shred of hope. This season is done for the Yankees. Throw them on the pile of expensive toys that broke all too quickly. Go spend some time with your loved ones rather than tuning in for the daily rust and rot. You've got better things to do than to cheer on this trainwreck.
Labels: Senility, Yankees
Kicking Chass and Fixing Chats
On Monday, my JAWS article about the Veterans Committee was published at Baseball Prospectus publication. Tuesday saw
the voting results -- another shutout -- announced, and when I
blogged it at BP Unfiltered, I added a veiled dig at the
New York Times' Murray Chass, who had... well, I'll give him
the rope:
I receive a daily e-mail message from Baseball Prospectus, an electronic publication filled with articles and information about statistics, mostly statistics that only stats mongers can love.
To me, VORP epitomized the new-age nonsense. For the longest time, I had no idea what VORP meant and didn’t care enough to go to any great lengths to find out. I asked some colleagues whose work I respect, and they didn’t know what it meant either.
Finally, not long ago, I came across VORP spelled out. It stands for value over replacement player. How thrilling. How absurd. Value over replacement player. Don’t ask what it means. I don’t know.
I suppose that if stats mongers want to sit at their computers and play with these things all day long, that’s their prerogative. But their attempt to introduce these new-age statistics into the game threatens to undermine most fans’ enjoyment of baseball and the human factor therein.
People play baseball. Numbers don’t.
Shortly after the blog entry was published, I began receiving a steady stream of emails, almost unanimously positive. The supportive comments -- thank you, readers -- kept pouring in during
my chat a couple of hours later, where I said some things that a few people took as upping the rhetorical ante. If I regret anything now that the story has cooled, it's that nobody got
the vintage Ice-T reference, and that said opening line was taken as BP's party line. It was not; it was an off-the-cuff response that was far more heated and less measured than Executive Vice President Nate Silver's
open letter, which stands as BP's official response.
In my view and the view of many others
around the blogosphere, Chass looked completely foolish. Even in hindsight, I'm puzzled why his screed was published; it's an embarrassment to the
New York Times and the profession. Did anyone who read that article decide they would suddenly take Chass more seriously than they had before, now that he had drawn the line in the sand and declared,
I will not learn what this means under any circumstances, even when the answer is one click away?
Did any of Chass' colleagues at the
Times -- whether old-guardsmen like Dave Anderson and George Vescey or younger writers such as Alan Schwarz and David Leonhardt (who have mentioned
many BP statistics and
writers in their "Keeping Score" column" but who obviously weren't asked in Chass' informal poll) -- thank him for standing up to those punks with their new-age stats?
Did the wheezing Grey Lady gain more traction in any quarter thanks to one of its writers proudly standing up for knownothingism?
Boil down Chass' words, and they amount to, "I don't understand this. It somehow finds my computer every day and it scares me and reminds me I'm obsolete. They're replacing me with a calculator!" To me, that looks like a writer who's gone waaaay past his pitch count.
It's a sad day when someone who's received
the top honor that baseball can grant his profession decides he knows too much about the sport to have to learn another statistic. Scratch that. It's a sad day when any writer decides he knows so much about his field that he'll trumpet his exemption from learning more.
It's even sadder that said writer, who was honored in part for being on the vanguard of reporting the business of baseball and its labor issues, has decided that he no longer can keep up with the changing times. Worse, he decided to make an unsupportable and offensive generality that something he doesn't understand --
a statistic, for heaven's sake -- somehow ruins the game for most fans.
The beauty of baseball is that its fans can find such a multitude of ways to appreciate the game. If Chass hasn't grasped that single fact in 40-something years of covering baseball, he hasn't learned a thing.
• • •
Aside from
l'affair Chass, my chat also featured technical problems that sent a few of my responses floating into the ether rather than showing up on the page. I earmarked a couple of JAWS-related ones to take a later swing at:
bloodwedding (BK): Jay, I am not totally up on HOF opinion and JAWS, but I assume a) that Biggio is a lock and b) that he is now a below average player in 2007. Using Biggio (not sure he is the best example), but say a player's last few seasons are decidedly below average for their position, yet they push up the guy's WARP3 or what-have-you...my question is, should Peak be given more weight than Longevity, and how much more? A guy like Albert Belle could peter out for a few more years and enhance his raw totals, but it wouldn't help a team in real life. Thoughts?
Biggio, who is now just 70 hits shy of 3,000 and 19 homers shy of 300, is in good shape regarding the Hall of Fame based on his accomplishments on the field. JAWS thinks so, too; he scores at 123.7 career WARP3, 69.5 peak, and 96.6 overall. The Hall of Fame second basemen set the highest bar — 122.8/71.5/97.1 — and Biggio isn't quite over it yet, but 1.2 WARP will do the trick.
Which brings up the fact that Biggio is in fact now a below-average player. According to BP's numbers, he was seven runs below average with the bat and 14 runs below average in the field last year, good for just 2.5 WARP in a season where he got over 600 plate appearances. In fact, in a year where the Astros missed winning the NL Central by 1 1/2 games, it's arguable that Phil Garner's decision to ride such a spent horse so far when they had a younger, more able alternative in Chris Burke cost the team the division. I wrote a chapter for the forthcoming
It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over: the Baseball Prospectus Pennant Race Book on similar instances throughout baseball history. It's an all-too-common mistake, alas.
But that shouldn't change how we view Bigs' career. One thing I stated in both the
BBWAA and VC JAWS articles is that what we can call the Terrence Long portion of a player's career -- the point where we could substitute said crappy player to soak up a mostly useless 2-3 WARP a year to finish out a foreshortened career -- isn't where a Hall case should be decided. That's why I overrode the "no's" on Belle and Dick Allen, both of whom had very high peaks and missed by just a couple JAWS points on career; with better luck they'd have made it over the line even with minimal production.
On the other hand, the studies I've done with my WARP data indicate to me that in terms of using JAWS as a predictive tool for the HOF, I'm probably overvaluing peak; one actually gets a better correlation simply using career WARP. Note that JAWS isn't
specifically designed to be a predictive tool; my goal with it is to strike a balance between the idealism that a Hall vote should be based on merit and the pragmatism to understand that merit is a concept that means different things to different voters, but that greatness is generally considered along the lines of career and peak.
Accounting for peak gives the system more nuance than simple career totals, as the peak element stands as a proxy for the awards, the All-Stars, Gold Gloves and league-leading totals which a career WARP measure doesn't see. But the latter still provides the bulk of a player's Hall of Fame argument whether rwe're talking about JAWS or the BBWAA vote; if it didn't, most of the players on this year's VC ballot would have long since been in, as their careers petered out at 33 or 35 instead of lasting until 40.
Carlos Delgado (Flushing, New York): JAWS me, please!
Oddly enough, this question came up over
dinner last week with my baseball-loving pals of some renown. Delgado scores at 81.8/58.7/70.3, where the average Hall of Famer first-sacker winds up at 106.1/62.8/84.5. That puts Delgado, who's entering his Age 35 season, 28.4 WARP away from the line, needing about four and a half seasons that are the equivalent of his 6.2-WARP 2006.
He can get closer by improving upon his peak component; his seven best years are worth 10.4, 9.2, 8.9, 8.7. 7.5, 7.2, and 6.8 WARP. An 8.0 WARP season, a level he hasn't seen since 2003, would up his career total to 89.8 and raise his peak to 59.9, good for an overall score of 74.9, leaving him 19.2 WARP shy. And so on. The bottom line is that Delgado will have to maintain a considerable pace into his late 30s to improve his Hall of Fame credentials. While I'd like to see it happen -- he's a great hitter, and his outspokenness is a nice reminder that not all athletes are pompous right-wing gasbags like Curt Schilling -- I'm not going to put money down on that likelihood.
Labels: Chats, Knownothingism, Luddites, Senility
