Big Hurts: the Yankees lose Jorge Posada, Alex Rodriguez, Brian Bruney and Philip Hughes to injuries in the same week. Both Posada and A-Rod are gone after wavering between the bench and the lineup, likely prolonging their absence, and while some question the validity of Hughes' injury -- particularly in light of dubiously timed reports of his night vision woes -- the latest word is that a stress fracture of his ninth rib may sideline him until July. Adding insult to this spate of injuries, the team is swept by the Tigers in their return to the Bronx following a record 18 road games in April -- 18 in a 20-game span, no less.
I'm not sure if it was Peter Abraham who technically broke the story on Hughes, but in the wake of Will Carroll's "Ferris Buehler comparisons in yesterday's "Under the Knife," he was the first I saw, and he's consistently the fastest gun on the Yankee beat when it comes to this type of news. If you're a Yankee fan and not stopping by his blog on a daily basis, go get a late pass.
• Via Pete, here's a good piece by the New York Daily News' media critic Bob Raissman on Joe Girardi's media management skills. Like predecessor Joe Torre, Girardi has experience in the broadcasting booth as well as the dugout, so he understands what it's like to be dishing out the questions. In light of this, many thought he'd be similarly deft at handling the media, but in his short time as Yankee skipper, he's proven himself to be a different beast. Where Torre gave the impression of complete openness, Girardi hoards information on things like reliever availability -- which is acceptable, tactically -- and often feeds reporters disinformation when it comes to injuries, disinformation that quickly winds up looking stupid when the front office reports that one of his players has been placed on the DL. Here's Raismann about the Hughes affair:
The honeymoon is officially over.
It ended before Wednesday night's Yankees-Tigers game. While meeting with boss scribes that afternoon, a reporter asked Girardi about the status of Phil Hughes. Girardi answered by saying Hughes' situation was the subject of "internal discussions."
"That's all I will say," Girardi explained.
The same reporter then asked if Hughes was still in the rotation. Girardi said, "Yes."
Another scribe asked if that meant Hughes would make his next start. Girardi answered by saying, "I just said" Hughes was in the rotation. The same scribe then said, "That's not what I asked you, I asked if he's going to make his next start."
Girardi repeated his "internal discussions line" and said: "That's just the way it is....I don't mean to get irritated, but I've been asked the same question five times."
The reporter said he wasn't "asking that" and - again - wanted to know if Hughes was going to make his next start. At that point a Yankees PR executive scolded the reporter and cut the session off, prompting the scribe - in full lecture mode - to remind the suit it wasn't his job to tell him how to "ask my questions."
"The ending (of Girardi's interview) may have seemed somewhat comical, but the whole session was tense," one participant said.
Torre would never have let things get that far out of hand. He would have admitted there was a problem with Hughes that the brass hasn't yet figured out how to deal with. Either that, or Torre would have said Hughes felt a "twinge" the other day, which may have something do to with his poor pitching performance. He then would have said either way, we're going to put Hughes on the DL, but go talk to "Cash" for the details.
Yeesh. I'll be surprised if he makes it through two seasons here.
• Bob Costas is on the damage control trail in the wake of Tuesday's debacle. Via Joe Posnanski (hilarious in his own take on dodging the bullet of appearing on that "Costas Now" segment), here's an interview with Costas by Kansas City Star TV critic Aaron Barnhart, who had already written a very good take (emphasis in original):
TV Barn: So, do you agree with Will Leitch that MSM-blogger relations were irreparably harmed by that exchange on your show?
Bob Costas: No. No. Buzz realizes that he did a disservice to his own points. On the other hand, if fairness prevails — which on the web it often doesn't because people are coming after whoever the villain-of-the-day is with torches and pitchforks — but if fairness prevails, you keep in mind who he is and that more than outweighs a subpar performance on his part.
The heat he brought to it obscured whatever points he made. And then some people made the leap that because I am critical of some — precisely SOME aspects of the web — that my sentiments are the same as Buzz's. And they’re not.
It's convenient, and in this case Buzz handed it to them on a silver platter, it’s convenient and self-flattering for some members of the blogosphere to think any and all objections to them come because mainstream media people are threatened by them.
While there is unquestionably a new media revolution going on, and much of it is good, the part — speaking for myself, the only part, the ONLY part — of which I am critical, is that there is an ethos on a significant portion of the web, an ethos not of criticism or skepticism or a contrarian viewpoint. There is an ethos of abuse, where not only is cogent thought not required, it’s almost resented. Where a reasonable argument has no place and where ad hominem attacks reign. That is not all or even most of the web, but no fair-minded person would say that isn't a significant portion of it. That’s my criticism.
Gotta call bullshit here. If you go to the barber every day, then you'll eventually get a haircut, and if all you read is Deadspin -- a site where the comments often go way overboard -- you're going to wind up thinking that blogs are basically abusive by nature. But there are a number of sites that do a great job of filtering out the good from the bad, the relevant from the irrelevant, sites like Baseball Think Factory and Ballbug and dozens of good blogs that will point you to other good blogs as well as good mainstream articles as well. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to figure that out or to gain a knack for filtering it your own damn self via the RSS news readers at Yahoo, Google, or a million other places.
To read Costas' reply, particularly the bolded part of the statement which echoes Buzz Bissinger's opening salvo, only reinforces the notion that Tuesday's confrontation was a setup, with Costas clearly reaching for controversy instead of conversation. He had a chance to make a clear distinction between quality blogging and crap, and instead he created a situation where folding metal chairs across somebody's skull wouldn't have been out of place. We all had a right to expect better from him.
• As for Bissinger, not so much. Salon's King Kaufman runs down his sordid history:
Interrupting as usual -- because as the defender of literature and higher learning whatever he had to say was, like, way more important than what anybody else had to say -- [Bissinger] told Leitch, "You say you don't want to be in the press box because the facts get in the way," which isn't even close to what Leitch had said. What Leitch had said was that he declined to apply for press access because "the minute I start doing that, I start writing for the other people in the press box ... I get a lot of benefit from having that distance."
But let's not let facts get in the way, right, Buzz?
"It seems to me," Bissinger continued, "what you're saying is, 'I don't want facts to inhibit me. Facts get in my way, so I'm going to sit in my little room and I'm going to give this nebulous fan's voice.'"
Pretty rich coming from a guy who sometimes -- for instance, in this very comment -- takes only a nodding interest in facts. Here, courtesy of FireJoeMorgan.com, are links to a bunch of smartpeople finding fundamental errors in a piece Bissinger wrote for the New York Times magazine Play last year about Kerry Wood.
He'd have found them himself if he'd bothered to do a little research instead of just transcribing the thoughts of Tony La Russa and other baseball men, as he'd done for his book "Three Nights in August" two years earlier.
...Bissinger is big on boneheaded generalizations about people who are younger than he is, which is 53. In "Three Nights in August," he wrote that the sabermetric movement had populated baseball front offices with "thirtysomethings whose most salient qualifications are MBA degrees."
"It is wrong to say that the new breed doesn't care about baseball," he wrote. "But it's not wrong to say that there is no way they could possibly love it, and so much of baseball is about love. They don't have the sense of history, which to the thirtysomethings is largely bunk."
If by "it's not wrong," he meant "it's absolutely 100 percent gold-plated wrong," then I'd agree.
Funny, while Costas tried to apologize on Bissinger's behalf, Buzz himself has been strangely silent. Hallelujah to that.
Update: Dodger Thoughts' Jon Weisman alerts me to this summary of a post-melee Bissinger appearance on Dan Le Batard's radio show. Bissinger comes off as embarrassed by his own conduct and lack of professionalism but hardly conciliatory towards the medium he dismissed outright:
There were some things I should not have said. I shouldn’t have used profanity, I shouldn’t have been as hostile in my approach to Will Leitch, ’cause it makes me look bad, its unprofessional and its unfair to him … I don’t care if it’s Will Leitch or anyone, no one should be treated the way I treated them. Just wasn’t right.
...I don’t take back a word of what I said. I have a tremendous amount of problems with blogs. It doesn’t mean all blogs are bad. It doesn’t mean I’m against free speech, because I’m not.
...The reason for it was is that I really care about this passionately, because, you know, I think blogs are a threat, not a threat to old school, it’s not a threat to M-M-S’es, as they call it, the mainstream media, it’s a threat to writing and reporting, which is what I’ve done for 40 years and what many people have done better than me.
It’s not all just about what flies into your head, and let’s, you know, put it down, and let’s be nasty and mean-spirited and hope we get as many posts and comments as we can so traffic increases and then, bingo-bango, we make some money. That’s not what it’s about.
As somebody who's blogged for nearly seven years without making more than a few bucks to keep this endeavor self-sustaining -- something I share with a great majority of blogs out there -- I can agree with this clueless, self-important schmuck on one thing: that's not what it's about. Unfortunately, until Buzz Bissinger does figure out what it is about, he's welcome to the ignominy guaranteed by the eternal preservation of his shameful performance. Every time that "Costas Now" clip repeats or those spiteful words are read, the joke will be on him.
It's tough to claim the moral high ground for tone when you're flecked with spittle and spewing obscenities on cable TV, telling us how blogging "really pisses the shit out of" you, as Bissinger did. Dishonesty? How about the intellectual dishonesty of picking one post from one blog and using it to dismiss an entire medium, a responsibility that's borne in part by Bob Costas for narrowing the focus on the medium down to a single, controversial site. As Fire Joe Morgan inimitably put it, that's akin to "picking a random romance novel off an airport bookstore shelf and saying, 'This book sucks. Fuck you, Tolstoy -- your medium is worthless!'"
Having recently said my piece about these battle lines, I don't have much else to add to the fray except a pointer to the always-thoughtful Jon Weisman's column on this melee, another pair of pointers to Bissinger's owndishonesty, and my own dedicated bit of cruelty in recommending that ol' Buzz have a scalding cup of my favorite beverage poured into his lap. Good grief, what a raging, unprofessional assclown.
During last Friday's chat, I was treated to a heaping helping of Hall of Fame-related questions, including a few that I didn't have time or space to answer. In light of a few recent milestones and some hot- and cold-running starts, I though it might be a good time to devote a column to the JAWS cases of these players, who form the core of the most frequently inquired about among my readers.
In the piece, I took a look at four "Cooperstown Cases" covering eight active players: a trio of pitchers (John Smoltz, Mike Mussina, and Curt Schilling), two relif aces (Mariano Rivera and Trevor Hoffman), a pair of sluggers (Frank Thomas and Jim Thome) and, in a class by himself, Chipper Jones. Here's the part about Smoltz and Mussina, with a look at the rankings of the active pitchers (with you-know-who still considered active):
Pitcher Career Peak JAWS Roger Clemens 199.6 83.9 141.8 Greg Maddux 180.3 86.0 133.2 Randy Johnson 147.0 77.3 112.2 Tom Glavine 137.4 63.7 100.6 Pedro Martinez 118.0 68.8 93.4 Mike Mussina 117.8 64.3 91.1 John Smoltz 122.8 58.5 90.7 Curt Schilling 110.3 65.9 88.1 Avg HoF SP 106.0 67.2 86.6
Among this group, Maddux and Glavine are locks for the Hall thanks to their 300+ wins and their assorted hardware. One question that I get asked often, both by fellow analysts and by readers, is whether their longtime rotation-mate Smoltz will be joining them. Last week, Smoltz whiffed his 3,000th hitter, becoming just the 16th pitcher to do so--an impressive feat even given the high-strikeout environment of this era, and one that places him in the company of every other pitcher listed above except for Glavine and Mussina. While he won't reach 300 wins (he's got 210), it's important to remember that Smoltz spent four years working primarily as a closer, saving 154 games but notching just six wins from 2001-2004. He's got a very solid case with respect to his other traditional merits, one that includes a Cy Young award, eight All-Star selections, a crucial role on a team that's won 13 division titles, five pennants, and a World Championship, and a stellar post-season record -- 15-4 with four saves, a 2.65 ERA, and 194 strikeouts in 207 innings. Hell, that's a season's worth of work these days, one that would set a career best for ERA while as a starter.
Turning to his JAWS, from a peak standpoint, Smoltz falls a bit short of the average Hall of Fame starter, but he more than makes up for it with his longevity. Lest there be any suggestion that he's simply padding his stats, it's worth noting that his 336 Pitching Runs Above Average and 1263 Pitching Runs Above Replacement blow past the Hall of Fame averages of 279 and 1099; this isn't Tommy John we're talking about. Smoltz ought to be considered a surefire Hall of Famer at this juncture.
Not that he needs them to cement his Hall of Fame case -- five Cys and the third spot on the all-time strikeout list ought to suffice -- but unless the Big Unit can eke out another 15 wins, it will be a while before another pitcher joins the 300 Win Club. Mussina (253 wins) is the next closest pitcher, and one of only three (along with Pedro Martinez at 209 and Andy Pettitte at 204) who have over 200 wins and are still under 40 years old.
At 39 and now reduced to employing a fastball that wouldn't get ticketed in a school zone, it's a safe bet that the Moose isn't going to become a member of the club. Which isn't to say that he doesn't have Hall-worthy numbers, at least from a JAWS standpoint. As with Smoltz but to a lesser extent on both scales, Mussina's ahead on career and short on peak numbers, with PRAR and PRAA numbers (284 and 1221, respectively) that also surpass the benchmarks. What Mussina doesn't have going for him, particularly relative to Smoltz, is the hardware which will augment his much more traditional case: no World Series ring, no Cy Young, no 20-win season (he's had 18 or 19 five times) and "only" five All-Star appearances. His post-season record is "just" 7-8, albeit with a 3.42 ERA and 145 strikeouts in 139 2/3 innings; the fact that his teams have scored just 3.2 runs per game for him is a big reason, and certainly hasn't helped his quest for a ring.
In Mussina's favor is a long stretch in which he could lay claim to being one of the league's best pitchers; he finished in the top five of the Cy voting six times from 1992 to 2001, with two sixth-place finishes as well, and has eight top five finishes in ERA, and eight top 10 finishes in strikeouts. While not the equal of Clemens, Johnson, or Martinez, he was one of the league's top-shelf hurlers for a good long time. He's probably facing a tooth-and-nail fight, but it ought to turn out in his favor.
As with most things JAWS, it's a pretty long piece -- I do tend to jaw on such matters.
I'm sorry if this screws up any links that might be out there, but I've decided to remove this post. While I still believe in the substance of what I was trying to say, in retrospect it was not only poorly written, but was also done in an exceedingly inappropriate tone. My apologies to those specifically named and anyone else who may have taken offense.
I've essentially attempted a do-over here if you’re still interesting in this topic, or I highly recommend an article by Mark Armour over at the Baseball Analysts site, which conveys the same point far better than I have.
Gone too are the comments in the aforementioned post; White had written a response to my post apologizing for his previous tone and with a grudging cordiality, the two of us kicked the topic back and forth a couple times before arriving at an impasse. I accepted his apology there, and I do here as well. We move on.
Not to pile on White after he has admitted he was in the wrong, but I am mildly surprised by his decision to actually delete the offending post. On at least one occasion (the Schilling mess) I've considered taking a similar step after the hatchets were buried, only to decide that the post's existence as part of the record was a stern reminder that I owed it to my readers and to myself to do better the next time. It would appear White's placeholder link will provide him with a similar reminder; if so, that's good enough from where I sit.
The following is a response to a blog entry by one Paul White, a writer I had never heard of until Tuesday afternoon but one who took no prisoners in dishing out the most scathing attack I've received in nearly seven years of writing about baseball. His blog entry went so far as to include the following open letter:
Dear Mr. Jaffe,
Kiss My Ass.
Regards, Everyone Whose Intelligence You Just Insulted
While it was tempting to take either one of two tacks -- simply ignoring this bilious screed lest I afford more publicity to a writer who's done little to merit it, or responding with a curt reply telling Mr. White exactly how far to shove it -- I ultimately settled for what I hope is a more measured approach, one in line with a commitment I made to my readers long ago to focus on the parts of my writing that I enjoy, rather than playing to my Howard Beale side.
• • •
Dear Mr. White,
It's awfully big of you to stick up for the oppressed BBWAA Hall of Fame voters who have the capability of reaching millions of readers with their work, assuming they're still gainfully employed. Heaven knows that the threat posed to its members by a few analysts writing behind subscription-only walls that keep their audience a few magnitudes of order lower is worth the energy of your frothing-at-the-mouth personal attack. Given the penchant some of the BBWAA's higher-profile members -- recentSpink Awardwinners, even -- have for ad hominem attacks, I can understand your affinity for this august group.
I'd love to respond to you with the vehement discourtesy that you've shown me in your post, and there was a time I might have reveled in the opportunity to score a few easy points by doing so. The sad fact is that while you've actually got a good point about the evolution of sabermetric evidence as it pertains to Rice and to every other player eligible for the Hall of Fame, you've polluted it by leveling personal attacks at Messrs. Law, Neyer, Sheehan and myself. Rather than stoop to your level, I'll simply take a page from my guru, Homer Simpson -- "Blame me if you must, but don't ever speak ill of the program!" -- and focus on defending my point of view as it pertains to my system, rather than what you perceive as my arrogance, since you've clearly made up your mind on that topic. So forgive this lengthy stroll through my thought process.
The JAWS system is designed to compare a candidate for election to the Hall of Fame with the players at his position who have already been inducted. The system was created in response to what I perceived as a gap alongside the nebulous standards applied annually by Hall of Fame voters, the work done by Bill James to create tools designed to compare candidates, and more than two decades of sabermetric progress, not to mention baseball history, since James' initial work in that area. What I have proposed via JAWS is that rather than rely on imprecise arguments which make only passing attempt to reckon with the wide disparity in raw statistics between candidates of different eras, environments, and positions, it is useful to incorporate a more all-encompassing measure of player value that accounts for offense, defense and pitching, and to distinguish between the value of a player at his peak and over the course of his career. Used as designed, JAWS highlights which candidates on a given ballot would raise the standards of the Hall by their inclusion, a goal I feel is worthwhile to counter the dilution of the Hall's ranks via shaky Veterans Committee votes and an overreliance on counting stats that don't do a great job of measuring a player's true contribution to winning.
I've chosen Clay Davenport's Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP) as the currency to measure value while conceding that it's not without its flaws. Among them is one that you've hit upon -- the fact that the values do get revised from time to time. Davenport, one of the founders of Baseball Prospectus, is a relentless tinkerer whose system evolves as better information becomes available; the replacement-level value of defense at given positions and the levels of league difficulty appear to be the main areas of change in recent years (the latter also requires annual adjustment with the addition of another year of data to the overall pool), with the result that I have to update my spreadsheets on a frequent basis to stay current from a JAWS standpoint. That shouldn't distract or detract from the matter at hand; even Bill James revised his Runs Created formulas and other measures in his annual Baseball Abstract series back in the day, and if you've done nothing else in your diatribe, you've provided a half-decent roadmap of the evolution of sabermetric thought as it pertains to measuring Rice's qualifications (I'll leave the debunking of the particular measures you've used re: Rice to others). I can assure you that the recent fluctuations in Rice's numbers at BP in BRAA and other such measures are no part of a conspiracy; those of Tim Raines, to use an example from the opposite end of the Hall-worthiness spectrum as far as my system goes, have fluctuated as well, not always to his advantage.
My use of a value metric such as WARP in place of raw statistics is designed to offer an alternative to the statistical selectivity that often gets incorporated into Hall of Fame arguments. For example, in the weeks since the 2008 ballot was released, I've seen that Rice is the only player outside the Hall of Fame with 350+ homers and a batting average above .290, that he's the only player in major league history with three consecutive seasons of 35+ homers and 200+ hits, and that he led the league in grounding into double plays four years in a row and ranks much higher on that all-time list (sixth) than on any other. Those are interesting, superlative feats which provide color and nuance to the story of Rice's career, but they're ultimately rather trivial; none is a particularly accurate gauge that accounts for the number of runs Rice really created or prevented when and where he played, or how we should weigh those feats against the impressive ones compiled by already-enshrined players. By using WARP, one can maintain the focus on player value instead of getting distracted by the granular data which is often tossed around without the necessary context for interpretation (i.e., park and league scoring levels).
I began this response with no intention of rehashing the numbers-based case against Jim Rice at length, but I will provide you with the up-to-date BP metrics you cite, along with relevant rankings among the Hall of Fame left fielders. Rice's Equivalent Average (EqA) is a very respectable .294. The composite EqA I use for my JAWS benchmark -- calculated per Davenport's instruction as (total Outs / total EqRuns / 5) ^ 0.4 -- among Hall of Fame left fielders is .306 (for the broadest group in my system, that of Hall of Fame hitters, it's an even .300). The median of the left fielder group is .301. Of the 18 Hall of Fame leftfielders, only Lou Brock (.282) and Zach Wheat (.292) are lower than Rice, while Goose Goslin is at .294 as well. Fenway Park, the high GIDP totals, the relatively modest offensive levels of Rice's era -- they're all incorporated into EqA. Against Rice's totals of Batting Runs Above Replacement (634) and Batting Runs Above Average (366), the benchmarks are 806 and 531, while the medians are 709 and 453. Among Hall left fielders, Rice's BRAR tops only Ralph Kiner (604), Heinie Manush (496) and Chick Hafey (401), and his BRAA tops only Brock (293), Hafey (252) and Manush (251). Translating those runs into career WARP, Rice is at 83.3, the JAWS benchmark is 116.8, the median is 109.3, and Rice only outranks Kiner (74.6), Hafey (68.8) and Manush (54.5). I also track peak WARP, defined as a player's best seven seasons. Rice's 55.5 falls short of the benchmark (65.8) and the median (63.1), outranking only Brock (49.4), Manush (48.1) and Hafey (45.9). Via Rice's JAWS score (the average of his career and peak WARP totals), Rice's 69.4 falls short of the benchmark (91.3) and the median (85.0), outranking only the familiar company of Brock (68.8), Kiner (68.5), Manush (58.5) and Hafey (50.2). In other words, he falls far short by all of these measures which put his offensive contributions in the context of ballpark and league scoring levels.
As an aside, one of the accusations leveled at me by a critic who holds me in much higher esteem than you apparently do is that my system by definition says that half the players in the Hall of Fame are unqualified. As I've pointed out, that's a mischaracterization. While the Hall's rolls have been compromised by the admission of some dubious players, we can't undo what's done; JAWS isn't a prescription for throwing the bums out. As noted before, the thrust of my entire project is the identification of the candidates who surpass the benchmark at their position (position can be broadly defined for players who moved around the field, since I make note of benchmarks for multi-category players such as outfielders, middle infielders, and all hitters), thus inching the standards upwards.
At the end of the day, however, JAWS is a tool, and as such, it's only as smart as those who use it. Furthermore, it's best used as directed, with an awareness that it excludes volumes of information regarding postseason performance, awards, All-Star appearances, milestones, and nonstatistical evidence. I expend thousands of words and dozens of tables in my efforts to fill in some of those gaps within my annual series at BP, and I'll incorporate some of that information into the following comparison.
In your piece, you've taken offense at my "Amen" to Keith Law's hyperbolic comment about the Hall of Fame doors. I don't know whether his hyperbole was directly informed by my system, but his point appears to be valid. Via JAWS, Rice ranks 91st all-time among Hall-eligible outfielders (i.e., anyone who played up through 2002, the cutoff for this year's class). Of the 90 outfielders above him, 46 are in the Hall of Fame. Thirty-seven of those 46 are concentrated in the top 46 JAWS scores among this pool. Only 12 enshrined outfielders are outranked by Rice; all but one of those are strewn over the 100 ranking slots directly below him. All but two of those 12 were voted in by the Veterans Committee rather than the writers.
If we move beyond JAWS to give Rice special credit for his 1978 MVP award, we'll have to note that among the 44 out of 90 who outrank him but aren't in the Hall are fellow winners Andre Dawson (81.3 JAWS), George Foster (73.9), two-time winner Dale Murphy (73.4) and Dave Parker (69.5). Save for Foster, all of them had as many or more All-Star appearances as Rice. Dawson, Parker and Murphy have multiple Gold Gloves to their credit, where Rice has none. Parker and Foster have multiple World Series rings to burnish their credentials. Yet of this subgroup, only Dawson has ever joined Rice in topping 25 percent of the BBWAA vote. If we compare Rice to the two BBWAA-elected outfielders whom he outranks, we find Brock, one of the select members of the 3,000 Hit Club, and Kiner, who led his league in home runs for seven straight seasons. Rice led his league three times and finished second once, a fair credit to apply given that Kiner accomplished his feat in an eight-team National League, Rice in a 14-team AL. Without belittling the nuances of Rice's fascinating career or the visceral thrill he provided observers (myself included) in his prime, I honestly can't come up with any conclusion other than that Law's hyperbole is valid -- Rice's credentials vis à vis the Hall simply aren't that unique, and to admit him is to suggest that the institution should admit at least a handful of similar candidates whose credentials also fall short.
To move past this longwinded digression and focus on the crux of your attack on me, nowhere have I suggested that my system is the only way to measure Hall of Fame candidates or that I am one of the "exclusive purveyors of the 'right' way to evaluate baseball players" (your words). My placing of the word "right" in quotation marks within the sentence you excerpted -- from a valid point about the BBWAA's unwillingness to police its membership rolls in accordance with its bylaws -- was an attempt to convey the fact that THERE IS NO ONE RIGHT WAY to do so, nor a broad consensus about the Hall's standards. As to the offense taken at the aforementioned excerpt, I can only infer from your screed that you object to my use of the word "educational" in describing my work, and feel as though I'm arrogant either because of my attempt to create a system which could inform Hall of Fame voters as well as interested spectators or because I long for the evolution of a sabermetrically-inclined electorate that no longer clings to Triple Crown stats as the be-all and end-all of the discussion. The two aren't mutually exclusive, and I do what I can with the platform I've been afforded. Despite your diatribe, I can assure you that BP's readers and staff have responded with enough positive feedback and enthusiasm to ensure my project's continuation. Apparently, there are people who find it informative, entertaining, or (dare I say) educational.
If you feel that I've somehow crossed the Mendoza Line of decorum in making my point, well, I'll leave it to the public to decide which of us has been more indecorous, me with the occasional stridency of my arguments (a charge to which I've already copped), or you with your ad hominem attacks and gratuitous, juvenile references to the size and/or location of your targets' testicles (which you mention three times). Nonetheless, I wish to thank you for the kind words, the superlative ("the most condescending remark I’ve ever seen on the subject"), and the open-letter suggestion on behalf of "everyone whose intelligence you just insulted" -- an angry mob that apparently doubles as a silent majority, judging by the dearth of emails I receive to that effect -- that I should be engaging in some ass-kissing. I'll be sure to put all of that in my scrapbook or on my to-do list as merited.
In closing, I'm well aware that there are millions of baseball fans and hundreds of voters out there who have never heard of me and who get along just fine without my efforts to shine a bit of light into this particular corner of the baseball world. Yet to hear you tell it I've practically enslaved the guardians of Cooperstown in an effort to prevent the necessary supermajority from electing Jim Rice. In fact, the concerted efforts on the part of myself and the aforementioned nefarious conspirators have been so successful that Rice garnered 46 more votes than in 2007, and 116 more than when my system debuted at BP in 2004. Clearly, you have pinpointed the reason why my ego is so huge.
I just wish you weren't so obsessed with my balls.
Regarding your NL MVP candidates, how about those two guys in Florida? Yes, the Marlins are not in playoff contention, but it's hard to ignore Hanley Ramirez and Miguel Cabrera, especially considering they're first and second, respectively, in the NL in VORP, and rank in the top three in Runs Created. It looks like you went through all the playoff-contending teams, and chose a "good" player from each. Let me ask you: If Cabrera were on a playoff-contender this season, would there be any doubt who the MVP was? -- Carolyn, Boca Raton, Fla.
Actually, you're right. That's exactly what I did, and how I came up with Prince Fielder as my NL MVP leader. His "good'' year is actually more than good, and the Brewers are right in the thick of the playoff race. While I understand your sentiments, I am more interested in "wins created'' than runs created. And the day I consider VORP is the day I get out of the business. The idea of the MVP is to honor the player who has had the biggest positive impact on the pennant races. I have been a big champion for Ramirez, but I would not consider him a true candidate to win the MVP award.
Emphasis added. Once again, an old-guard sportswriter decides that a simple sabermetric concept is interfering with his ability to gum his applesauce in peace:
"Damn you kids! You don't know anything about the manly, musky smell of a locker room and its relationship to team chemistery and anonymously sourced shit-stirring quotes! It's got nothing to do with your new-age sissy numbers! You don't need a computer to add up RBIs! Hell, I'll bet you think these stat-generating robots put their pants on two legs at a time as they plug their Internets into their calculators. Well, you whippersnappers can pry my ignorance out of my cold, dead hand!"
Funny, I had Heyman for being about 15-20 years younger than Chass. Clearly, he got old in a hurry.
Fire Joe Morgan was on this one like white on rice, and Lone Star Ball took some pretty good cuts, too. So rather than raising my blood pressure any further, I'll simply get off Mr. Heyman's lawn and allow him to resume the search for his pants.
And hope that the day he gets out of the business comes before the day he hands in another award ballot.
First things first, the Hit List is here. Rather than expending another drop of energy discussing the sad state of the Yankees and the various Alex Rodriguez storylines -- I did a radio hit on Wednesday and the first thing the host wanted to talk about was the New York Post cover, as if T&A scandals on athletes stepping out were my area of expertise -- I'll cut and paste what I wrote at Baseball Prospectus:
Desperate Times: a five-game losing streak sinks the Yankees to the bottom of the AL East standings before Alex Rodrigueztakes a page from the McGraw Orioles by distracting Howie Clark from a popup. For all the bush league accusations (and who knows bush league better than John Gibbons?) and "Yankee Way" hoohah, you can guarantee former pinstripers such as Billy Martin and Leo Durocher would spike their grandmothers in envy of such gamesmanship. As for that other A-Rod story, it stinks of a smear job; since when does such alleged behavior among this demographic merit multi-tabloid, multi-news cycle coverage? How many times would Mickey Mantle or Joe DiMaggio have made the cover of the New York Post if such "reporting" had carried the day? ... Elsewhere, Jason Giambi endures a 4-for-44 slump amid heelproblems of multiple varieties, and the Yankees strap in for a $28 million Rocket to Nowhere; they're just 8-14 and have fallen eight games in the standings since announcing the Roger Clemens signing.
The Yanks are #14 in this week's list, having fallen from two weeks at #12. As bad as they've been, they still hold a +30 run differential, which is a good indicator that they should be able to play better than .500 ball (you have to crawl before you can walk). The problem is that they've underperformed by a whopping 6.3 games, the largest shortfall in the majors according to BP's Adjusted Standings, which factor in run elements, park adjustments and quality of competition. That said, now that it's quite apparent the Yankees won't be sweeping the Red Sox this weekend, I'm fully prepared to attach the Do Not Resuscitate tag to their chart.
Moving along to more amusing topics, while you may have seen Cub manager Lou Piniella's meltdown, which comes a day after Carlos Zambrano and Michael Barrett brought new meaning to the term "batterymates" by scuffling in the dugout and again in the clubhouse, the one you really shouldn't miss is that of Mississippi Braves Double-A skipper Phillip Wellman. There's a brief description here, but the video -- available on ESPN and now YouTube -- is an absolute must-see.
Wellman amplifies a couple of tried-and-true tantrum tricks, not only covering home plate entirely in dirt (shades of Piniella and Art Howe, among others), but doing so with his hands and then redrawing a new home plate about three times the size. Additionally, he uproots not one but two bases (Earl Weaver, Lloyd McLendon), tossing third base into rightfield (Piniella) and carrying it and second base with him into the outfield. But in between those two bases, he adds a new one to the tantrum lexicon, crawling on his hands and knees, infantry-style, to the mound and lobbing the rosin bag at the home plate umpire as if it were a grenade. This being Vegas, I'll wager that's a vacation of about 10 days.
Freakin' hilarious -- do not miss it.
Update: Better yet, now that I've figured out how to embed YouTube video, you can watch it here. Or run for the hills before I unearth every great managerial tirade video on YouTube.
