November 28, 2010

Statheads Will Steal Your Lunch Money

Repeat after me, you little runt! 'Wins are an outdated and ineffectual standard by which to accurately measure a starting pitcher's true contribution to his team and I henceforth promise to be more rigorous in my qualitative assessments and consider DIPS and FIP and WAR and BABIP!' Say it! Say it!!!


Chicago Tribune writer Phil Rogers wonders if Felix Hernandez won the American League Cy Young because of "bullying on the Internet".

That's right! Rogers thinks some of his BBWAA cohorts may be a-scared of those guys who spend their days "eating Hot Pockets in their mothers' basements"!

Dept. of YCMTSU*: Rogers said this while chatting with Murray Chass!

* You Can't Make This Shit Up

(Thanks to yfsf.)

10 comments:

laura k said...

Oh my lord. ROFL. OMG.

allan said...

Do NOT miss the link on the word "Chass".

accudart said...

Wow, that Murray Chass is some thinker!

Rob said...

"Good pitchers find a way to win."

What if your team doesn't score any runs? Do good pitchers bitch their team out in the dugout and demand them to score runs and then they score?

Liam, Summa Contra said...

In 1989, Oakland A's pitcher Storm Davis went 19 - 7 despite posting an ERA 15% higher than the league average. The Kansas City Royals gave him a large contract, insisting that they didn't care about ERA, but about pitchers who could "win games." Anyone know what Rogers thoughts are on that signing?

FenFan said...

Does Murray Chass also believe that Abner Doubleday invented baseball?

Jim said...

Gawd, that Chass stuff is classic. I guess he's bucking for a Page 6 gig. What was Uma's line from Pulp Fiction--about scamps getting together being worse than a sewing circle? Hilarious. He and Cafardo should do a forum on when to identify sources, leave them anonymous or simply make shit up and let the reader decide. And the internet can make stuff disappear but newspapers can't? Gold, Jerry, gold.

Michael Holloway said...

Chass:

"..good pitchers find a way to win.

Steve Carlton compiled a 27-10 record in 1972 for a Phillies team that otherwise had a 32-87 record."

Makes you wonder. But then in Chaos Theory, it was bound to happen, everything will happen - eventually.

But, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts"; so says Albert Einstein - and although a 'feeling' one might have about baseball matters has dominated too much in the past - and new data are now being collected and parsed with new-fangled machines that can obviously add insight - the infinitely complex game still, I believe, has room for intuitive decision making.

The Lemming-like (but not Lemming-like) band-wagon-jumping professional baseball writers have shown themselves to be spineless clogs before (as regularly do 75% of the population of human kind), and in today's climate of fear about everything - and most pointedly about paid writing positions - I wouldn't doubt that spinelessness pervades. The fact that Murray Chass has the gall to stand his Neolithic ground here is a quality of writers that I admire. And although it was hard for me to find that one thing I admire about Chass - unbelievably - there it is.

I believe that if you break it down, between the lines Chass is saying his brethren are incredibly ignorant about the actual playing of the game at it's highest level (as are 99.9% of us), and that they know in their heart of hearts that their opinion isn't worth sh*t... so they go with the flow. 'What he said'. If that is indeed what Chass is saying, then I agree with him once again!

Twice in one day?

What are the probabilities?

mh

allan said...

The fact that Murray Chass has the gall to stand his Neolithic ground here is a quality of writers that I admire.

A stubborn refusal to keep an open mind is a good thing?

Michael Holloway said...

No. What I was angling towards was his stubbornness to stick with a metric in thinking that may be unpopular at the time. This is not Murray Chass I admit; but I'll support the 'brand' if not any of the things he actually believes. :]