Seems like the "wrongest thing that has ever been said about baseball" label could use another entry

Guys. Guys.  GUYS.  Fellow bloggers and baseball fans. Listen up. All of the Hall of Fame stuff you've read these last few weeks is great.  You've read about backne and BALCO and bWAR, but you don't realize that there's one simple fact out there that shows how bad HOF voting is bad. Good thing there's Forbes.com writer Chris Smith to point it out for us.  I won't discuss the whole article because you know the boring parts about Bonds and Clemens, but here's the crux of it:

There are plenty of arguments to be made about what’s wrong with the Hall of Fame, but there may be no simpler example of just how messed up the current format is than this one simple fact: Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens received a different number of votes. This year Clemens received 206 votes, or 37.5% of the total, while Bonds got 202 votes (36.8%). That marks the third straight year that this has happened. In 2013, Clemens received 214 votes (37.6%) to 206 votes (36.2%) for Bonds; last year Clemens again outpaced Bonds, 202 (35.4%) to 198 (34.7%).

So guys: Chris Smith has disovered the one simple fact that shows how bad this voting is. The fact here isn't that the best-hitting catcher in baseball history wasn't elected, or that two writers actually (actually!) voted for one-time all-star Aaron Boone, two voted for one-time AL saves leader Tom Gordon, and one for this guy.  Heck, I would argue that it's more of a travesty that 15 actual human beings returned ballots that apparently did not vote for a guy who won four straight Cy Youngs and has the second-most strikeouts in baseball history.  OR that 49 actual human beings did vote for a guy with the highest ERA+ of any starting pitcher in history.

Apparently the real problem is that three writers, for some reason, don't believe that Bonds and Clemens have exactly the same steroid resume.  But you know - there's a lot of gray area there. In fact, Mr. Smith even acknowledges that Clemens was found not guilty of perjury and the charges againstn Bonds were dropped.  Maybe someone out there has a slightly different view of the evidence in these cases. That seems a lot more plausible than the terrible voting decisions I pointed out last paragraph, all of which are grounds for some justice.

Anyways, thanks for the enlightenment, Mr. Smith. Armed with this one simple fact, I will now go to the BBWAA and they will recognize the error of their ways, reform the voting system to be a beacon of justice and fairness and the American Way. 

Now that that's said, I also happen to think that John Smoltz should've been like a sixth-ballot Hall of Famer.  Has there ever been another guy whose HOF candidacy was indirectly boosted by an injury that forced him to switch positions and generate an unusual stat line?  But that's for some other post.

This Jeter post goes out to all the STATS NERDS and HATERS out there

Hey!  I'm both!  Now let me warn you up front: use caution, everyone.  These takes are piping hot.  Salon's Allen Barra (who has also covered sports for the Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal; Greggggggggg approves) is here to drop some knowledge about the same topic covered in my last post: unanimity, and how stats nerds and haters need to get on board with the whole "Jeter deserves it" thing.

Shut up, stats nerds and haters: You’re wrong about Derek Jeter

Trollolololololololololololol.  Gotta hand it to him--if you want angry clicks, you need a good catchy headline.  And I know that most writers don't craft their own, but this one is so delightful that I'd suspect it was penned by Barra.  And if it wasn't, this post is dedicated to the editor who did write it, because that headline fucking rules.

Inflated steroids-era numbers might not show it, but the Yankees shortshop deserves to be a unanimous Hall of Famer

1) If you want to make the case that Jeter is the mostest bestest player evar, maybe don't call attention to the offense-friendly era that he played in.  Or if you do, make it clear that you think his numbers should be considered that much more impressive because of it, not that it is somehow dragging his numbers down.
2) I like that we're getting right to the good stuff up front: Jeter should be a unanimous HOFer, but not because of his numbers.  No no no.  Because of leadership.  And winning.  And of course, class.  Classy class class class.  Fuck class.  Identifying athletes other than those with Roberto Clemente-like track records of being a good person as "classy" is stupider than debating a player's level of "eliteness."  (Note: I don't think Barra uses the word "class" anywhere in this article.  But you fucking well know he's thinking it.)

To my knowledge, what the Baseball Hall of Fame did yesterday was unique: It tweeted the date for an induction ceremony for a still active player to be welcomed into Cooperstown. 

How long has the HOF had a Twitter account?  It's really not that interesting or impressive.  And I know I'm being nit picky and semanticy, so as to the more generic point that the HOF probably has very rarely announced the induction date for an active player via any medium, there are two obvious responses: 1) this is just another outcome of the attention-seeking behavior exhibited by the kind of player who announces his retirement before his final season starts, and 2) the cult of Jeter ballwashers creates outcomes like this, not the other way around.  If the baseball media world weren't full of 60 year old men who write Jeter at least two or three love letters per year, the HOF would not feel compelled to do this.

The date, if you want to make your reservations now, 

I do, so I can show up and boo him.

is July 26, 2020. (A player must be retired for five years before he goes on the ballot.) And if I were you, I wouldn’t wait.

"Hello, is this the Best Western in Cooperstown?  Yes, I'd like to make a reservation for July 26, 2020.  What?  Oh, OK.  I'll call back in late 2019 then.  Sorry for wasting your time."

Not only will Derek Jeter be a first ballot selection, he may well be what Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Bob Feller, Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays and Hank Aaron weren’t – a unanimous choice. 

"May well" is about as correctly used in that sentence as it is in this one: "The United States government may well have carried out the 9/11 attacks."

If that happens, and I think there’s a very good chance that it will, 

I'm not sure whether to think of this as total delusion, or a clever sales pitch for something he knows is really really unlikely to happen, but slightly more likely if he can build some momentum for it.  The former is more fun, the latter is more pathetic.

it’s bound to stir up even more resentment toward Jeter than we’re seeing in the blizzard of stories that have already appeared since he announced Wednesday that 2014 would be his last year.

Either Barra reads this blog, or he's making a hilarious attempt to manufacture resentment towards this generation's most sportswriter-beloved athlete.  If any baseball writer did anything other than wash Jeter's balls in the aftermath of his announcement, I sure didn't see it.

If one had to synthesize most of the recent Jeter coverage under one headline, it would be: Is Derek Jeter a True Hall of Famer or Is He Overrated?

No, it would not.  It simply would not.  That discussion, which only takes place as an Around the Horn-ish lashback because of fucktards like Allen Barra who won't stop telling us about how Jeter cured polio and smallpox and invented the wheel, has made up about 2% of the Jeter discussion at any given point during the last ten years.  The other 98% has been garbage like this article.

Let’s deal with the first question. There isn’t any doubt that he is going to get into the Hall of Fame. Only nine players in the history of baseball have more hits than Jeter. He’s a 13-time All-Star with five World Series rings. And he’s tremendously popular. 

BUT HE HAS SO MANY HATERZ!  ALL THE MEDIA TRIES TO DO IS TEAR THE POOR GUY DOWN!  LET'S TAKE A MUCH NEEDED MINUTE TO ACKNOWLEDGE HIS GREATNESS, PLEASE!

If you put down a deposit on a hotel room in Cooperstown for July 2020, it’s good as gold.

Why are you still talking about hotel rooms?

Those who have cast doubts about his HOF worthiness have always stressed the lack of bold numbers on his statistics page on BaseballReference.com. 

Ah, those who have cast doubts on the HOF worthiness of one of the most obvious HOFers of the past ten years.  All of those people.  Who you always read about in the, uh, well, usually they make their opinions known in, uh... yeah, they're out there.  They are definitely out there.

What a fantastic straw man this is.  How dare all these multitudes of people say Jeter isn't an HOFer!  What are they, blind?

In other words, he never led the league in many offensive categories. This is true. He only led the league in runs scored in 1998 and in hits in 1999 and 2012, and HOFers have usually topped the list in more stats than that.

See, this is where you bring up the steroid era, if you're desperately trying to pump Jeter's tires.  Somehow he misses the opportunity.

He was never quite a match for the top superstars of his era. Or as Ted Berg put it in USA Today (in a piece titled “Derek Jeter is the most fervently overrated shoo-in for the Hall of Fame”), “In terms of overall value to his teams, Jeter just doesn’t stack up to recent historic greats like Albert Pujols and Barry Bonds, and can’t quite match great contemporaries like Chipper Jones and Jeff Bagwell either.”

As to Bonds, Pujols and Jones, he is right.  As to Bagwell he is stretching it.  Also, here is the very first sentence of Berg's piece:

"Derek Jeter is a bona fide, first-ballot Hall of Famer."

So, yeah.  The guy that Barra has cast as excessively critical of Jeter happens to hold the same opinion that I do: Jeter goes in on the first ballot, and should.  Funny that.  It's almost like people who take shots at Jeter don't think Jeter sucks.  They're just sick of the Barras of the world and are trying to introduce a little reason and objectivity to the discussion.  How dare they.

This is also true, but not to the point. Jeter is a greater player than a Yankee shortstop of the 1940s and early 1950s, Phil Rizzuto, who is in the Hall of Fame. 

Rizzuto was elected by the Veterans Committee almost forty years after he retired.  He is also one of the worst players in the HOF.  If he played for literally any team other than the Yankees, he would have been forgotten about decades ago (putting aside his name's appearance in "Billy Madison").

Nobody said Rizzuto should not be inducted because “He doesn’t quite stack up with Ted Williams and Stan Musial.” 

No, but hopefully, when he was up for election by the writers, they said he should not be inducted because "He doesn't have the counting stats, doesn't have the rate stats, and frankly just wasn't all that great at baseball."

Like Rizzuto, Jeter is a shortstop, and shortstops (and second basemen and catchers) aren’t expected to put up the same numbers as slugging outfielders or first basemen because their position is so much more difficult to play.

Jeter's offensive numbers are the whole reason he's going in.  He's such a better hitter than Rizzuto was that it's hard to describe the gap between them without hyperbole.  Rizzuto had an OPS+ over 100 just three times in his career.  Jeter's has only been under 100 three times.  Even if Rizzuto hadn't missed three seasons serving in World War II, he probably would have just barely cleared 2000 hits.  Saying "Rizzuto deserves to be in because shortstops aren't held to the same offensive standards as other players" is missing the point by ten thousand miles.

For that matter, of the 23 shortstops in the Hall of Fame, Jeter is probably more worthy than all but three or four – Honus Wagner, for sure, probably Arky Vaughan, maybe Cal Ripken and Ernie Banks (who is officially listed as a first baseman, though he won back-to-back MVPs at shortstop).

Ripken and Banks are much better players than Jeter.  Robin Yount belongs on the "probably" list if we're going to count guys like Banks who spent ~50% of their career at SS, as do Luke Appling and Ozzie Smith.  Alan Trammel is about equally worthy as Jeter, but forgot to play for the Yankees, so he may never even make the HOF.

Not that Jeter was great at shortstop. 

He suuuuure wasn't.

I don’t trust any of the supposedly scientific measures of fielding ability, 

That is wise, defensive metrics are pretty suspect, but let's see if you can show any basic knowledge of what makes a good baseball player in explaining whatever it is you're about to explain.

but here are two that surely have some measure of validity: Jeter’s career fielding percentage, 

Your grade for knowledge of what makes a good baseball player came in.  F-minus.

going into the 2014 season, is .976, compared to the average for players at this position over the same period has been .972. 

Savvy move by Jeter to let all those hundreds of grounders that a non-shitty SS would have fielded and perhaps then made an error on trickle past his sort of outstretched glove over the years.

His range in the field has been four chances per nine innings while other shortstops over the same span averaged 4.5. 

That's a good metric, but you sadly haven't processed how colossal that gap is.  First note: that's all other shortstops, not HOF-worth shortstops.  Ripken's RF/9 was 4.7.  The Brewers moved Yount off of SS as he entered his 30s, but while he was there his RF/9 was 5.1.  Banks was at 5.0.  Ozzie Smith's was 5.2 (yes, he's the greatest defensive SS of all time so not the most fair comparison, but I'm going for context here geez lighten up).  Second note: let's see, a difference between Jeter and an average shortstop of 0.5 chances per 9 means roughly one per two games or roughly... let's see here... fucking EIGHTYISH per season.  That's horrendous.  The average SS during the mid 90s through today makes somewhere between 70 and 80 (depending on games played) more outs per year than Jeter.  That's a huge deal.  What conclusion can we draw from that horrible number and his mediocre fielding percentage (while ignoring that fielding percentage is a nearly worthless stat).

I’d say that on the whole this indicates that Jeter was an average fielding shortstop, 

/Price is Right loser horn

perhaps a tad below average. 

He's a ghastly shortstop.  Has been pretty much his entire career.  Has no range.  Has a mediocre arm.  Good thing he kept his spot at the most important defensive position on the field when the Yankees traded for Fish Fillet-Rod (4.62 RF/9 as a SS, .977 fielding percentage).  That's leadership.

But he hit and ran the bases well enough for the Yankees to keep him there 

In spite of themselves, because they knew he'd throw a shit fit if they asked him to move to LF or somewhere else where he wouldn't hurt his team so much.

regardless of his defensive deficiencies.

Yeah, potato, poh-tah-toe.

In any event, he isn’t going into the Hall of Fame because of his fielding – he’s going in because of his hitting and base running.

Truest sentence in this whole article.  I couldn't agree more.  Unfortunately, his excellent offense and very bad defense combine to make him just a regular great player, not a "This guy deserves an honor that Ruth, Aaron, etc. didn't get" player.

Let’s save time and compare Jeter to a hitter who everyone acknowledges as a legitimate Hall of Famer – or at least they would if Pete Rose hadn’t tarted betting on baseball games.

This should be good.

Jeter’s career batting average is .312 to Rose’s .303, and even if Derek played another five seasons to match Pete’s 24 years, and his skills declined over that time as Rose’s did late in his career, Jeter would still end up with a higher batting average.

You know what, I'd like to give you the benefit of the doubt on that because the next few things you're about to say are so much dumber, but I'm not even sure if that's true.  Jeter's high batting average has always been bolstered by his ability to rack up infield hits.  I'm not saying that pejoratively, like "HAW HAW HE SUX CAN'T EVEN HIT BALL OUT OF INFIELD," I'm just stating it as a fact.  And it's a fact that matters, because if he played five more seasons, he wouldn't just lose batspeed.  He'd lose a lot of foot speed.  If he played five more seasons, I could see him perhaps getting to 4000 hits, if he stayed perfectly healthy, but I could also see his batting average dropping at least ten points during that time.  And losing ten points even if you're a player who doesn't rely on infield hits isn't that hard to do.  Frank Thomas lost seven points off his career average in his last five seasons.  Barry Larkin lost five.  Craig Biggio (who I'm using because holy smokes, he'd better get elected next year) lost seven.  And those guys were playing in their late 30s, not their early 40s.  But enough of this sort of dumb stuff.  Let's get to the REALLY dumb stuff.

Jeter has a higher on-base percentage than Rose, .381 to .375, 

Adjusted for park and era, Rose was better.

and had a considerably better slugging percentage, .446 to .409.

Adjusted for park and era, Jeter was just a little better.  Rose has the overall OPS+ advantage, 118 to 117.

When you combine these two numbers into the stat beloved by so many analysts, 

In 1998.

on-base plus slugging, Jeter has an even bigger edge, .828 to .784.

Repeat my point from above.

He has been a better power hitter than Rose with 256 home runs, 90 more than the Hit King, in around 3,600 fewer at-bats. And Derek is a far better base runner and stealer, 348 of 448 bases for a success rate of nearly 79 percent, while Pete was a base-stealing liability with 189 steals in 347 attempts for just 54.5 percent. And, if you want to throw in fielding, whatever shortcomings Jeter has had with a glove, he was better than Rose, who was never more than adequate at any of the several positions he played.

This is all idiotic for oh so many reasons, but let's throw Gamblin' Pete a bone here: early in his career, he was a better 2B than Jeter is a SS.  And he actually got pretty good in the outfield for a brief period in his early 30s.  He played 30,000 innings and racked up -14 dWAR, but had the disadvantage of switching positions several times during his career; Jeter has played 22,000 at the same position and has racked up -9 dWAR.  It's basically a push, unless you want to give negative points for players who have undeserved Gold Gloves, in which case Rose collects more negative points than Jeter.  But whatever.

But has Jeter been overrated by fans and an adoring press? 

Best non-rhetorical rhetorical question ever.

If you check my Wikipedia page – and I’m not advising you to since just about everything on it is wrong – you’ll find reference to a Deadspin story back in 2009 titled “Jesus Is the Derek Jeter of Christianity.” The author (unnamed) says that I “think Derek Jeter should win the MVP despite the pesky fact that Joe Mauer is a better candidate …”

Here's the Deadspin piece, written by one of those other FJM guys (who was unnamed then, but I believe has since revealed himself--notice Barra's not too subtle dig at this UNNAMED internet cretin trying to point out that Barra knows exactly jack shit about baseball).  Barra's argument basically comes down to "Well, Mauer has played better this year, but Jeter is Jeter winning leadership calm eyes."

Five years after the fact is probably a little late to say this, but lighten up, Deadspin. I never said Joe Mauer was a better MVP candidate than Jeter. 

Actually you sort of did, and if you didn't, you should have.

What I said was that most of Mauer’s statistics 

All of Mauer's statistics other than R and SB, and certainly all of the statistics that mean the most; specifically OBP and SLG.

were better and that “the case for Mr. Jeter” – the Wall Street Journal makes you refer to men who are living as “Mr.” – “as American League MVP is made by more subjective arguments.”

This is what I referred to way back at the beginning of the post.  Here it comes.  CLASS (or other words that mean class).

Come on, are you going to tell me that Derek Jeter wasn’t a great teammate and that he didn’t contribute to his team in ways that don’t necessarily show up in a box score? Except maybe in the “win” category?

DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE

After all, the Yankees did win the American League pennant and the World Series that year.

With Jeter starting at every position and even pitching to himself, like Bugs Bunny!

And really, why would Jeter need special arguments to be an MVP in a year when he hit .334 with 18 home runs, 212 hits, 107 runs scored, 30 stolen bases and an OBA of .406?

Because Mauer's numbers were significantly better in all (well, both) of those statistics that are actually very meaningful?

Have some of us overrated him a bit? A bit, maybe, 

Don't admit it!  It's a slippery slope from here to asking if he belongs in the HOF at all!  Allen, nooooo!

but we’ll happily bear that cross. See you in Cooperstown in 2020.

But I don't have a hotel room!  Can I sleep on the floor of yours?

This is a repeat of what happened in that last article I posted about.  So I'll post the awesome comment left there by an Anonymous: "I'll admit it. When I started reading that article, I thought there was no way Jeter deserved a unanimous vote. But he convinced me. Jeter does deserve to be a first ballot HOFer."  That's pretty fucking good.

If you know Allen Barra, do me a favor and let him know he's a fucking idiot. 

Baseball Is a Team Sport: Mike Tully is a Fool

Today's post comes to you courtesy of Mike Tully of the New York Times - a rarely-critiqued news outlet here on FJayM. But this one's worth the time. This one actually suggests that really bad players are not that bad, and that really good players are not that good, and it hits on some classic FJayM fallacies - both logical and statistical.

In fact, I'm going to be so bold as to slap the "wrongest thing that has ever been said about baseball" on this post. That's because the writer implies that David Eckstein is better than Carlos Beltran, that Jonny Gomes is better than Joey Votto, and that signing Carlos Pena was a masterstroke by the Chicago Cubs. It's amazing how he has managed to pick one statistic that justifies all kinds of stupid conclusions and throws them into one article. It's a smorgasbord of stupid.

[For some reason, the article opens and closes with a long extended comparison to North Carolina women's soccer. I've cut that part out]

To Create Winners, you have to Find Winners

Uh oh. The title has ominous foreboding to it. Maybe the Cubs should just hire Charlie Sheen as a consultant?

David Eckstein is one player whose contribution far exceeded his talent. A walk-on in college and a 19th-round draft pick, he still managed to make the postseason in 4 of his 10 major league seasons, played on two championship teams and was the most valuable player of the 2006 World Series.

This is so stupid. This is classic stupid. This is the epitome of the stupid Eckstein fallacy. Why does Tully define Eckstein's "contribution" as making the postseason, which is a team acheivement, instead of looking at Eckstein's individual contributions... say his sole season above 100 OPS+ or his two seasons above 3 WAR.

On the other end of the spectrum one might find Carlos Beltran, a four-time All-Star with the Mets. While he recovered from knee surgery last year, they won 48 of their first 88 games, and were only four games out of the National League East lead at the All-Star break. Then Beltran rejoined the team. The Mets went 31-43 (.419) the rest of the way and finished 18 games out of first place.

Carlos Beltran did have a bad season last year, but let the record show that Beltran, in comparison with Eckstein, has had exactly four times as many seasons above 3 WAR. And Eckstein is even two years older.

Their decline cannot be attributed solely to Beltran, but the Mets did not improve with him in the lineup.

What a stupid sentence. Their decline barely be attributed to Beltran. The man plays one position out of nine. How hard is that to comprehend?

On the other hand, the Mets went 42-36 (.538) with Ruben Tejada, the team’s highest winning percentage among position players with extended time on the field. Ike Davis had the best winning percentage at .503 (74-73); only David Wright was on the field for more Mets victories (75).

RUBEN TEJADA HIT .213 WITH A .588 OPS AND WAS ACTUALLY WORSE THAN A REPLACEMENT PLAYER LAST YEAR. A REPLACEMENT PLAYER LAST YEAR WOULD PROBABLY HAVE BEEN ABOUT AS GOOD AS RUBEN TEJADA. WHO THE HECK IS RUBEN TEJADA ANYWAYS.

Baseball insiders cite factors like cohesion, rhythm and percentages to defend the idea of sticking with tried-and-true players. They argue, with some justification, that baseball involves failure and that players need time to work through it.

That time is during little league baseball, high school baseball, sometimes in college baseball, and minor leauge baseball. Not in Major League baseball.

Also, what are "cohesion", "rhythm" and "percentages"? Doesn't one of those things not belong with the others? I don't understand that sentence at all.

The Yankees’ Derek Jeter, who has won five championships, is coming off the worst offensive season of his 16-year career. Now the team is debating whether he or Brett Gardner should bat leadoff. No matter where Gardner bats, he should play; the Yankees were 93-57 (.620) with him in the lineup, and 2-10 without him. They seemed to get along just fine (21-4) without Alex Rodriguez. In the games Jeter played, the Yankees were 92-65.

Argh. So much stupid. Of all the arguments and claptrap I've heard this week about Jeter heading into this season, this is the worst. Seriously, people, shut up about Jeter and just let the poor man fade away into mediocrity without hyperanalyzing his slow descent.

Also, how did Derek Jeter win five championships? I thought the Yankees won five championships. Who were all those other guys in pinstripes? Were they batboys for Jeter? WAS SCOTT BROSIUS NOTHING BUT A HOTDOG VENDOR?

Should teams be slaves to such statistics? No, but they should notice. And they might be surprised.

Should teams pay any attention at all to such statistics? Not really. I guess these statistics are kind of worth noticing, but I think they are probably about 50th in importance, as statistics go. I'd rather judge a hitter by HBP (hey, at least it contributes to his own OBP) than by this stat.

Last season Cincinnati won the National League Central at 91-71 (.562). But in games Joey Votto, the league M.V.P., played, the Reds went 83-67 (.553). Six regular teammates finished with a higher percentage than Votto’s: Scott Rolen, .586; Jay Bruce, .574; Brandon Phillips, Orlando Cabrera and Jonny Gomes, .561; and Drew Stubbs, 560.

We're taking about a difference of four or five wins in each of these cases. Over a full season of baseball, anything can cause a differential of four or five wins. This is the exact opposite of a sample size fallacy - this is a huge generalization about winning that has nothing to do with individual production.

Absolutely nothing can be concluded from the above paragraph. Joey Votto is approximately one hundred times better than all those other Reds players, and any clown who cherry-picks win stats to try and even weakly suggest otherwise has his head in a sack.

Similarly, Texas was 71-62 (.534) with Josh Hamilton, the American League M.V.P., in the lineup. He finished behind several fellow position players: Ian Kinsler (.592), Elvis Andrus (.568), David Murphy (.565) and Michael Young (.561).

Bench Josh Hamilton! Bench Joey Votto! Call the fire department!

This is also a completely pointless paragraph. Nothing can be concluded from this generalization except that apparently individuals on a baseball team cannot win every game completely by themselves, even if he hits .359 and his OPS is 1.044.

Carlos Pena, who had a miserable 2010 season for Tampa Bay, is a remarkable example. He batted .196 and had 158 strikeouts, but the Rays were 88-56 (.611) with him in the lineup, the best among their regular players. They were 22 games above .500 with Pena, two games under without him. The Chicago Cubs signed Pena for one year and $10 million.

Awesome. The Chicago Cubs, who have had over a century now to get adjusted to failure, are now all set to win the 2011 World Series.

St. Louis traded shortstop Brendan Ryan to Seattle in the off-season after his career-worst .223 batting average. The Cardinals were 17 games over .500 with Ryan, seven games under without him. In his place is Ryan Theriot, whose Cubs went 43-53 with him in the lineup last year, 32-34 without him.

I predict the Cubs will surge past the Cardinals this year! Based solely on Ryan Theriot and Brendan Ryan!

Sometimes teams will find a player with an X-factor that goes way beyond talent. Leo Durocher once said that second baseman Eddie Stanky could not hit, field or run — all he could do was win. But Stanky was not helpless. He retired in 1953 with a .410 career on-base percentage, among the best in history.

Let's rewrite that sentence. Eddie Stanky could not hit, field or run - all he could do was walk, which helps a whole team win. Leo Durocher's statement was meant to be interpreted figuratively, and it's pretty stupid when New York Times writers interpret it literally to support a stupid thesis.

On-base percentage was not valued in the 1940s and ’50s, and that is the point. Certain players have always done things that keep them on the winning side, even if they are not always recognized.

Except that they ARE recognized - anyone who knows anything about Eddie Stanky could quickly recognize his walks and their resultant value to a team. That's why he was kept in the starting lineup.

Well, the 2011 season starts on Thursday. Get excited, baseball fans! After game #1 of the season, if your team wins, they should run the same lineup out there for the next game. After all, they will have won 100% of the games with those players!

By Far Bill's Worst Baseball Article Ever, Part 1

I couldn't get all the dumbassery from last week's article into one post. Just couldn't do it. In any case, I know the title of the post sounds hyperbolic (not that we use that kind of style around here, not at all, ever) but I stand by it. It's terrible in so many ways; covers so many facets of godfuckingawful; contains so much garbage that it's hard to get my mind around it. You'll see what I mean.

Before we begin, I'd just like to remind everyone what Bill taught us last post: that the MLS is less popular than AAA baseball. Sure, MLS is on TV infinity times more often, but if you want the whole story you have to look at the attendance numbers. Oh. Damn, nevermind. (If you don't want to do the division for the AAA numbers, or click on the links, the long and short of it is that MLS teams on average draw more than twice as many fans as AAA teams.)

ANYWAYS

The most prominent (and pretty much the most hilarious) way in which this article is fucking terrible is in Bill's perfect embodiment of the frontrunnerness of RED SOX NATION. The last third of the article, which I hopefully get around to before the weekend, is about how baseball games are too long. There are all kinds of ways to put fire to his analysis there and watch it burn, but it's not really homerish. Well it is and it isn't. You'll see what I mean. But most of the first two thirds of the article, covered here, consists of reasons why Bill thinks the Red Sox are "boring" this year. The real reason NESN and Boston radio ratings are down, of course, is because the Sox are buried in third place and probably won't make the playoffs. But watching Bill spend 5000 words dancing around that and instead blaming a bunch of other shit (some of which actually isn't other shit, just a half admission that he's a frontrunner) is fascinating. OK, I think the intro is sufficiently long.

On Tuesday night in Anaheim, with a teetering Red Sox season threatening to crumble, J.D. Drew saved Boston fans from another episode of "Papelbon, P.U."

/rimshot followed by 1950s style laughtrack

by walloping a timely double. The ball bounced off the right-field wall toward Bobby Abreu, who reacted to the carom like a ghost was clubbing him from behind with a two-by-four. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! (Didn't we create the DH position for guys like Abreu? I'm almost positive we did.) Two runs scored, Boston's eighth-inning lead expanded to three and when the TV crew cut to the obligatory shot of Drew pumping his fist at second base ...

Oh, wait ...

I forgot. J.D. Drew never does things like that.

HOW DARE HE? Doesn't he know how to "own" a moment? Doesn't he know what the legendary Beantown faithful deserve? Clutch doubles only mean something if you celebrate afterwards.

He stood there impassively, handsome as always, looking the same way he always does, like the guy whose at-bat music should be Lady Gaga's "Poker Face." If NESN launched a game show called "Guess What J.D. Just Did?" in which contestants guessed based off his expressions -- did Drew just hit a game-saving double, take a called third strike, hit into a double play, win the lottery or find out he was going to jail? -- nobody would ever win. Really, he's the perfect player for the post-2007 Red Sox regime: someone who plays hard, looks good statistically, does everything either "pretty well" or better and leaves you cold. He used to have me screaming obscenities every time he took a called third strike in a big moment. Now I get him. There are no big moments for Drew. He approaches every game, every inning and every at-bat exactly the same. Expecting him to own that Anaheim moment just wasn't realistic.

We're off to a good start. Who the fuck cares how a player "owns" moments? Sign #1 that you're a frontrunner: your team is 15 games over .500 in early August, but you're bored by them because they don't pump fists and shout at the sky enough. You know who owns moments? That fuckstick Papelbon. And Joba Chamberlain! Now there's a guy you can get excited about.

Quite simply, he's a boring player on a boring team during a fairly boring season.

Fffffffffffffffffrontrunner.

It's the first Red Sox team without a truly compelling player since 1993 -- when we went 80-82 -- and even then, we had a young Mo Vaughn (29 homers, .915 OPS) and Roger Clemens launching his loathsome "I just got paid, I'm gonna start puttin' on weight,

I cut this joke short. You didn't miss anything.

Really, you have to go back to 1981 (pre-Wade Boggs, post-Fred Lynn, post-Carlton Fisk) for a Red Sox team with less pizzazz than the 2010 crew.

Significant losses for the Red Sox from 2009 to 2010: Jason Bay, Nick Green (significant in that he had a lot of ABs, not that he's good), and Takashi Saito. 2009 Red Sox on August 1: a half game back of the Yankees for the division crown, 2.5 games up in the Wild Card. 2010 Red Sox on August 1: 6.5 games back in the division, 5.5 games back in the Wild Card. So you do the math: either Jason Bay is the most magnificently exciting player of all time, or Bill is a complete and total fucking fffffrrrrrrrrrrrrontrunner. Oh, and as he explains later, they've also been missing Jacoby Ellsbury basically all season. But if Ellsbury and Bay are the difference between this article being written and not being written... Bill can go eat a box of taints. JD DREW WHY DON'T YOU DO A DANCE AND SHOOT OFF FIREWORKS WHEN YOU MAKE A GOOD PLAY?

On Wednesday, both Boston papers carried front-page stories about Sports Business Journal's report that NESN's Red Sox ratings had plummeted 36 percent. (The Boston Globe also reported that WEEI's ratings were down 16.5 percent, and that male listeners between the ages of 25 and 54 had dwindled by 28 percent.) One morning earlier, my father and I had been on the phone trying to make sense of SBJ's story. Neither of us was surprised, more curious. What caused it? Was there a single reason? Five reasons? Ten reasons? Was it a fluke or a sign of something more substantial?

There a single primary reason. I've already brought it up a few times. Finish it for me: you're all a bunch of ffffffffffffrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

/Larry B makes direct eye contact with you, encouraging you to say the word out loud

Let's say we assigned a percentage pie of blame for dwindling Red Sox interest in 2010. My pie would look like this:

Needs more pop culture references. Pie charts are boring. Let's get Jersey Shore or The Bachelorette worked in here somehow.

INJURIES: 10 PERCENT

[Newly acquired CF Mike] Cameron also can't hit. And he's one of those guys who looks old -- like, when you're watching him stand on second base, you make jokes like, "I wonder whether he still keeps in touch with old teammate Satchel Paige's family" and "I forget; did Cameron integrate the American League in the early '50s, or was that Larry Doby?"

And here's your obligatory mention of the fact that the Red Sox were the last team to integrate, 12 years after Jackie Robinson debuted for the Dodgers. Twelve fucking years. That's crazy. That's like if integration started the same year the McGwire/Sosa HR chase happened, and some team was just getting around to taking care of that this year.

As for Bill's substantive analysis, Ellsbury has been down all year. Pedrioa and Victor Martinez have been hurt too. On the other (sensible) hand, the Sox still have Kevin Youkilis (I always laugh when Sox fans claim he's underrated, although he isn't as overrated as you'd expect a white Red Sox player to be), David Ortiz (somehow OPSing over .900 after starting the season like 4 for 100), Clay Buchholz, and Jon Lester. Those four guys alone would be enough to excite any rational non-frontrunning fanbase. Add in Pedroia's substantial contribution (342 PA so far) and there's really no leg for Bill to stand on here.

FRONT-OFFICE PARALYSIS/INADEQUACIES: 5 PERCENT

A few days ago, the following rant appeared on the Boston Dirt Dogs site:

" ... can't believe the front office just fiddled this summer while Rome burned and we flushed an entire season and $150M down the toilet by thinking we could tread water with Bill Hall playing second and Kevin Cash catching and David Ortiz batting third against lefties and J.D. Drew playing every day against lefties and Eric Patterson and Daniel Nava and Dusty Brown, et al. It was so [expletive] obvious when the Laser Show and V-Mart got hurt that we had to go get a real bat, Jason Werth level, who would still start when we got healthy, but instead we did [expletive] nothing and buried ourselves. It was like we had no front office, the Jack Hannahan blockbuster notwithstanding." -- An understandably apoplectic Kevin H. on the lost season

Awwwww. Poor guy. His team didn't go pick up an all-star caliber hitter at the trade deadline when the few that were available would have cost way more than their value. THEO YOU BUM YOU LET US DOWN WE WILL NEVER FORGIVE YOU UNLESS WE MAKE THE PLAYOFFS AGAIN THIS YEAR FOR THE 7TH TIME IN THE LAST 8 SEASONS

My friend Daniel recognized the venom immediately: It sounded just like our crazy friend Hench, who had been griping about Theo Epstein in our e-mail circle for the past few weeks. Daniel e-mailed us the rant with the subject heading "Hench, is this you?"

Yup. It was Hench.

Who. Gives. A. Fuck.

I couldn't disagree. Team Theo's lack of urgency as the injuries mounted was appalling -- on July 3, after the Pedroia/Martinez double whammy, we were still a half-game behind New York and 1½ games ahead of Tampa

And we had an exciting team! Now that we're 5+ games back, they're just not exciting anymore. You know what's exciting though- playing with the ESPN NBA trade machine. Hoooo boy. THE NETS SHOULD SWAP THEIR ENTIRE ROSTER WITH THE CLIPPERS. WHO SAYS NO? WHICH GM HANGS UP THE PHONE FIRST?

At the same time, you can blame Epstein (and Boston's owners) for ignoring a simple law of entertainment these past two seasons: Just like you can't open a blockbuster movie without a star, you can't expect a nine-figure baseball team to capture the daily imagination of a big market without a player who passes the Remote Control Test (when you don't flip channels because you know Player X is coming up) or the We Can't Go Get Food Yet Test (when you don't make a food/drink run at a game because Player X is coming up) or even the Every Five Nights, I Know What I'm Doing Test (when you have a transcendent pitcher who keeps you in front of the television every five days).

I like Pedroia. I like Kevin Youkilis. Clay Buchholz has been a revelation this year. I really, really like Lester, my favorite current player (and someone quietly enjoying a monster season) mainly for everything he's been through. But none of them passes the above tests. I went to a Philly-Boston game in June in which we shelled Jamie Moyer for something like 30 runs in the first two innings. Philly pulled Ryan Howard in the third. We were crushed. Dammit! We only got to see Howard hit once! The 2010 Red Sox don't have a pitcher or hitter who generates that reaction. It's true.

So I guess either Bay, Ellsbury, or some combination of them passes all those tests. And geez, I had forgotten that the Red Sox and Phillies played a series against each other in Philadelphia. How much asshole can you cram into one stadium at one time? I'd hate to have been a security guard at Citizens Bank Park for that one. Oof.

THE HANGOVER: 15 PERCENT

It's been the elephant in the room for three years. Do I care as much as I did? I think about this question constantly. The short answer? No. It can't mean as much. It will never mean as much.

I'm fine with this. It's OK to say that your team's first championship in nearly 100 years was super special and meant more than any other one in the future could.

Before 2004, rooting for the Red Sox wasn't about just sports. It was about mortality. It was about a ticking clock that only we could hear. It was about exchanges like this:

"Jimmy's dad died last weekend."
"That's terrible! How old was he?"
"Sixty-five."

... and how you'd immediately add 1918 plus 65 and realize, "Crap."

I'm not fine with this. If you or anyone you know did/does this, you are an asshole. Stop watching sports immediately and go throw yourself off a building.

With that said ... it's not life or death. Which opens the door for fickle TV ratings and everything else.

Fffffffffffffffrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

This reminds me of the time Bill claimed that Celtics fans (pre-2008 championship) were suffering more than Clippers fans, because it's harder to be a fan of a team with a great history of winning that's in a slump than be a fan of a team with no history of winning at all. You hear that, Browns fans? YOUR FANDOM IS LESS TORTURED THAN COWBOYS FANDOM.

(Interesting side note: In just the past decade, five franchises lost life-or-death status.

Interesting fact: Bill makes up categories like this and presents them as universally agreed upon six times per column.

Boston in 2004. The White Sox in 2005. St. Louis in 2006.

That's fucking ridiculous. Their last win before 2006 was 24 years earlier.

Philly in 2008.

And 28 years. Let's throw the Marlins in 2003 on here, why not.

And really, the Yankees in 2009 -- since every Yankees fan was secretly having a heart attack about the fact that they were 0-for-the-century, the Red Sox/Yankees dynamic had flipped and A-Rod had become the Reverse Curse of the Bambino, so we have to count them.

You're the stupidest person ever born.

That leaves San Francisco and the Cubs as the last remaining big-market, life-or-death teams with that "Jimmy's dad" factor, although you certainly can count Cleveland, Houston and Milwaukee as well, and maybe even Seattle, San Diego and Texas if you're feeling magnanimous.)

A World Series win by any of those teams would mean 50 times as much to their fans than Philly's 2008 win or Saint Louis's 2006 win did. It would mean 500 times as much to their fans as New York's 2009 win. FIVE OF THE EIGHT TEAMS YOU JUST NAMED HAVE NEVER WON THE WORLD SERIES. ANOTHER IS ON A 102 YEAR DROUGHT.

THE BANDWAGON EFFECT: 5 PERCENT

Look, I don't want to be Grumpy Old Man. I really don't. But I probably attended 100 Fenway games just from 1998 to 2002; the level of baseball sophistication in the stands was unparalleled.

Unparalleled relative to Bill's experiences in other ballparks, which probably adds up to a handful of games in Yankee Stadium and this one time he went to Philly and saw the Sox beat the hell out of Jamie Moyer. Hilarity always ensues when he starts talking about Boston crowds. Always.

We worked with Pedro like Frick and Frack. He did his job (rolling through lineups); we did ours (standing every time he got two strikes on someone, doing the steady clap to get him fired up, cheering him like a Roman gladiator). That's gone now.

WE CLAP FOR OUR PLAYERS! IN RHYTHM WITH ONE ANOTHER! LET'S SEE YOU PULL THAT OFF!

THE STEROID ERA HANGOVER: 5 PERCENT

Gag me.

The best thing about baseball? How 120 years and six generations intersected. Now our little statistical compass has been shattered like a beer bottle. For the past week, every media outlet has tried to talk us into A-Rod's 600th homer -- as if the moment means something, because, after all, just six other people have done it! -- only the nation's collective indifference was telling.

As I've perceived it, people are no less excited for it than they were for Ken Griffey Junior's 600th in 2008. And he's insulated from steroids in the minds of most. So really, what this point amounts to is Bill admitting that he's not really that into baseball this year. Probably because the Red Sox are buried in third and he's a ffffffffffrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

(I tweeted sarcastically Friday, "I'm on pins and steroid needles!")

Congratulations! You turned a phrase!

THE DECLINE OF BASEBALL IN GENERAL: 5 PERCENT

This is where it gets really, really, really, really stupid. And it's also where I go to bed. Join me next time, as Bill comes to the conclusion that the state of the economy overall has no bearing on baseball ticket sales! And that when a team starts sucking ass on the field ten years after opening a new stadium, and then their attendance drops, that's because fans got bored with the stadium!

Nothing Needs to be Said About This:

Jay won Around the Horn on Friday (which of course does not involve "winning" in the traditional sense, but work with me here; I guess you could say Tony Reali thought he was the least stupid member of the panel that day). Here's how he led off his subsequent "face time:"

A few months ago it would have been unthinkable to say that Alex Rodriguez would one day make the Hall of Fame.

So, like the title says, nothing needs to be said about that. But I think I'll post a funny picture of Jay anyways.