I haven't posted in six months but this infuriated me so much that I have to take time out of my day to excoriate it

Now that I am all grown up and no longer the fresh-faced wise-ass I was when I first posted on this blog back eight years ago, my bitterness has abated somewhat. Now I'm a family guy, two baby daughters, etc.  But every so often something comes along that is so infuriating that it has basically ruined my morning and forced me to spend the first half hour of my work day writing a post for the first time in six months.  I know only like six people read this blog but I am convinced that I must write this in order to expose the banality of evil that is Frank Deford, and that if even one of you goes home and thinks, "You know, Frank Deford sucks", then I will have made the world a better place and there will be some brighter future for humanity.

Here's the scene in the dan-bob family van this morning on the way to work. Mrs. dan-bob is in the backseat dealing with a screaming baby-bob.

NPR Host: Upcoming: a story about statistics and our national pasttime!

dan-bob: Awesome!  [turns up radio over screaming child, tells wife to calm that kid down already]

NPR Host: Here's our weekly commentary from Frank Deford

dan-bob: Oh no. 

Frank Deford: Whereas numbers have never been a significant adjunct to the other performing arts, they've been stitched into the very essence of sport. Not just the score, but how fast, how far, how good. And, of course, no sport is so identified with numbers as is our American baseball.

Here's  a little cheat sheet for any of you who want to know if your commentator is a self-righteous chump like Frank Deford: they use "sport" in the singular. [Note: you're exempt from this rule if you're British.].  Besides that, this is some awful diction: "adjunct"?  "stitched"?  "our American baseball"?  What the heck other kind of baseball is there?  I hate Frank Deford. Honestly I think I hate him more than I've hated anyone else on this website.  He's like HatGuy on steroids invating my morning commute and regularly wrecking my Wednesdays.

In fact, baseball statistics have been around almost as long as baseball. But stats — which is a fairly new shortcut word, about as old as the Mets and Astros are — have proliferated recently, not only in other sports, notably basketball, but to deeper and deeper levels of baseball enlightenment.

First, Frank, in the English language there is actually a word for "shortcut words".  We call them "abbreviations".  Second, is there any reason to note that the abbreviation is as old as the Mets and Astros?  Referencing baseball expansion in the early 1960s makes no sense to me, unless he's trying to argue that baseball expansion is bad or lazy or something.  But if there were any group of fans out there pining for pre-expansion sixteen-team all-white baseball, I'd expect Frank Deford to be their spiritual leader, chanting about the evils of modern baseball and demanding a return to the pure Church of Baseball.

Today, traditional statistics like batting or earned run averages — righteous measures that were accepted as the athletic equivalent of the Ten Commandments — are made to seem quaint and primitive. Baseball even has its own specific brand of analytics, which is known as sabermetrics.

Bible references!  Righteous measures! Anyone who would deny righteous measures like BA and ERA are inherently sinful to the essence of sport! These are the Ten Commandments of the Frank Deford Church of Old Timey Baseball!

Baseball statistics were further glorified by Michael Lewis in his book Moneyball and then on film by the heartthrob Brad Pitt. Imagine on-base percentage being a thing of heartthrob. Moneyball posited the fancy that revolutionary statistical magic had sprung forth from the brain of the Oakland General Manager Billy Beane, like Athena emerging full-blown from Zeus' head. In fact, other resourceful innovators had found original uses for stats all through diamond history.

Dear God: "posited the fancy"?  Someone shoot Frank Deford with a pellet gun.  And the reference to Athena: wait, what? I don't see any reason for the allusion other than trying to overdramatize a nonissue. I'm sure this is just the pure holy Frank Deford defending his Church of Old Timey Baseball against the pagan innovations of modern man.

Plus, at the end of this paragraph, you'd think that Frank is going to talk about the actual resourceful innovators, but no, this paragraph is just one of many examples of his disjointed rambling. This essay has no direction, no organizing principles.  It's just the rambling of a bitter old man.

But now there is an absolute sabermetric explosion. Every team has employed nerds, who are presumably tucked away in secret offices, with computers and green eyeshades, emerging only to hand over new numerical strategies. This has resulted not only in the outward and visible sign of infielders being shifted all around the diamond like linebackers in football, but even in covert skulduggery, industrial espionage and power politics.

Oh man.  This is the new Cheetos-and-Mountain-Dew-in-the-parents'-basement! It's the secret-offices-and-green-eyeshades insult!  Good lord, this man's insults are even more dated than his opinions. Someone please put this fossil of a sportswriter in a museum, but not like on display at the museum.  Just put him in one of those back storage sheds that never gets opened where he can mildew and canker all he wants without bothering people.

I also like how Frank blames the sabermetric explosion for defensive shifts, which any educated baseball fan knows date to the 1920s, covert skulduggery (which of course was never around before, thank god), industrial espionage (i.e. when you use someone else's password to log into a website), and power politics (good thing baseball was apolitical back in the old days!).

Last week the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim general manager up and quit in midseason — something that statistically just doesn't happen — because, it seems, his manager wouldn't apply enough of the new metrics that his computer minions were churning out.

That's hilarious! It "statistically just doesn't happen" because it is uncommon!  I get it!  It's a joke! Good thing we have statistics around to identify uncommon things! I wish someone would glue Frank Deford's mouth shut!  

But wait! Worse than this front-office insurrection, the federal government itself may well bring charges against one or more members of the St. Louis Cardinals staff, nabbed for hacking into the secret files of the Houston Astros. Hacking! Baseball! Like Russians and Chinese. Oh my.

Oh my god! Like this is somehow worse than all the other terrible things that have happened in baseball over the years! Some Cardinals folks used the old password of an Astros guy!  THE WORLD IS GOING TO THE DOGS AND THE PURITY OF THE FRANK DEFORD CHURCH OF OLD TIMEY BASEBALL IS FOREVER STAINED.  ALL THE RACISM AND STEROIDS AND LABOR DISPUTES AND THE JUICED BALL DIDN'T DO IT, BUT NOW THE CARDINALS ARE HACKERS, AND THAT'S THE LAST STRAW!

"Like the Russians".  It's like we're living in 1960 or something.  Frank Deford is still cheering for the Mazeroski home run and ignoring Mickey Mantle's alcoholism.

It makes deflating a few footballs look like child's play, and it makes baseball the darkest statistical art, even more the place for sexy metrics.

What? Ow. How is this even a concluding sentence?  How is this statistics a "dark art"?  What the hell are "sexy metrics"? THE CHURCH OF OLD TIMEY BASEBALL WILL NOT STAND FOR THIS. FRANK DEFORD WILL EXORCISE THE DEMONS!

This wasn't even an essay.  It was just rambling about nothing, with a heavy dose of moral grandstanding.  And yet NPR has him on every Wednesday morning, ostensibly to say something interesting about sports. I generally enjoy getting my news from NPR in the morning, but if they employ Frank Deford, it casts serious doubt on the quality of the rest of their reporting. Imagine if the equivalent of Frank Deford were informing a large number of Americans about something actually important.

Even Mrs. dan-bob, who only caught snatches of it in between infant screams, knew enough to remark. "Why did you listen to that?  Frank Deford sucks so much".  

Statistics, Racism, and Stereotyping

This article was originally published in ESPN the Mag in late March. It's an amazing conglomeration of foolishness. It was written by Jeff Phillips, a principal at The Parthenon Group, which is some kind of business consulting firm, so perhaps this isn't exactly sportswriting. But if ESPN the Mag is going to publish it, it qualifies.

FOR 150 YEARS, "clubhouse chemistry" has been impossible to quantify.

Have people been trying to quantify it for 150 years? I don't think there was anyone back in the early days of the American League trying to figure out some way to quantify the clubhouse chemistry. Plus, it would've been totally different back then. All the players were white guys from the good old USA, so the model would probably have to measure things like "willingness to pound moonshine or "ability to cover for me when I need an alibi for the manager's bed checks" or "sleeping ability on a train". I imagine that old time GMs probably had different models for chemistry than their current counterparts.

The only way to measure it, winning teams said, was by gut feeling: Either you have it, the way the Red Sox did with the Idiots of 2004 and 
the Beards of 2013, or you don't.

It's a good thing all the other baseball teams have the RED SOX around to show them examples of good chemistry. God knows the RED SOX are the most charismatic organization playing America's most charismatic sport. This is what makes everyone hate Boston's sports team.

I also find it interesting that the authors don't present the scores of the '04 or '13 Red Sox on their scale. This would've been a really good place to show that their super-duper chemistry metric matches the eye test of the obviously chemically superb Red Sox. But there's no mention.

Until now. 

EMPHATIC SENTENCE. Jeff Phillips is following the advice of his 10th grade English teacher, Mrs. Higgenbotham, who reminded him to use syntax to reflect meaning. Way to go, Mrs. Higgenbotham!

Working with group dynamics experts Katerina Bezrukova, an assistant professor at Santa Clara, and Chester Spell, an associate professor at Rutgers, we built 
a proprietary team-chemistry regression model.
Jeff Phillips probably pitched his article something like this:

Jeff Phillips: We've got an educated baseball audience hungry for some new insights on baseball, and they seem to love statistics. But we also need to appeal to the good old boys who understand clubhouse chemistry. So we're trying to figure out how to quantify this. This is gonna be a killer article!

Katerina Berzrukova: Listen, I'm busy working on getting tenure, and working with you clowns isn't exactly going to boost my academic resume. Plus I am Russian. Call me if you want to quantify the chemistry on your gymnastics team.

Chester Spell: Yeah, publishing in ESPN the Mag is not exactly a peer-reviewed journal. If I'm trying to build my resume, I probably don't want to get published by the same organization that has employed both John Kruk and Joe Morgan as a baseball analyst.

JP: Wait, did I mention I'm writing an article for the World Wide Leader in Sports? The Biggest Sports Journalism Outlet around? You can get a lot of hits on our website.

[KB looks at CS]

CS: So?

KB: Yeah, so? Nobody reads it in Russia.

JP: Also we can pay you handsomely because our coffers are overflowing with money. I'll just grab a few grand from the Bristol Money Bin, where Simmons and the ESPN execs just swim in cash like Uncle Scrooge.

KB: Now that you mention it, I've got a PhD from Moscow State University, where I helped the vaunted Moscow State Dragoons hockey team run off a four-year undefeated streak by concocting a clubhouse chemistry model based on their loyalty to the motherland and their vodka tolerance. So this stuff is my wheelhouse.

CS: Well, I do a lot of research about organizations and businesses, and Major League Baseball is an organization and a business!

JP: Great! I'll throw some bills at you, you throw some random numbers and regressionspeak back at me, we bang out a few thousand words for the Mag, and we call it a day. Whew! I'm gonna hit the pool.

*************

Plus the model is proprietary. Which basically means that article could've been random numbers thrown out of nowhere. That might work if I thought ESPN had the ethos of being honest and trustworthy and devoted to making a contribution to how we understand the complex game of baseball... hahaha, I kill me.

Our algorithm combines three factors -- clubhouse demographics, trait isolation and stratification of performance to pay -- to discover how well MLB teams concoct positive chemistry.
It's a good thing that human relationships in the complex world of a baseball clubhouse can be reduced to three indicators. And it I'm still not buying the premise that MLB teams are trying to "concoct" positive chemistry. Sure, I bet now and again a team makes a decision perhaps not entirely based on baseball performance (the Reds did spend a fair amount of coin for an aging Scott Rolen in 2009 probably in part because of his clubhouse presence), but that particular acquisition wouldn't have done much at all for these threefactors. 

Also, the word choice here is putrid. "Algorithm"? "Concoct"? C'mon, Mrs. Higgenbotham! I know you wanted to teach Jeff as much vocabulary as you possibly could, but you have to also teach him how to use it appropriately!

Plus this model doesn't quantify the major factor that would be conducive to positive chemistry: not signing total assholes like Milton Bradley, John Rocker, or Albert Belle When these guys come up with a model that precisely quantifies being as asshole, I'll start listening.

According to the regression model, teams that maximize these factors can produce a four-win swing during a season.
So by overhauling their entire 25-man roster in order to manipulate the overall chemistry of the team, they might be able to get four wins out of it. Sounds like a plan! Actually, maybe they should manipulate the overall quality of their baseball players instead.

According to our projections, such bonding will clinch this year's World Series: The Rays (third in chem) will prevail over the Cardinals (28th) in six games for Tampa Bay's first Series title. Happy players, happy fans.
At least the Cardinals suck at chemistry. I've heard all sorts of bullshit about the Cardinal Way over the years, so I'm glad to see that the BFIB won't latch on to this as evidence of their moral and personal superiority to the rest of the National League. But this model is still stupid. And if chemistry accounts for 4 wins over 162 games, its effect in a 7 game series must be miniscule. So I don't think it makes any sense at all to over-reach and use it to predict the winners of the World Series.

Chemistry breakdown
Demographic factor: The impact from diversity, measured by age, tenure with the team, nationality, race and position. Teams with the highest scores have several overlapping groups based on shared traits and experiences.

Does this mean teams should try to avoid racial integration? Or including foreigners? Or only bring them in if they're in groups? This is such an awful way to look at any kind of group construction - instead of actually working with your players, teaching them not to be assholes to people from other races and countries, and generally working to improve the clubhouse chemistry of the best players they can assemble, it suggests instead that GMs should view their human resources as fixed identities. What a terrible way to view human beings, and what a terrible way to generate organizational culture.

Also, why the hell is position in this factor? Are we really looking at the chemistry impact of the few positional decisions a team makes? OH SHIT IF WE CARRY A THIRD CATCHER THAT TIPS OUR CHEMISTRY FACTOR. CMON UP CORKY!

Isolation factor: The impact from players who are isolated because of a lack of subgroups from these shared demographic traits. Too much diversity can, in fact, produce clubhouse isolation for players who don't have teammates with similar backgrounds or experiences.

If they're assholes, yes, then you'll have a team full of players who don't want to talk to their teammates because they have different backgrounds. God forbid we have TOO MUCH DIVERSITY. I guess that's why the 1927 Yankees were so awesome. They didn't have too much diversity.

Maybe they're thinking of a team like the 1975 Reds - three Latinos, three black guys and too white guys - as their ideal team. That way, every player has his own buddy within his own racial group. I'd be interested to see how they treat race, for example. Perez was Cuban, Concepcion Venezuelan, and Geronimo Dominican; would they they have meaningful shared traits? As a Reds fan I am ashamed that I don't know the answer to that question. As a baseball fan I'm interested to see how they actually categorize demographic traits. Oh wait, this is an article written to appeal to the hordes of fans who just want to throw numbers around without actually thinking about how they were constructed. Shame.

Ego factor: The impact from individuals' differences in performance and monetary status. Too few All-Stars and highly paid players signal a lack of leadership; too many, however, creates conflict. The ideal level falls in the middle.

Actually, too few All-Stars signals a lack of good players. Too many All-Stars signals, generally, a good team. Leaving out the obvious point about All-Star selection being a popularity contest, it's still a stupid-ass thing to say that the IDEAL LEVEL of All Stars is "in the middle". Maybe in Russia an All-Star means something else.

Chris W. once reminded me that Bill James once said that if you find a stat that says some nobody was a better hitter than Babe Ruth, you should probably find a different stat. In this case, if you find a model that says a team should not try to have a maximum number of all star players, you should probably find a different model. Or at least a different proxy variable for "performance". All-Star appearances is a a terrible variable proxy for performance. The current leader in the AL shortstop voting is Derek Jeter, who has the 12th best WAR among AL shortstops.You'd think that with the tons of possible ways to quantify performance , the professors would pick something sensible.

Their point about the possible chemistry effects of income inequality in the clubhouse seems relevant. I can see how that might cause problems in a clubhouse. I'd actually like to see the information on that. BUT NO: the model is proprietary.

The article goes on to discuss every division and how chemistry will affect the standings. I'm not going to go through every division because it's boring, but here's a sample:

The Tigers' clubhouse diversity contributes 0.9 of a win by itself, but the strength of its subgroups is weak due to differences in age and years with the team, leading to an Isolation score of minus-1.6 wins. The Royals' Isolation score, on the other hand, is 4.7 wins higher, boosted by a pitching staff that includes eight Americans among the team's 10 core pitchers.

This is pure junk. We're supposed to draw a meaningful conclusion from the fact that the Royals, are doing their best to keep American jobs at home instead of outsourcing them like those anti-American Pirates? Or that Dave Dombrowski's careful assembling of Tigers' 25-man clubhouse diversity is almost worth one win? It's just so stupid.

Man, that article was bad. Faux academic knowledge? Statistics misused? Terrible writing? Subtly promoting racial stereotyping? Nice work, ESPN The Mag.

As entertaining as the comment war going on in the next post down is

Let's see what Jon Heyman has to say about the Ryan Zimmerman extension. (And by the way, all of you who think that everything Braun has said is a bunch of face-saving malarkey while everything Mr. Steroid Test Collector Guy has said is the absolute unaltered truth are fucking killing me. You're just. Fucking. Killing me. But I'll let Chris W fight that fight for now.)

The immediate reaction to Ryan Zimmerman's $100 million, six-year extension with the Nationals was this: Where's the hometown discount?

Where's the beef am I right LOL? To answer the question seriously, something I'm loathe to do but am forced to because providing actual analysis in my posts is one of the conditions of my parole, here's how I see it: If Adrian Beltre's age 32 to 37 seasons are worth $96MM over six years (after five years in Seattle, three of which were pretty awful, and one "Hey wait I need another big contract!" season in Boston), then I'm pretty sure that Zimmerman's age 29 to 34 seasons were going to be worth a good amount more than that had he hit the market after 2013. Just pulling numbers out of my ass FanGraphs style here but let's say $120MM/6. Maybe more if the Yankees were ready to move Fish Fillet-Rod (shoutout to Eriz) to DH at that point.

Zimmerman's total contract, which now runs through 2019, guarantees him $126 million, including the two years he already had on his deal. Forget that $126 million has been an unlucky number in baseball contracts (see Vernon Wells, Barry Zito and Nationals teammate Jayson Werth),

Yes, forget that, even if you're a superstitious idiot who normally wouldn't forget it, because Zimmerman hasn't signed a contract for that dollar amount.

it just seems a bit high considering 1) Zimmerman has an injury history,

He missed a medium amount of time in 2008 and 2011 but still cleared 100 games in both seasons. In his other four full seasons he averaged 157 GP. All told he's averaging 136 GP per year. Yes, loosely speaking, he has a history of being injured. No, he is not a fragile player. No, he is not a likely candidate to miss extended time in the future. No, Jon Heyman doesn't give a shit. Jon Heyman is the kind of idiot who would bother to note that there have been some bad $126MM contracts in recent history, and that if you squint and cock your head to the side and stand on one foot, it kind of looks like Zimmerman signed a $126MM contract.

2) he sprayed a few throws in recent years,

So dumb it's not even worth addressing, other than to say that both by advanced metrics and "the eye test"/traditional scouting, Zimmerman is somewhere between a decent and really good defensive player.

and 3) the Nationals have a top third-base prospect in Anthony Rendon.

And since all prospects always pan out... aw, snap.

Said one competing executive of the Nats' two nine-figure deals now in the books: "Seems like they have two $100 million contracts but no $100 million payers.''

PLEEEEEEEEASE please please please please tell me it was Ruben Amaro who said that.

No matter what anyone on the outside thinks, Zimmerman was said to be the Nats' No. 1 priority this winter, and they did get the deal done. They love him for his defense,

But he has sprayed throws in recent years! It was in all the papers!

his clutch hitting,

Always critical to a learned baseball man like Heyman.

his personality and his local roots (University of Virginia). They also recall that he led the majors in WAR one year.

If true, that would be a HUGE strike against Heyman's argument. Fortunately for him it's not, but Zimmerman still seems like a good candidate to be a 4 to 6 win player early in this contract (huge bargain) and maybe a 2.5 to 4 win player later on (a little overpaid or properly paid).

Zimmerman did agree to a $10 million personal services deferral, which means only $116 million of the $126 million counts as payroll and could help the Nationals in terms of flexibility.

The Jinx of Zito is no more! Shrewd move, Mike Rizzo!

/video of Brian Sabean punching a hole through the top of a stovepipe hat

But the reality is he's a one-time All-Star.

Wait, what? Holy shit you can't be serious.

And that's a lot of loot for a one-time All-Star.

Wow, you really did end up boiling it down to the number of times he's made the all star team. That's awesome. And Heyman's analysis ends right there. Well, how about that. Hold on for a sec, let me check my computer machine for something really quick...

Ah, yup, there it is. Yadier Molina is a THREE time All-Star. No wonder his age 30 through 34 seasons are apparently well worth almost $15MM per. MOLINA'S VALUE GOES WAY BEYOND WHAT THE NUMBERS SHOW! NO ONE APPRECIATES HIM, EXCEPT THE MILLIONS OF FANS AND DOZENS OF WRITERS WHO CRY ALL THE TIME ABOUT HOW NO ONE APPRECIATES HIM! (Quick tangent: Dear (most) Cardinals fans, go the fuck away. You're the fucking worst and I hope your team never ever wins another playoff game. I'd cheer for the Red Sox if they played you in the WS this fall, perish the thought. Fuck you and fuck your smug and undeserved sense of accomplishment. Your city stinks and so does your team. I hope Pujols hits 800 career home runs and goes into the hall as an Angel. Signed, not a Cubs fan even though I bet you're sure I am at this point) Meanwhile Zimmerman's value is apparently wholly demonstrated by the fact that he missed like fifty games during two of the past six seasons.

/sits and waits eight years so he can laugh about how bad the Molina deal was and how reasonable the Zimmerman deal was

WMTMQR: There shall be no TMQR

What a bummer. How could this be? The guy writes an entire column centered around making predictions for all 32 teams in haiku format--yes, haiku format--and I can't find anything in it really worth picking on. Seems ridiculous but it's the case. I dunno, maybe I'm going soft in my old age. Maybe Gregg has written moronic drivel intentionally all these years and decided to cut his act this week. Maybe all this hoping to one day study law is giving me some kind of a mental block. Whatever the reason, Gregg gets a pass this week. I'm sure he'll be back to his old tricks next Tuesday, speculating that Team X kicked a 48 yard field goal on 4th and 12 that made the score 24-3 early in the third quarter because Team X's coach was trying to avoid having a shutout on his resume.

And since there's no TMQR I think I will turn this into a grab bag of a post. When you live in your Grandma's basement (my parents recently gave me the heave-ho out of theirs because I was too busy writing about baseball without knowing what sunlight feels like to help them with the chores), you can do whatever you want with your blogoblog.

Speaking of basement dwelling trolls who know nothing about how baseball actually works, I can't wait for the release of the Moneyball movie because 1) it looks like a decent flick and 2) it'll give crusty old fuckasses like Plaschke a chance to roll out the same sorry criticisms of Beane and his methods they've been rolling out for five or six years now. HEY THE A'S NEVER WON A WORLD SERIES SO THAT PROVES BEANE KNOWS NOTHING. AND LOOK, THE A'S HAVEN'T BEEN GOOD FOR SEVERAL SEASONS WHICH ALSO PROVES THAT BEANE'S MANAGERIAL METHODS DID NOT STAND THE TEST OF TIME.

Moving on. I need to make couple apologies.

To Jeff Pearlman: you were right. Jason Bay is fucking terrible. He's not terrible for the reasons you said he'd be terrible, but he's terrible all the same. You saw it coming. A feather in your cap, sir. And I still want my free copy of The Rocket That Fell To Earth whenever you get a chance.

To Phillies fans: I was wrong. Despite a buttshit lineup (team OPS+ of 97), your team is going to win like 103 games. Good for them. I hope they win their first two against the Diamondbacks easily, then drop the next two in Arizona, and then lose game five at home as Ryan Howard strikes out looking with the game winning runs on base. As long as your team is going to have a starting staff capable of annual regular season success, the least I can wish upon your cavalcade of trashball moron fans is a devastatingly painful annual playoff disappointment. Worst of luck to you in October.

Finally, a minor rant. After realizing TMQ had nothing to offer me this week I moved on to a well that never runs dry- CBS's Scott Miller. He wrote a column about who deserves to win baseball's individual awards this season. It was actually pretty inoffensive minus this little bit of cognitive dissonance:

NL Cy Young

Ian Kennedy, Diamondbacks

Arguments for: Leads NL with 18 wins, instrumental in bringing baseball relief to desert.

Arguments against: Haven't we learned enough from sabermetrics that pitchers just can't, ahem, control wins very much? And Kennedy's other numbers don't come close to stacking up.

AL MVP

Jacoby Ellsbury, Red Sox

Arguments against: Ellsbury is 27 runs behind Curtis Granderson.

Curtis Granderson, Yankees

Arguments: Granderson leads the majors with 125 runs scored, 27 more than the No. 2 run-scorer.

Ah yes, finally, in the year 2011, even mouth-breathers like Miller understand that pitching wins are a pretty useless statistic. But runs scored? Now there's something you can set your watch to.

That's not where I'm going with this, though. Where I'm going is directly into the eye (with a sharp object) of anyone who wants to say that Justin Upton is worthy of winning the MVP. Now I don't hate Upton, he's a good player who's had a good year. But there's a problem that prevents me from saying he should win big-time hardware: I'm a Rockies fan. And I will never, ever, ever, ever stop being furious with writers who diminish the accomplishments of any Rockie because of the Coors Field effect while ignoring the home/road splits of every other player in the league. Yes, many Rockies have sizable differences between their road and home numbers. Yes, lots of non-Rockies have the exact same problem. No, this criticism is never leveled against them and it makes me want to throw puppies off a cliff.

Such is the case with Upton this year, hitting .348/.427/.641 at Chase and .246/.331/.444 everywhere else. If the Rockies and Diamondbacks switched spots in the standings and Carlos Gonzalez had Upton's splits, you'd never hear the end of how Gonzalez is nothing but a guy who's lucky to play half his games at Coors and would otherwise be a 4th outfielder. Chase isn't Coors, but it's a pretty solid hitter's park. Don't expect the average baseball writer to know that. Instead it's all DERP DERP DERP LOLCOORS DERP. Any writer who gives his or her #1 vote to Upton this year but didn't give his or her #1 vote to "Coors Creation" Matt Holliday in 2007 (.301/.374/.485 on the road) should be immediately dragged into the nearest town square and beaten to death with bricks. That is all.

You bet your sweet bippy I'm willing to bitch about FanGraphs

Why not? Sure, it's just a blog (that also maintains a ton of statistical information- here I'm just talking about their analysis). But we pick on Deadspin because Deadspin is a shit factory; and in its own way, FG is just as much of a shit factory. More importantly FG holds itself out to be a source for serious, objective baseball analysis. So I don't feel bad at all as I engage in this episode of blog-on-blog crime.

I "discovered" FanGraphs (by which I mean "was linked to" or "was told about"- don't you hate it when people try to act like they actually discovered some well-known site or blog before the general public? Like they got in on the ground floor or something? GRRRRRRRRRRR) sometime back in 2008. My initial reaction was "Wow! This is great! A whole blog dedicated to numbers-based analysis!" Within two or three weeks that had changed to "Wow! This is insane! What a pathetic collection of smartest dipshit in the room writers and sycophantic pathetic commenters! How could a concept this great be executed this poorly!"

It's sad and true. Despite offering itself as a high-minded source of objectivity, in reality it's often simply a bunch of pick-and-choose-which-stat-helps-your-predetermined-conclusion garbage. Frequently its analysis is no more objective that the kind of crap Dayn Perry or Scott Miller peddle. If a hitter the FG staff approves of (usually a Mariner, a Ray, or a backup catcher with a high OBP who is SO UNDERRATED IT'S CRIMINAL! THIS GUY WOULD BE A 5 WAR PLAYER IF THEY'D JUST LET HIM PLAY EVERY DAY! (Note: player does not play every day for a perfectly good reason, such as an obscene platoon split problem or the fact that he spent last year putting up slightly above average numbers as a 26 year old in AA ball)) is struggling, it's because of an "unsustainably low" BABIP or HR/FB or whatever. And if those metrics are down because that player's LD% is down and their GB% is up compared to their career numbers, no worries, it will certainly normalize itself in due time and you'd be a fool to think otherwise.

BUT- if a player who is not one of their chosen favorites is struggling, it's a whole new set of rules. The reduced BABIP or HR/FB which is a function of a tanking LD% is not going to change anytime soon. After all, the LD% was "unsustainably high" in the first place. People who say otherwise are selling snake oil. And of course, apply appropriate numbers and logic for pitchers FG loves/doesn't love. Long story short, the whole site is a celebration of the lies/damn lies/statistics thing. Decide what you want your conclusion to be, then build an argument around it based on cherry-picked stats. Just because batted ball splits tell us more about a player's skill level than RBI or batting average doesn't mean they can't be misused just as egregiously. Effecting the egregious misuse in question just takes a little more skill.

In any case, there's no more well-known or hilarious example of FG's groupthink stupidity than the 2010 "organizational rankings" which saw the Mariners, who just happen to be the team of choice for managing editor Dave Cameron, come in ranked shockingly high (#6org!) despite a crummy MLB team and a very questionable farm system. But there were TOTALLY LEGITIMATE AND OBJECTIVE REASONS behind that ranking- just ask any of those smartest dipshit in the room writers or sycophant commenters. Until June or July 2010, anyways, when the Mariners were on their way to a very foreseeable 101 loss season and everyone associated with the site started to get really annoyed with any commenters who made light of the whole situation.

But I'm not writing this post to generally dump on FG. I'm writing it to point out two atrocious posts they've published in the last two days. To be fair, neither is of the lies/damn lies/statistics ilk I was just talking about (although I'll keep an eye out for the next one of those they put out). Nope, each of these is flat out awful for different reasons. I think both would fall nicely under the label of "articles that didn't need to be written."

First, we have this peach, in which the author spends 5 paragraphs and 600ish words expressing the very controversial position that Paul Konerko is ABSOLUTELY NOT a hall of famer. No fucking shit, of course. But what really serves to douse the whole thing with dumbsauce is the reason the post was written in the first place: because White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen said that Konerko was a HOFer. So can anyone raise their hands and tell me why Ozzie might have made that argument? And further explain why saying this in response:

Over his career, Konerko has been worth only 26.7 WAR. Again, a far cry from Hall of Fame level. Just a quick glance at his stats reveals a good, but not exceptional, player. If that’s the case, why is Ozzie so convinced Konerko will make it into the Hall?

is kind of like using a hammer to open a can of soda? It's a completely ridiculous and pointless method for dealing with the situation. Ozzie is sticking up for his player (a conclusion deftly reached by the author in the post's final paragraph). A dumb Sox fan who thinks Konerko is bound for Cooperstown because he gave Jerry Reinsdorf the damn ball after the 2005 World Series isn't going to listen to someone talking about WAR. And you certainly don't need to explain that Konerko is not a HOFer to anyone who reads FG. Overall just a useless fucking article that takes the mindless bluster of one of the game's great mindless blusterers and turns it into an excuse to blandly state the completely fucking obvious. Awesome.

Better yet we have this, which is mind-bogglingly dumb enough to have rolled off the ESPN.com press.

What a tough question. What are the top rivalries in baseball?

Who gives a shit? Is there some kind of prize for the two teams involved? Is there any way to get past the insane subjectivity involved in this discussion? And in case I forgot to mention this, who gives a shit?

I’m sure Yankees fans will claim it’s Yanks-Boston,

I realize saying this makes me a hypocrite (to pick nits, I'm saying what's NOT the best rivalry in baseball rather than what IS), but this is almost certainly the most overrated rivalry in sports. It has negligible historical roots and is largely fueled by the fuckwits in the MLB front offices pushing it on everyone every goddamn second of every season. Anyways.

but if you went out on the West Coast, I bet you’d hear plenty of fans saying Giants-Dodgers deserves more consideration.

Actually, I bet most fans out here probably would say that it's Red Sox-Yankees anyways because they've been told over and over and over and over and over again for the past seven or eight years that that's the case. See above. Thanks Bud Selig! You make Roger Godell look downright sensible sometimes.

How exactly do you declare one rivalry “bigger” than another?

You can't, in any meaningful way.

How do you measure fan excitement, and compare one fanbase against another? Is it possible?

NO. Leave writing this article to Jayson Stark. Walk away right now while you still can.

Probably not, but regardless, I’m going to take a stab at it anyway. My methodology is very simple: I’m ranking rivalries based on the amount of Google hits returned for the search “(Team name) (Team name) rivalry”.

Your head should be buried in your hands right now. Tears optional. I'm not going to tell you what the results are, although they're fairly predictable. The point is this: FanGraphs is fucking hole. It's a disastrous combination of misguided analytical elitism and worthless poopstain articles like the two linked here. Fangraphs upsets me just as upset (if not more) as tales of Simmons and J-Hench's AL East-only 17 team keeper league.

Technology Could End This Industry

Thanks to reader A-Dave who sent along this NPR story about StatsMonkey, a program generated by Northwestern University which has the potential to computerize journalism. The program takes the input of a baseball game's boxscore and generates an article about the game - replete with stats, events, and even integrating quotations and pictures of the players.

Here's the project's website at the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern, where they explain how the program works.

The system is based on two underlying technologies. First, it uses baseball statistical models to figure out what the news is in the story: By analyzing changes in Win Probability and Game Scores, the system can pick out the key plays and players from any baseball game. Second, the system includes a library of narrative arcs that describe the main dynamics of baseball games (as well as many other competitions): Was it a come-from-behind win? Back-and-forth the whole way? Did one team jump out in front at the beginning and then sit on its lead? The system uses a decision tree to select the appropriate narrative arc. This then determines the main components of the game story and enables the system to put them together in a cohesive and compelling manner. The stories can be generated from the point of view of either team.

A few thoughts on this:

1. I'd never thought of using Win Probability to do this - to determine the most significant plays in the game as the plays which change the WP the most. For example, it seems that the program can determine that before Larry B's broken-bat single down the third base line, Stanford Hall had a 4% chance of winning the game, but after that, his team had a 10% chance of winning the game. Therefore, Larry B is more clutch than David Eckstein.

2. If the code for this project ever goes public, you can imagine the Turing tests that will take place on this blog. I'm sure the computer generated stories will be better than HatGuy's sentimental diatribes on why his favorite teams need to win more.

3. Doesn't the quality of the output of these articles depend on the phrases coded into the machine's algorithms? For example, if the folks at Northwestern hire Jay to help them come up with a set number of phrases that describe a come-from-behind home run in the bottom of the seventh, that means every article that comes out of this program is stamped with Jay's inanity.

4. Someone needs to save sports journalism. Someone needs to walk into the compounds of sports news departments all over the country and deliver the news:

Listen, sportswriters, and understand. That StatsMonkey is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. It knows the clutch situations in the game without even listening to the roar of the crowd and the crack of the bat. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until your industry is dead.

I think this job falls to pnoles.

Execs Love Stats, Thinking; Managers Hate Stats, Thinking

Reading Tim Kurkihjidsian's latest article (it's pretty good) about the magic number of the 100-pitch start, I came across an interesting paragraph that seems to corroborate the postulate I suggested in my last post about Jeter:

There is an growing discord in baseball between the managers and players in an organization and the management of an organization over the use of numbers/statistics/quantifiers to make baseball decisions.

Consider this paragraph, which attributes the slow but significant decline in pitches per start to:

Today's young general manager

Twenty years ago, nearly 90 percent of all GMs had played in the major leagues. Now there are three out of 30: Philadelphia's Ruben Amaro Jr., the White Sox's Kenny Williams and Billy Beane of the A's.

An interesting stat, though it's not like any of those players had major league careers of major significance.

This decade has brought a new breed of GM, one who is highly educated, can run a spreadsheet and has mountains of data to support his theories.

It certainly has, suggesting that the Moneyball revolution has really shaken the management of the game to its core.

"We have a new wave of general managers who are deeply into mathematics, analysis, metrics -- I'm not saying it's wrong -- because that's what they charted in the minor leagues," said Rays pitching coach Jim Hickey.

I'm not really sure what he means here. Does he mean the GM started charting these things in the minor leagues of being a GM?

"I don't know the numbers, but the new wave of GMs are the ones who have charted that the chance of injury is, say, greater at 85 pitches than it is at 75. And with every five-pitch increment, there's a 22.8 percent more likely chance that someone gets hurt. With each 10 extra pitches, it goes up by five percent."

Interesting. So it seems like a basic calculation: after X number of pitches, you get a diminishing return on your investment in a starting pitcher. Obviously a pitcher isn't much more likely to get hurt between 50 and 55 pitches, but if a pitcher's chance of going on the DL rises significantly after, say, 105 pitches... is it really worth leaving them in for another inning when you have a reliever who can throw that inning almost as well?

The new GMs sometimes clash with the old-school manager about how the club should be run. Often, the GM wins.

I sure wish Wayne Krivsky would clash with Dusty Baker about having the player with the lowest VORP of any starting major leaguer hit leadoff and get the most at-bats for the Cincinnati Reds. Literally! He's 865th in the majors in VORP! Where is the stat-conscious GM when I need him?

"My GM used to load reams and reams of paper on my desk about that night's game," one former manager said. "Sometimes I'd read it; sometimes I just throw it in the trash.

... awesome.

But in the end, if it comes down to him or me, he's usually going to win. And if the discussion is about pitch counts, he is always going to win."

It seems as though the disconnection between the front office's love of player statistics and players' and managers' distaste for them is only going to increase in coming years. I wonder if there will be real consequence from it.