FJM is a closed forum, but we welcome reader feedback. We're especially interested in corrections of our work, and research (usually number-crunching) that we may not be able to do ourselves. Please check the comments section as well, where we often post readers' opinions, and, less frequently, announce that we were wrong about something.
You can e-mail dak,Ken Tremendous,Junior,Matthew Murbles, or Coach individually.
Sometimes we at FJM Headquarters receive so many emails about one particular article that we have no choice but to put aside our busy work as mild-mannered pension plan monitors and such and just like lay out the article for all to see. Such is the case with this pointless list of the "10 Worst Franchises in Sports," by a nefarious Russian named Dave Golokhov, from the venerable sports reporting media outlet askmen.com. I don't know about you, but I was raised never to trust a Ruskie. This is why.
10. Los Angeles Clippers
...Most of the Clippers' struggles can be traced to [Donald] Sterling. Their .365 franchise winning percentage is the third-worst in the NBA and the Clippers have only had two winning seasons since Sterling bought the team in 1981.
Fair enough. Though they did win 47 game a couple years ago...but yeah, they stink. Almost as bad as the Knicks.
9. Vancouver/Memphis Grizzlies
The Vancouver Grizzlies were embarrassing in Canada and they haven't been much better since the move to Memphis. Vancouver compiled 56 wins throughout its first four seasons — a total that serious contenders top annually — and the team's downfall has been nightmarish draft days...
Okay, well, they kind of stink, too, but they did have three straight winning seasons from '03-04 to '05-06, including 50 wins that first year (though Jerry West is gone, I guess, so maybe that's old news). I don't know. I thought Rudy Gay was a great draft pick for them. Eh. They kind of stink too. But the Knicks definitely stink more. Can't wait to see where the Knicks rank on this list.
8. Atlanta Hawks
The Atlanta Hawks, averaging 28 wins per season between 1999-00 and 2007-08, were the Eastern Conference's whipping boy until the Charlotte Bobcats entered the league. The good news is that the Hawks are chock-full of upside since they've been selecting at the top of virtually every draft over the last decade. On paper, the Hawks have more potential than most teams, but they haven't learned to win or remove themselves from the worst sports franchises list.
Weird inclusion here, since they just stretched the 66-win Celtics to 7 games, and seem to have an awesome collection of young talent in the weak East. That Josh Smith fellow seems awfully good to me. This one is weird -- I would've put the Knicks here. But it's nowhere near as weird as number 7:
7. Minnesota Twins
"Moneyball" is to baseball what frugal is to cheap; it's a creative way of saying, "we're not going to pay for our stars or reward our veterans who have earned their keep."
There are 103 things wrong with this analogy. How many can you spot? Let me get you started: "Moneyball" has nothing to do with the Twins.
Sabermetrics and scientific stats are used to evaluate players and give a better indication of their worth, but teams like the Minnesota Twins use this strategy to kiss their superstars goodbye at the trade deadline or the first day of free agency.
Sometimes. Then they take the draft choices and turn them into young, excellent, cheap players who help them win baseball games at a rate that belies their small-market budget. This is called: being good at baseball management.
The Twins constantly sell proven veterans for prospects and draft picks, but when those youngsters finally develop, they get shipped away to start the cycle again. The Twins incessantly look to the future and winning now is not a priority. Translation: the Twins care more about the dollars than about winning.
Twins win totals, 2002-2006: 94, 90, 92, 83, 96. Four division titles in five years. You're telling me that a team that won four division titles in a five year stretch ending in 2006 is the seventh worst franchise in all of sports?
You know who's a terrible director? Scorsese. Did you see Kundun? Booooo-ring.
Puzzling personnel plays: Trading Johan Santana and failing to re-sign Torii Hunter.
I'm with you, kind of, on Santana, though what were they gonna do? It seems like they were right about not accepting Kennedy and Cabrera from the Yankees...maybe Lester and some other Sox prospects would have been better, but time will tell. As for Toriiii, well, let's look at that signing when the contract is up and see if the Angels got their money's worth. (Spoiler alert: they will have not gotten their money's worth.)
Remember ... 2002: A year removed from a contraction battle, the Minnesota Twins (under first-year manager Ron Gardenhire) make it to the American League Championship Series. With a solid roster and a light payroll, 2002 would have been the perfect season to sacrifice some future players to add some veteran players at the trade deadline and make a serious run. Instead, the Twins entered the playoffs with the youngest roster in the league and never stood a chance in the ALCS after beating fellow cheapskates, the Oakland Athletics, in the first round.
So...you're bashing them for being "cheap" and following a "Moneyball" philosophy, because in 2002, with the 4th lowest payroll in the sport, they got all the way to the fucking ALCS. They were one of the 4 best teams in the league that year. And another one of the best teams was the Oakland A's, about whom the book "Moneyball" was written.
You know who didn't make it as far as the $41m Twins that year? The $132m Yankees, or the $108m Red Sox, or the $105m Rangers, or the $103m DBacks, or the $101m Dodgers. And this means the Twins are a bad franchise?
Congratulations! That is bone-dumb.
#6 is the Bruins. 5 is the Detroit Lions.
4. Tampa Bay Rays
Expansion teams are typically a laughingstock for a few years, but in the Rays' case it's been permanent. In fact, a perennial assumption is that the Rays will finish fifth in their division. The Rays' best finish was in 2004, when they climbed to fourth in the American League East. They have finished fifth every other season and have never won more than 70 games.
More inexplicability here. Have you seen the Rays play? They're kind of awesome. They just locked up Evan Longoria. Shields is awesome. Upton is awesome. Kazmir is awesome when he's not hurt. Crawford is awesome. Obviously they won't come out of the East, but damn, that team is fun to watch. Two years ago you would've had something. Now, this just looks like you haven't done any research. I mean...you haven't even mentioned the Knicks yet.
3. Arizona Cardinals
The Cardinals logo appears next to "loser" in the NFL dictionary. The Cardinals have made just four playoff appearances in 45 years since Bill Bidwill got his hands on the team. Bidwill is known as a cheapo, which explains why the Cardinals are always short on star power and talent. The closest they've come to success was when Cuba Gooding, Jr. as Rod Tidwell, in the movie "Jerry McGuire," wore a Cardinals jersey.
I guess it's hard to argue this when you look at the last like 30 years, but again -- they won 8 games last year and were 7th in the league in points scored. If I were making this list, I would look for teams that are not only currently bad, but have bleak futures. Like the New York Knicks, who I assume will be listed here very shortly.
2. Kansas City Royals
Fine. Sure. They aren't very good. I guess that means the Knicks are #1?
1. Pittsburgh Pirates
Okay. That's fair. They are pretty rough. So, the Knicks are # 1/2?
Hey, you there. Sportswriter. Bet you thought you could write a logically unsound SAT verbal section-style analogy about Moneyball and get away with it. Sorry, buddy. Not when this sports journalism blogger just burned through two Miller Analogies Test prep books this morning (as I do every morning; it's a ritual like having a cup of coffee to me).
"Moneyball" is to baseball what frugal is to cheap;
<buzzer sound FX>
First of all, Moneyball is a book, not really a formal philosophy. But even putting that aside, let's do this in English. Moneyball, loosely speaking, is a general managing strategy that involves exploiting market inefficiencies in the sport of baseball...is to baseball, which is the sport of baseball...as frugal, a euphemism for the word "cheap"...is to cheap, which is the word "cheap."
Wha?
You don't have to have gotten a 600 on your M.A.T. to smell that this analogy is to correctness as Hillary Clinton is to giving up-ness! Wait, did that work? No. It did not, on several levels. (Humor and accuracy, no. Topicality and mordant political commentary, yes!)
"Moneyball" is not a euphemism for "baseball." "Frugal" is not a strategy for winning at the sport of "cheap." The whole thing is so tangled I can't even begin to suggest an alternative.
Oh, what the hell, here are a half dozen, each one at least as accurate as what this guy wrote:
Hey -- I have a question. SportsCenter is the show you watch to get highlights of sporting events, correct?
It's like "the news," but for sports. Where I can find news about what happened in sports.
I'm not wrong about this, right?
Except tonight -- and God knows how long this has been going on, and forgive me if I am late to this party -- there was a segment called The Bud Light FreezeFrame, wherein viewers were given the chance to vote on the "Image of the Week." And then Brian Kenny read -- aloud, so everyone could hear him; like, he didn't try to hide it at all -- various reader comments. One of them was in re: Williams hammering Rondo from Game 7 of the Hawks-Celtics series, and came from jpizzle39 (a commenter name so parodically parodic I couldn't beat it if I tried) and began "What a clothesline!"
I don't want to get all Bissingerian here, but do I need to be exposed to reader comments during SportsCenter?
No, I don't.
The Bud Light FreezeFrame. Every Wednesday on SportsCenter.
Thanks to those of you who pointed out that the foul was Game 7, not Game 4 (I think I was thinking "deciding game" or "4th win" or something). Also, I am aware that the Roman numeral sequence is not real or possible. I was trying to convey frustration with long number sequence. I should have made it longer. If I had written "Vol. MCMDVMXIIVMDCDMMMVVIIIII" everyone would have gotten it.
Times are slow in the sports metacommentary world. In lieu of more journo-evisceration, here are two tidbits about two of our favorite subjects, A-Rod and Juan Pierre.
"As tough and big as he seems, he is real wimpy around doctors or any type of medical situation," Cynthia Rodriguez said. "I was, like, not even having a baby; he was the one. The one nurse had a cold cloth on his head, the other nurse had the blood pressure on his arm and my mother was like rubbing his back -- and he is passed out on a couch.
"And I am there, in the middle of labor, and really, I am not being paid much attention to besides the doctor and a couple of nurses. And he is there, moaning. In between pushing, I am going, 'Honey, are you OK?' And are you breathing? Are you OK?'"
Derek Jeter, of course, regularly attends childbirths for fun and is a licensed obstetrician/gynecologist in twelve states. Delivered two of Mariano's kids -- without fancy medical tools. Just his hands, his calm eyes, his gut, and a shovel.
Second thing: Juan Pierre is reading FJM. Buster Olney explains:
Juan Pierre has always been an old-school free-swinger, someone who hacks first and asks questions later. But in the first five weeks of his season, there has been a dramatic change in Pierre.
"He's picking through pitches," said one talent evaluator. "I think with the competition going on" -- with four Dodgers outfielders competing for three spots -- "he had to re-think a little bit the way he was playing. In the time I've seen him, you can really see him trying to get on base, in a way that's different from in the past. There's a deliberate thought process going on there. His at-bats look different."
That's because they are different, so far. Entering Wednesday's game, Pierre is averaging 3.67 pitches per plate appearances, more than a quarter of a pitch better than the 3.40 pitches per plate appearance he averaged last year, and he is hitting .316, with a .388 on-base percentage. He's never had an on-base percentage of greater than .378.
So you're welcome, Juan, for inspiring you to change your approach and revitalize your career.
Next up: Bill Plaschke turns his back on Juan and accuses him of playing too much like a computer.
In FJM Heaven, every writer complains that high-OBP sluggers clog up the basepaths. In FJM Heaven, every article trumpets David Eckstein as an MVP candidate based on his grit, his heart, and the fact that he sleeps in a child's race car bed. In FJM Heaven, A-Rod is a worthless choker, wins matter more than WHIP, "it's not called the Hall of Very Good," and all bloggers live in their mothers' basements.
And in FJM Heaven, HatGuy writes about food for an entire column, every column.
No more candy cane lane? Say it ain't so, Joe! Yankees manager goes too far by banning goodies in the clubhouse
This is just a delight. I mean, I'm not even going to be an asshole for this one. Okay, maybe a little. If Braveheart
-- topical -- were playing for the Yankees in 2008 instead of the underdog Scottish Nationalists in 1305, he’d have climbed on a table in the Yankees clubhouse and delivered a line that would resonate through time: “You can take my life, but you can’t take my Reese's peanut butter cups!”
All of you readers who e-mail me to add the "food metaphors" label on every single post I write, this post is for you. You are legion, you are persistent, and I appreciate every e-mail.
HatGuy, Jesus...he's not even veiling his gustatory fascination with the aforementioned food metaphors anymore. This baseball column is just straight up about food. Think about that. Also, countdown until he mentions ice cream. 5...4...3... Alas, there is no William Wallace on the Yankees and no plans for Mel Gibson to play the brave rebel who leads the team against manager Joe Girardi, who has imposed a reign of health food on his team.
No Mel Gibson joke? You disappoint me, HatGuy. Hell, "sugar tits" even has a food in it. You definitely could have awkwardly shoehorned a dated, unfunny Gibson reference in there. Next time.
No candy in the clubhouse, Girardi has decreed. And no ice cream.
There it is. For the uninitiated, I refer you to what reader Zac once wrote us:
June 28, 2006, Mike Celizic writes "Sox Fans must boo Pedro heartily," and makes a choppy, hot fudge sundae/whipped cream joke:
"If anything else happens — the fans cheering wildly or the commentators congratulating them for booing boisterously or no one taking notice of the occasion at all...[I'd] be as disappointed as I’d be if I set out to construct a hot fudge sundae and discovered I was out of whipped cream."
July 7, 2006, Mike Celizic writes "Not Time for Yankees to Panic" and makes eerily similar whipped cream reference:
"It’s hard to make panic seem banal, but that’s what the Yankees have accomplished over the years... [blahblah] ...Panic should be saved for special occasions. For the Yankees, a day without panic is like a hot fudge sundae without whipped cream."
Yes, HatGuy -- we keep track of food metaphors and similes you made nearly two years ago. That is the kind of people we are. Food metaphor enthusiasts.
It’s not just at Yankee Stadium, either. By Girardi’s orders, stadiums the Yankees will visit this year have been asked not to provide M&Ms, Dove bars, or any other sweet succulence to his Yankees.
Forget FJM Heaven. This is HatGuy Heaven! The Yankees, food, sweet food, creamy food, chocolate, dessert, Yankee stadium, candy, ice cream, Dove bars (ice cream inside candy)! Instead, Girardi wants granola, nuts and dried fruits for his players to snack on. My guess is there won’t even be salt on the nuts.
d:(
(That's a HatGuy frowny-face.)
It makes you wonder why he doesn’t go all the way and ban apple pie and motherhood.
Because he wants his players not to eat junk food? Multi-million-dollar athletes whose bodies are finely-tuned machines designed to perform extraordinary physical tasks on an everyday basis? Yes, this man is Stalin because he doesn't want his players looking like this:
I understand his motivation — promoting healthy choices in all things. But no chocolate? No nougat and caramel? No Heath bars? Not even a roll of LifeSavers?
How many times do you think HatGuy stopped to eat something while writing this column? Fifteen? Twenty? I'm guessing he ate at least one of each and every food he mentions.
Girardi came to the Yankees with a reputation as something of an extremist, but this is ridiculous. We’re talking about grown men here. We’re talking about a freaking Reese's peanut butter cup.
Well, to be fair, you were the one who brought up the peanut butter cup.
It wasn’t that long ago — within the past 20 years — that baseball clubhouses were among the last refuges from a world that was becoming obsessed with inflicting “healthy” living on everyone — by law if necessary.
Yes, 'twas a fine time. The baseball men would laze about, drunk on molasses moonshine, cheeks puffed with tobacco crabgrass. No coloreds were allowed, and the only women were the Lace Tutu Girls, whose sole purpose was to light your cigar and freshen your martini -- toplessly, of course. Ah, 1988.
Once upon a time, players arriving for work could load up on free chewing and spit tobacco to get the nicotine that kept their engines running.
People say a lot of things about baseball. But one thing I think just doesn't get enough play is that it doesn't have enough mouth cancer.
Next to the tobacco was a rack of gum and candy. Coffee urns dispensed a brew so strong you felt you could slice it and eat it in a sandwich.
Food...metaphor? No. Yes. No, wait. No. Brain twisting...screw it, I'm adding the "food metaphors" label and the "liberal use of 'food metaphors' label" label. You happy, "food metaphors" label crazies? You're welcome.
Out of sight from the public but no less readily available were amphetamines — “greenies” — for those who needed to kick-start their games.
So you're pro-greenies? What? I'm lost.
When their work was done, the tired heroes foraged through a postgame buffet that included at least three items from the all-important grease food group. Coolers harbored all manner of soda pop and enough beer in the players’ favorite brands — Free and Free Lite — to get a fraternity house through rush week.
Yeah. That's partly why I bet a team of modern players would kick these lard-assy gentlemanly layabouts' asses. Just a guess.
Except Wade Boggs. Dude would drink 70 beers on a cross-country flight and still go 3 for 5.
It wasn’t something that the American Heart Association (or your mom) was going to endorse, but when you threw in the magazine collection — heavy on hunting, cars and women who had forgotten to bring their clothing to their photo shoots – it wasn’t surprising that ballplayers liked to get to the park early and stay later than absolutely necessary. Clubhouse life was as good as it got.
HatGuy's new rallying cry: Bring back Car & Driver & Porn & Guns magazine!
And then the health police started getting involved.
I think HatGuy is confused. You can still eat all of these things. Relax. Breathe deeply. Look in your pantry. They're still there. All of them: the Three Musketeers, the Butterfingers, the Snickers, the Milky Way Darks. Now look in your freezer. See the ice cream? Yep, it's still there. Hey, here's an idea: what if you crumbled up some of those candy bars on top of the ice cream? That's good, isn't it?
Now isn't that more fun than writing a column about there being no chocolate in the Yankees' clubhouse? Aw, he fell asleep. The little HatGuy's all tuckered out. Isn't that cute?
The first thing to go was free tobacco for reasons that should be obvious. Then teams started to get more healthy choices in the buffets. In some clubhouses the beer also disappeared.
There were good reasons for all of the decisions. Tobacco can kill you, and so can excesses of grease.
Or chocolate. Or -- gasp -- hot fudge sundaes with whipped cream. It's all fun and games when you're just making metaphors about sundaes, but when those metaphors become reality, it's your arteries that pay.
And if a player were to get drunk in the clubhouse and then get in an accident, the team could face heavy liability.
It’s not as if modern ballplayers are Babe Ruth wannabes who train on hot dogs, beer, cigars and babes. (Well, maybe the babes, but not the other things.) These guys work out year-round and many have nutritionists and trainers at their beck and call.
So they probably don't care that much about not scarfing down Turtles for three hours straight before the game.
Sure, you’ve got your C.C. Sabathias carrying on the weighty tradition of David Wells and other noted gourmands, but for the most part, these guys are as healthy and fit as anyone could ever want to be.
So is it that modern players are all so in shape that it doesn't matter if they eat junk in the clubhouse or that it was more fun back in the old days when all guys did was eat junk in the clubhouse?
Also, not really sure how fit Joba Chamberlain is. Maybe he's like the Kingpin and it's all solid muscle.
A Dove bar or a bag of M&Ms is not going to hurt them, and it just might make them feel better — and therefore perform better.
Oh, I get it. It's neither. It's that Chocolate Makes People Better At Things! You think the chocolate lobby has gotten to HatGuy? Look, we've all been tempted by the money Big Chocolate throws at us, but I've always thought of HatGuy has an incorruptible lone kook-type.
Chocolate can, in fact, be very good for you. Dark chocolate is full of anti-oxidants and contains a chemical that elevates your mood.
Yarrrgggh!!! Corporate synergy -- they wrote chocolate into the storyline!
Right here is probably where HatGuy sticks in some hard scientific evidence proving that chocolate improves your WARP3 -- This is well-known at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where Harry Potter and his posse frequently were ordered to eat lots of chocolate to help them heal after a busy day battling Dementors.
Best part of an already unbelievable gold mine (of gold chocolate coins) of an article.
Chocolate isn’t junk food.
WE GET IT.
Some would argue it’s the best food nature ever contributed to our diet, a food loaded with anti-oxidants and imbued with a mood-elevating substance called theobromine, from which comes cacao’s scientific name — theobroma, the “food of the gods.” Was ever any product of nature more aptly named?
Holy f-ing s. He's really lost it, hasn't he? I'm worried. I'm honestly, no-kidding, 100% worried about Michael Celizic's mental state. Call me, Mike. Well, no. Don't do that. Just write an article about A-Rod faking his injury so he can avoid those high-pressure May at bats so I know everything's all right.
And now, just for the fun of it, I will now list each and every food (including repeats) or other consumptible (I made that word up to mean something you put in your body in a food-like manner) found in the column:
candy cane Reese's peanut butter cups candy ice cream M&Ms Dove bars granola nuts dried fruits salt nuts apple pie chocolate nougat caramel Heath bars LifeSavers candy bar Reese's peanut butter cup chewing and spit tobacco gum candy coffee sandwich greenies buffet grease soda pop beer tobacco beer grease hot dogs beer amino acids vitamins ginseng Dove bar bag of M&Ms chocolate dark chocolate chocolate chocolate best food nature ever contributed to our diet cacao "food of the gods"
We've come so far, baseball writers. You're citing OPS occasionally, you're learning that wins and losses for pitchers aren't all they're cracked up to be, you're even acknowledging the dubious worth of small sample sizes. It makes me proud, like a mama city raccoon watching her baby eat its first piece of leftover Taco Bell. So please, when you're doing the last of these three things, don't merely pay lip service to sample size and then leap to ridiculous conclusions, like Mr. Timothy Kawakami did today: 1. Barry Bonds is not missed, in part because Fred Lewis is a better player than Bonds was at the end of last year. (italics and insanity his)
In the top of the third inning last night, Macedonian superstar Kevin Kouzmanoff hit a home run off of Jamie Moyer. On Friday, May 20, 1927, Babe Ruth struck out against George Ernest "The Bull" Uhle. Kevin Kouzmanoff is a better player than Babe Ruth was during that at bat. (italics and hamhanded hyperbole mine)
EMPHASIS ON: BONDS AT THE END OF LAST YEAR. I’m of course not saying Lewis is better than Bonds at the height of his power/the injections or when Bonds was 27, as Lewis is now.
EMPHASIS ON: BONDS DURING AN ARBITRARY, TINY SMATTERING OF AT BATS THAT I CHERRY-PICKED COMPARED TO FRED LEWIS' HIGH BABIP-FUELED START THAT HE ALMOST CERTAINLY WILL BE UNABLE TO SUSTAIN.
I’m saying that Lewis is a better producer in LF for the Giants at this moment than Bonds would’ve been if he was currently playing LF for the Giants, or any other team, or DH-ing, or whatever.
Fred Lewis is hot as hell right now. He's got a .952 OPS. I'm sure even Kawakami would admit that he's performing a little over his head.
You know what Bonds' OPS was after the month of April last year?
1.349
That is not a typo. You know what Bonds' OPS for the year was?
1.045
It's early, motherfuckers. Nate McLouth has a 1.083 OPS. Let's keep our heads when comparing 27-year-old virtual rookies with the first- or second-greatest hitter of all time, even the hypothetical 349-year-old version of that hitter who would be playing this year.
(And Bonds would’ve only been worse this year, while Lewis is getting better.)
Probably. Though Barreee did increase his OPS from .999 to the aforementioned 1.045 from 2006 to 2007, at the age of 9,528.
Flash back to early August, when Bonds was a good player.
Something happened between early August and late August that made Bonds not a good player anymore? Did he lose an arm in a lathe accident? I feel like Barry Bonds with one arm in a lathe would still OBP in the high .300s. He hit HR No. 756 on Aug. 7, to break the all-time record.
Then he hit a few more, then went into a predictable post-record, pre-indictment lull. But there was still more baseball to played and Bonds knew his career was on the line. After the record-gazing, he still needed a big September to prove he could play at age 43. September should be a good barometer for what Bonds has/had left.
YES LET'S JUDGE THE ENTIRETY OF BARRY BONDS' REMAINING BASEBALL ABILITY ON THE BASIS OF ONE MONTH'S WORTH OF AT BATS, NOT THE REAMS AND REAMS AND REAMS OF DATA, INCLUDING THE SEVERAL MILLION RECORDS HE BROKE AND THE KIA SEPHIA HE CLEAN-AND-JERKED OVER HIS HEAD IN LATE OCTOBER 2007.
Here’s what Bonds did last September: 1 HR in 30 at-bats, 7 hits, (.233 batting average), 6 walks (.361 on-base), 1 double (.367 slug). That’s a .738 OPS, way, way under his alleged-steroid totals and career totals.
Did I say one month's worth of at bats? I'm sorry, I meant two weeks' worth. Tim Kawakami is judging Barry Bonds' current baseball-hitting prowess on 12 games' worth of data.
Through 9 games this year, Fred Lewis had a .388 OPS. That's worse than Alicia Silverstone would hit in the majors! Throw him into a viper pit of pit vipers! Through 10 games, it was .654. That's worse than Jennie Garth would hit in the majors! Drop him off of Mount Everest into the Marianas Trench! Through 11 games, it was .761. Eh, okay. That's about average, I guess. Through 12 games, it was .946. HE IS OUR NEW BASEBALL GOD.
The point is, after each one of these games, Fred Lewis seemed to be an entirely different player. The larger point is, you can't judge players after 9 or 10 or 11 or 12 games. What's frustrating is that Kawakami seems to know this (as we'll see from what he writes later), or seems to think he knows this, and yet he still wrote all of this nonsense about Lewis definitely being better than Bonds.
Here’s what Lewis is doing right now, comfortably settled into the lead-off spot at the end of April:
92 at-bats is better than 30, and Lewis appears to be developing into a productive offensive player. Then again, check out this hotshot:
35/104 15 4 26 1 .337 .926
Yeah. That's Xavier Nady. I just made you get a baseball-rection from Xavier Nady, 29 years old, .777 OPS in 551 career games.
-Lewis has the fifth-best OPS (.952) among regular LFs, ahead of Matt Holliday, Johnny Damon, Jason Bay and Carlos Lee, among others.
-That’s much more than Bonds could’ve logically been expected to produce this season, with or without steroid injections, with or without a federal indictment, with or without clogging up the clubhouse with his karma.
Well, there was that whole 1.349 OPS in April of last year. But more importantly, I think we have a new rival to "clogging up the basepaths." "Clogging up the clubhouse with his karma" -- it's delicious, pungent, and utterly nonsensical. Brian Bocock's karma wants to run free with the antelopes. But oh no, here comes Barry's karma (I picture these karmas looking a little like the creatures from Where The Wild Things Are)! It's fat and it's slow, and it's clogging up the clubhouse! Who cares about his karma's karmic OBP (kOBP) when he can't run the karmic basepaths (in the clubhouse)!
-Lewis obviously might and probably will cool down.
Thank you.
His defense isn’t very good (great play here, bad play there) and I’m not volunteering Lewis for Gold Glove consideration at any point. But Bonds was a sieve out there for the last three years. So Lewis is better in the field, too.
Sure. Not helping your point much that Lewis is a butcher in left field, but I'll give you this.
-I realize these are relatively small sampling sizes–September for Bonds, April for Lewis.
Relatively? Relatively?! This is like a dude telling a girl he just slept with, "I realize that I may be relatively chlamydia-y, but..."
You can't just say "Yes-these-are-small-sample-sizes-moving-on-I'm-using-them-anyway." That's, as Buzz Bissinger would say, fucking glib as shitfuck. You didn't even use an entire month for Bonds. You used 30 at bats. That's a fraction of an eye-blink in Barry Bonds' career. I just looked it up. He has 9847 at bats. Some of those could have been incorporated into your evaluation. More than 30 should have been.
But they’re the most legitimate comparable sample sizes.
Infinite monkeys on infinite MacBooks could not construct a more false sentence. Both players were extremely motivated to do well: Bonds to get another contract, Lewis to stay in the line-up. We’ve seen the results. I’m going with them.
-Therefore: Lewis is better than Bonds, and Lewis is a big reason why the Giants are, so far, out-performing the low expectations.
I'm willing to listen to arguments that a healthy, young, solid-hitting outfielder who plays every day and is far more valuable than Barry in the field might, just might have more value to a team than a gimpy, non-DH-ing Bonds. But what I'm not willing to do is accept 12 games' worth of semi-crappy at bats as ironclad evidence that Markus Winston Barrold Bonds IV is done as a hitter, and that MWBB IV's "karma" is going to "clog" its way to that many losses for whatever team it and he join.
Hey, I looked up Fred Lewis' batting average on balls in play. It's .414. This guy is going to fall off big time. Going out on a limb here, but I'm going to say that I don't think he's actually a better player than Barry Bonds.
Maybe you've heard -- Buzz Bissinger is in the bloggy sports news ether today. Several people sent us Buzz's piece on Kerry Wood in the New York Times magazine Play from about a year ago. I read the article from start to finish. It's artfully written, evocative, unPlaschkely poetic -- and deliberately, wrongheadedly misleading. Buzz Bissinger, such a gifted wordsmith and storyteller, weaves a beautiful, heart-rending tale about Wood, but doesn't bother to do enough research to avoid coming to the exact wrong conclusion about Wood's generation of pitchers.
And that's where blogs come in. Bissinger writes:
The rule of thumb is that a pitcher should get some 400 innings of work in the minors before being called up. But with today’s baseball economics, La Russa knows that has become an untenable luxury.
Buzz's stance is clear: leave 'em in the minors longer! Wood, Prior, Liriano, King Felix -- they've been picked while still unripe. Big Bad Economics, Modernity, Progress -- whatever your boogeyman -- that's who's to blame.
Buzz is wrong. And had he done a modicum of research, he would have found this out immediately. I know this because people did that research for him here, here, here, here, here, and here. Good people on the Internet. Blogging. Posting on message boards. Thinking. Writing. Addding. Subtracting. Mother's basement-ing. Spreadsheeting. Checking on articles that get published in the Old Gray Lady so we don't just have to accept what's in black and white print as pure gospel.
How is this a bad thing?
Jared Park:
Pitcher, Minor League Innings (numbers courtesy of The Baseball Cube)
Steve Carlton, 306 Nolan Ryan, 287 (and quoted by Bissinger in the piece) Don Sutton, 249 Tom Seaver, 210 Jim Palmer, 129 Bert Blyleven, 123
And a few current players with no durability issues:
Johan Santana, 334 C.C. Sabathia, 232.7 Mike Mussina, 178
Joe Posnanski:
I looked up, by decade, the number of pitchers who were 21 or younger and had seasons throwing 150-plus innings in the big leagues.
Here's what I came up with:
1960s: 32 different pitchers. 1970s: 26 different pitchers. 1980s: 15 different pitchers. 1990s: 5 different pitchers. 2000s: 8 different pitchers (so far).
Clay Davenport:
I dug out a 1974 Baseball Register I have, and, far more slowly, did the same for all pitchers who made their major league debut in 1973. For the recent years the numbers were:
2004 averaged 137 minor league games and 433 innings (113 pitchers) 2005 109 games and 353 innings (100 pitchers) 2006 130 games and 434 innings (134)
Bounce to the old stuff: 1973 85 games and 420 innings (53 pitchers)
More Buzz:
Francisco Liriano, in his first full season with the Minnesota Twins in 2006, went 12 and 3 and seemed destined for greatness, but he will miss the entire 2007 season after undergoing ligament replacement surgery — the so-called Tommy John procedure — on his elbow last November. “The economic push is to bring kids up, and it’s unfortunate,” La Russa says.
Yes, so unfortunate that Liriano was called up after only 484.1 minor league innings. I looked it up. Searched for francisco liriano cube. Took 0.23 seconds.
Buzz -- Pulitzer Prize-winner, exceptional prose stylist -- arrived at the exact opposite of the truth. And thanks to an entertaining, extremely satisfying interview of Buzz by Boog Sciambi (spoiler alert: it ends with Buzz calling an unrelated radio host a "slimebucket" and Boog hanging up on Buzz), we know why Buzz did this.
It was because Tony LaRussa told him what conclusion to draw, and with maestro LaRussa conducting Buzz's train of thought, Buzz didn't care to punch a few numbers into Google ThoughtMaps to guide his thought-train into Accuracyville Station. (Is this better than the Underwater StupidTank metaphor from a few posts back? I can make it more convoluted, if that's the problem.)
Old Baseball Men told Buzz what to think and Buzz dutifully wrote what they told him. He did so beautifully, but I'll take an ugly truth over a beautiful falsehood every day of the week except those days I'm feeling really shallow. The Kerry Wood profile as a whole still has some value, of course, but how much value, considering its central tenet is based on purely anecdotal, and ultimately inaccurate, information? Why can't Buzz Bissinger see that blogs provide a valuable fact-checking service as well as a place to see athletes drink Creme de Menthe off a naked lady-shaped ice luge? And why is Buzz Bissinger in my house spitting on me, punching me, and screaming "Stop being so fucking goddamn profane, you cunt-word!" as I write this?
Next up: I tear Braylon Edwards a giant new poophole.
Man, I just rewatched the Leitch/Bissinger tête-à-tête because my girlfriend said "I want to see that crazy man again." At the end of the segment, Bissinger goes after Leitch for staying out of the press box, accusing him of ignoring the facts. Reader Thomas chimes in:
"Don't let facts get in the way of your writing," as Bissinger condescendingly asserted that Leitch (and bloggers in general) tend to do.
Rather, let cute anecdotes from Tony LaRussa and Jim Riggleman get in the way of facts.
Another crazy Buzz moment I liked was when he was all "It's amazing to me that you say 'sports news without access, favor, or discretion' when you admit to being biased for the Cardinals." Umm, dude? I don't think that's the kind of "favor" they're talking about.
Tonight, I was interviewed as part of that program's multi-part investigation of Sports and the Media. What followed the tape piece was a live discussion among Will Leitch of Deadspin, Buzz Bissinger of "Friday Night Lights" and "Being Very Angry," and of course the one guy you go to for any discussion of Sports and the Media: Braylon Edwards of the Cleveland Browns.
If you didn't see it, the discussion went like this:
Bob Costas: There are some criticisms about blogs. How do you respond?
Will Leitch: Well, I think some of them are valid--
Buzz Bissinger: I have to interrupt here. (to Leitch) Fuck you and everything you stand for.
Braylon Edwards: (to himself) I am going to kill my agent.
The argument I had tried to make in the pre-taped segment was: you can't say anything about "blogs," any more than you can say anything about any medium. There are good blogs and bad blogs. There are blogs that cover the personal lives of athletes, ones that cover only the games, ones that offer opinions, and even a few that quixotically and foolishly attempt to metacriticize the media as a whole. What Bissinger did that was so annoying to me was: he lumped all of these into one thing ("Deadspin," essentially), then took one article from one day and read it aloud from a file that looked suspiciously like it'd come from Joe McCarthy's safe, and read one sentence from it aloud. And furthermore, he seemed to conflate the actual blog and the people who write for it with the silly comments people make at the bottom of every article.
It's a big dumb ignorant mistake to do this. It's a big hot wet mushy smelly bonebrained mistake to (a) use one sentence from anything as a representative sample of the thing, much less as a representative sample of all blogs everywhere, and (b) to mix blog comments and blog articles. It's an even bigger mistake, in my opinion, to disparage the level of discourse on the Internet and use blog comments as an example. (And swear a ton while doing it, while saying that the Internet is "profane.") Picking a random blog comment and wielding it as a club to bash "blogs" is like picking a random romance novel off an airport bookstore shelf and saying, "This book sucks. Fuck you, Tolstoy -- your medium is worthless!"
For what I hope is the last time, but is clearly not: the level of discourse on Athletics Nation, and Baseball Prospectus, and SoSH, and Joe Posnanski's blog, is every bit as high (if not higher) than what you can read in the best newspapers in the country. Bissinger's hare-brained attempt to prove Leitch an uneducated oaf by asking whether he had read any W.C. Heinz (which failed miserably when Leitch had, in fact, read some W. C. Heinz) was a perfect example of the old guard's attitude toward the new guard: you little shits don't get it. You don't know how to write. You have no gratitude or appreciation for those who came before you. So: fuck you. (P.S. I have never really read your blog.) (P.P.S. Fuck you, though, anyway.)
There are sports bloggers (and message-board posters) who write very well, in my opinion. There are those who love Ring Lardner and David Halberstam and Robert Creamer and Roger Angell. They try to write well, and entertain, and contribute to the universe of sports reporting. Please read them, Buzz. If you find nothing of interest, you can swear all you want. (For the record, FJM is extremely pro-swearing. We just feel you should be funny while doing it.)
If there is anything tangible and helpful to take away from Mr. Bissinger's performance -- and it takes a good deal of chaff-sorting to get anywhere near this little nugget -- I think it's this: a lot of the discourse and sub-discourse (commenting) on the internet is, in fact, pretty shitty. This is not news, though, really. A lot of newspaper writing and editorial writing and every kind of writing is shitty. It's just not as immediate and anonymous and easily-accessed as Internet writing is. Thus, the net has this reputation, now, as being a nihilistic and thoughtless meetingplace for people to spew venom. Partially deserved, partially not, whatever -- point is, the part that is deserved can be altered. We can all probably do a little better in this realm, by making sure that whatever we write has an actual point, and some thought behind it. So, there's that.
Okay. I guess that's it. As the kids would say: [/serious and unfunny discussion of Internet journalism standards]. Coming soon: more swearing!
[Just added two clauses to this post at 9:25 AM PST -- the clarification about what Bissinger actually did (taking one sentence and reading it aloud) and the subsequent (a), (b) follow-up in the next paragraph.]
Here's some information on W.C. Heinz, whose memory Buzz Bissinger attempted to use as a club with which to bludgeon Will Leitch:
One of his pieces from around this time - Death of a Racehorse - is famous for its brevity (fewer than 1000 words) and its brilliance. The story centers on a promising young two-year-old horse racing for the first time, and concludes with the horse's death less than two hours later after it broke down in its first race.
Written in double quick time on a manual typewriter as the events unfolded, Death of a Racehorse is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest sports articles ever written.
So this piece, Death of Racehorse, was brief, hastily written, and composed as the event it concerned occurred, yet Bissinger endorses this man? How dare he embrace this human pestilence?
Plus, I totally read this piece and it was accompanied by a picture of the horse drinking from a beer bong with some sexy lady horses right before it died.
---
Caveat: the quoted block of text comes from Wikipedia, so there is a 60% chance it is 100% false. The internet rules!
Junior's comment about W.C. Heinz's "Death of a Racehorse" being 1,000 words (and quite good, of course) is funnier when you consider Bissinger's most recent magazine article: A 13,000 (!) word piece on Barbaro that compared him to legendary sports figures and talked about how Barbaro made the world a better place.
I blogged about it last year when the piece ran in Vanity Fair. It is, of course, becoming a movie. The best line from his article was this:
"The University of Pennsylvania itself was having a field day, handling more than 500 interview requests and perhaps the most publicity the university had ever received." Yes, tiny ol' Penn, unknown in the world until a racehorse won one race on TV then got injured in another.
An interesting twist in the ongoing saga of imaginary ESPN intern Bill Fremp. This week's JoeChat is significantly more Joe-like than last week's. Is Joe actually back at the keyboard? Or is Fremp adapting...changing...learning?
JW (NH): Joe - man what a waste of $126M! Can Zito find his curveball working in the bullpen or is it harder to get consistent when you don't go every fifth day?Joe Morgan: Well every fifth day will not make you consistent.
Let me just pause here to say that one of the ways that we knew (and by "knew," I mean "wildly claimed") it wasn't Joe last week was: there was nary a "consistent" to be found. Count how many there are this week.
But the Giants do have to be worried about their investment. But many people saw this coming. (...)
Lot's of "but"s this week, already, too. Is this really Joe? Or an increasingly clever imposter?
Mike (Clearwater, FL): Hi Joe - Are the Rays for real? Can they really manage to stay near the top of the standings?
Joe Morgan: To say they can do it for the whole year is a bit hard to tell right now. So far they are doing eveyrthing right. But I feel like that ballpark will hurt them in the end, becasue it is so hard to be consistent there, where teams think they can score runs. You need a big home field advantage, and I do not think they have it. A lot of the fans, when they play the Yankees, for example, are New York fans. I think the mixture of fans there does not give them much of a home field advantage, which they need. But they do have talent and are playing very well together right now.
But...but...consistent...Yankees...nonsense. This smells like Joe. And yet, I can't quite bring myself to believe...
SprungOnSports (Long Island): You saw the Tigers and Angels last Sunday, what's your take on those two AL clubs who have not been playing to their potential as of late?
Joe Morgan: The Angels are playing up to their potential when you consider they have had injuries to their top two starting pitchers. The Tigers are just incosistent.
This is Fremp. I promise you. He's gotten better at his craft, but another "consistent," and a typo to boot? Gilding the lilly. Too perfect. Like the too-perfect English that Axis spies spoke when impersonating British businessmen.
They scored a lot of runs last week and are not scoring this week. The week before I saw them, they were on a hot streak. But it's easy to look good against Texas before you play the Angels. But I do think Detroit will play better as the season continues. And I thought Verlander played better and used his three pitches well. Again, as I have said before, it comes down to how Sheffield plays. He is their run producer and the difference maker. When he hits well, they'll do well.
More "but"s, and a Sheffield reference. I'm sorry. This is too stupid even for Joe. Not even Joe would call Gary Sheffield (.159/.321/.254) the "run producer" or "difference maker" on a team with Cabrera, Guillen, Ordonez, and Granderson. This is not Joe. This is the Wyatt Gwyon of Joe Morgan impersonators.
Kevin (STL): The Mets offense is not very consistent
Well done, Kevin.
right now....How much of that is due to Reyes struggles?
Joe Morgan: For some reason everyone wants to blame Reyes for everything that happens with the Mets. He is not even one of the top payed players on the team, and yet everything gets blamed on him, including last year's collapse.
...Well, he did hit .205/.279/.333 in September, unlike his buddy David Wright, who got blamed for the collapse way more (to the tune of: he lost the MVP because of it) despite the fact that Wright hit .352/.432/.602 with 6 HR in September. And I'm not sure what his salary has to do with anything, when you're just talking about on-field performance. This is such a weird response, I want to believe Fremp just took a break here and the real Joe sidled up to the keyboard for a moment...
They have Delgado, Beltran and Wright also playing for them. Now it does not help them that he has not been playing well at the top of the order. But there are other guys on this team besides Reyes, and the Mets need their veterans to step up.
Delgado may be done, but Beltran isn't playing that badly, and Wright has a .980 OPS this year. They do need Reyes to play way better. I think we can all agree on that. Can't we....Fremp?!
Dave (Chicago): Do you think Sheffield can make it back from his shoulder problems or is this the end of the line?
Joe Morgan: That is a big question with a veteran player. I had this conversation about Frank Thomas last year, when he got off to a slow start, but look what he ended up doing last year. When you are a young guy and this happens, you're in a slump, but when you are a vet it becomes an "end of the line" issue, and that's just the nature of the game. But Gary told me he is getting closer. We'll just have to see.
When did Gary Sheffield talk to Bill Fremp? I would've loved to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation.
Tom (NY): Despite all the problems in Yankee-land, we are only 1 game out of first...surprised?
Joe Morgan: No I am not surprised; Boston has struggled of late and have kept the Yankees in it. You need to have Kennedy and Hughes win some game for you though. But looking at their potential they are capable of doing that. But I am not too surprised.
Now this...this seems like Joe. Rambling, semi-coherent sentence fragments. A completely inappropriate semi-colon after the first sentence. Ends exactly the same as it begins, rendering the middle meaningless. I'm going to be optimistic and say that right before this answer, Joe decided he'd had enough of Bill Fremp (Edgewood, KY) and fired him. Got back in the saddle. Pulled a Pat Riley and took day-to-day control of the team. Time will tell.
Joe Morgan: That's all the time I have! Talk to you next week!
Looking forward to it. (ominously) Whoever you are.
I will appear on a segment of HBO's "Costas Now" tonight. Subject matter: Is Miley Cyrus too young for that Vanity Fair picture? Or "Bloggers and Sports Media." They interviewed me for both and haven't told me which one I'm in.
There is also a live panel (of which I am not a part) with Will Leitch, Buzz Bissinger, and of course Braylon Edwards.
For those who don't have ESPN Insider, every single grade is between a C and a B+. It's the old "on a scale of 4 to 7" spectrum. Thanks Mel! See you in 363!
NFL Draft time. That's right, you heard me. NFL Draft.
Remember May 1 of last year, when dak pointed out that Mel Kiper Jr. gave every team a grade between a C and a B+?
Mel did it again. This year, no one was worse than a C- and no one was better than a B+. The article should be titled "On a scale of B to C, how gutless is Mel Kiper, Jr.?"
---
So here we are. 2008. Mel Kiper Jr. sits down at his Apple Lisa (he's old-school) to write his annual Draft Day grades column -- the single most-read piece of writing he'll do all year. He digs deep in his soul to assign the most perfect letter-grade assessment of each team's performance on this, the day he was born to live, experience, and grade. Draft Day is Christmas, the Super Bowl, and 9/11 all rolled into one for Mel Kiper, Jr. Mel Kiper, Sr. put him on his knee when Mel Jr. was a boy and told him, "Son, there is a sport called football where grown men play a pushing game involving an oblong fun-ball. You will not be one of those men. There will also be men who select the best among these other men, the best 'football players.' You will not be one of those men. You will be the man who judges the men selecting the other men. You will write one article a year that anyone will read, wherein you assign a letter grade evaluating the performance of the men selecting the other men. You were destined for the role of giving these grades. Your mind will be honed like an ancient Indian arrowhead to pierce, with laser-like intensity, the precise letter grade zone that each selecting man deserves."
And Mel Kiper Jr. nodded, for he knew what his father said was true.
And then on April 28, 2008, he would give 31 out of 32 teams between a B+ and a C-. Because everyone pretty much did an "eh" job. Like every year. Except the Chiefs. They get an A -- Mel's first A in the three years we've been tracking this!
If Mel Kiper, Jr. were a college professor, at the beginning of the year he would hand out a piece of paper explaining his grading system:
Just want to give a quick "congrats" to Doug Spernelman, who was recently named Employee of the Year here at Fremulon Ins., Inc., LLC. Doug came to us after 11 years in H.R. over at Gruntwelk and Karp, and he's really done a bang-up job helping us weather the sub-prime storm.
Here he is accepting his award.
Great work, Doug.
(It's been like three years of nothing but attacking sports journalists. I'm allowed one of these.)
HDTV Was Better When It Was Called "Ship-to-Ship Semaphores"
Anti-modernization tracts are pretty much our bread and butter here at FJM. Rarely are they this multi-grained and buttery. Hit it, Frank Deford.
Possibly because I'm scared of technology, I'm not always pleased by what are called "advances" in our society. Sometimes I think we were better off in more innocent times -- which is, to say, back when I could understand stuff better.
At least he admits it. One point for admitting it. Deford 1, Sanity 0.
Actually, I consider myself secular Amish.
Admitting it again doesn't get you a second point.
Synthetic rackets pretty much ruined the beauty of tennis. Children have no business swinging lethal aluminum baseball bats. Now there's even talk that a new bathing suit made by Speedo, in which all sorts of swimmers are setting world records, constitutes "technological doping."
The tennis racket argument is one to which I weirdly subscribe. I used to follow tennis fanatically. The first time I ever voluntarily woke up early was to watch Breakfast at Wimbledon when I was like 7. But the other things...aluminum bats is a cost issue, I think, for little leagues and colleges and stuff. The bathing suit thing...? Never heard of it. How much of an advantage can a speedo be? Does it have an outboard motor attached to it? (Hope it's not an inboard motor! Hey-oooo!) (Ouch! Now that's what I call a "close shave!" Heeeyyyyy-oooooo! )
What were we talking about? Oh yes. The Unabomber was giving us an anti-tech panegyric.
You know what's even worse? Technology has made it so there are so few surprises left in the world. Is that really an advance? Parents know whether their baby is a boy or girl long before it's born.
Yes, we should all be like the peasants, and birth our babies in the fields, and decorate our nurseries in gender-neutral yellow. (You do know you can opt not to learn the sex, right? It's a choice. Choices are usually considered good things.)
You can tell who's calling you on the phone before you answer.
I'm calling bullshit louder than I've ever called bullshit in my personal history. Is there a single person on this crazy blue marble we call "Earth" who does not like caller ID? Caller ID is the greatest thing in the universe. How many unwanted calls have been avoided thanks to caller ID? A hundred billion? Does Frank Deford not know the specific pleasure one has when one looks at one's phone and sees "Work" and rotates one's Blackberry toggle wheel thingy to "ignore?" Does Frank Deford prefer -- when awaiting an important call -- to answer his ringing phone and hear the voice of a representative from Wachovia Bank who wants to know if all of his investment needs are being met? I ask you, people -- does Frank Deford not have one crazy ex-girlfriend?
The real joy in taking photographs was that you didn't know how they turned out 'til you got them back from the Photo Zip a few days later. Of course, some of the pictures were awful, but what's the fun of taking only safe shots instead of snap shots.
I measured the decibel level at which I called bullshit on the caller ID thing, and I am now buying a second amp and a kick-ass tweeter, and I am paying some very pricey A/V guys to install this equipment with like 6"-diameter cable connecting everything, and I am inventing a new kind of megaphone that has its own internal volumizing booster, and I am doing all of this in order to call bullshit louder than I just called bullshit on that other thing, because: are you fucking kidding me?
Listen, man -- I like nostalgia. I think there are certain aspects of our pre-internet days that were preferable to their modern counterparts. (For example, baseball cards were much better in the 1980's than they are now. Upper Deck ruined everything.) But taking pictures of important events in your life and then driving somewhere and dropping them off and then waiting a few days and then driving back and picking them up and finding out that half of them were out of focus and the other half sucked? This is not one of them.
Digital cameras are way better -- for the average non-professional, at least, which is all I can speak to -- than film cameras. Easier to use, cheaper to use, faster to use. If you are being driven crazy because you can't remember who played Hunt Stevenson in the TV version of "Gung Ho," IMDb is better than the old method: just going fucking crazy and never coming up with the right answer. (Which is: Scott Bakula.) That's the deal, man. Not everything newer is better. But a lot of stuff is.
Maybe that's why sport gets more popular all the time. It's about the last thing we have that still has some suspense to it.
Tell that to Obama and Clinton! (Political humor. Topical. Relevant.)
And that's why I can't stand the National Football League and National Basketball Association drafts. What disappoints me so about these protracted selections is that fans don't want surprises in the draft. Really, they don't. They want to look into the camera and see the picture before it's taken.
Is this true? I'm seriously asking. I don't feel this way. I don't like to know what I'm getting for Christmas, I don't like knowing plot twists in movies, and I don't particularly like knowing whom my team is going to draft. If I'm a Dolphin fan right now, I'm happy, because Long seems like a good bet. But I'm a tiny bit sad, because the wrapping is off the present on Dec. 23.
For weeks now, leading up to the real NFL draft this weekend, all sorts of self-appointed experts have been creating so-called mock drafts, and basically, they're all the same. Oh, some bloviator might have this linebacker going third and that one pegs him fourth, but it's pretty much the same names at the top.
That's because the 25 or so best players in the draft are pretty clear every year, and the needs of the 32 teams are pretty obvious, and the trends of the GMs of those teams are known quantities, so...people can predict things, kind of. Still, nobody nor his mother saw Ted Ginn, Jr. going #9 last year, did he or her?
The fans get brainwashed, and so if their team should dare take somebody who wasn't touted by the echo chorus, they have a fit.
Do they? Again, I am asking. I think fans have a fit because they are diehard and/or drunk, and use the draft to take out their frustrations on their GMs. Jets fans just seem to take out their frustrations, period, no matter whom they pick. I don't think it's always because the pick was unexpected or something.
Mock drafts become the reality that reality must accommodate itself to. It's like in school now, where children study how to take tests rather than study how to learn something.
An elegant analogy, but I'm not sure it's an apt one. Because again, I disagree with the central premise here -- that any variance from Mel Kiper's Mock Draft 16.0 drives people crazy. I think the fans are super knowledgeable and get upset when a team reaches too far, or skips over someone who they think could help them. Sometimes they're wrong -- amazingly, Mario Williams might end up being a better #1 overall than Reggie Bush, and who the hell saw that coming (if it indeed happens)?
It's also terribly ironic. Football fans always want their team to go for it on fourth down instead of punting, to take risks on the field, but when draft day comes they're all conditioned by now to be completely conservative ... lemmings.
Going for it more on 4th down -- last year's Super Bowl 4th and 13 abomination be damned -- seems to be a better bet than most coaches think. And again, I just don't think people freak out on draft day because of conservatism instilled in them by mock drafts. I think they freak out because people freak out about the things their football teams do.
And, of course, draft mistakes are legion. But draft-guessing has become a cottage industry, and essentially these seers are graded on how they assess the draft, not how their top selections actually play football after they are drafted. It would be as if you judged your stock broker on how well he picked the most popular stocks, not how well he chose stocks that actually went up in value.
Being a New England Patriots fan, I can definitively say that we judge Scott Pioli and Bill Belichick on how the guys play on the field. I was shocked when they took Ben Watson in the first round. I was surprised when they went with Maroney. But I didn't really get upset...because I am not an insane person who judges books by their covers. (Except for this one, which you can clearly tell is going to be awesome just by looking at it.)
I sometimes have the feeling that the more film we have of these players, the more sophisticated technology to study them, the less we know, both about the players being chosen and the professionals who choose them.
How can that be? Seriously. Even metaphorically, how can that be? You're telling me that today's GM knows less about Chad Henne now than he would have in the 1970's? How? Why? When? Which? Whap? Worf?
Football people have guts. I think, though, that too few of them any longer dare possess gut instinct.
There you go, NFL GMs. Ditch the scouting reports. Throw away the tape. Ignore the needs of your team. Put the blast shield down and use the Force to deflect the little laser blasts from the training drone.
(Yeah -- that's a ST: TNG reference and a Star Wars reference in the same post. Sometimes I play into the blogger stereotype. Deal with it.)
I want to educate on the "aluminum bats". They are, usually, cheaper than wood...the really crappy ones that is. I don't think that's what he meant, though. The alloy bats, the ones that are standard at the high school level and increasingly popular below that, are MUCH better than wood and aluminum. besides being lighter and weighted for performance, the metal itself generates a "pop" that you don't get in wood...aka hitting is much much easier.
It's also really fucking expensive and prices out any lower middle class family. So if you're poor you won't hit as well. Rich kids always win in America though, i think that's going on the new dollar coin or something.
Ozzie Guillen Wants Derek Jeter Inside His Hypothetical Daughter
It's come to this: Ozzie Guillen saying out loud that he wishes he had a daughter so Derek Jeter could fuck her. In the already crowded Hall of Fame of Jeterbole (you can figure that portmanteau out), this is going to get its own wing. "I keep saying the best [Yankees] player who ever happened—bigger than someone else, but I'm not going to say the name here—is Derek Jeter," Guillen began, perched in the Sox dugout.
Is "best player who ever happened" some weird, different category from "best player ever"? It certainly must have nothing to do with, I don't know, being good at baseball. Because Derek Jeter is terrific, spectacular, amazing at baseball (mostly). But he's nowhere near the best Yankee ever. I know it's tough, but I've always tended to think Mr. Babeland Ruthlor was the best. That's probably because I've always got my head buried in a book full of computers!
"Derek Jeter has everything in his life. He's got money. He's got rings. He's got …"
Guillen paused, because timing means everything in comedy.
"He's not married."
Well, yes. I suppose money should factor in the discussion of best Yankee who ever happened. In which case, I nominate whoever plays 3rd space base for the Intergalactic Space Yankees in the year 30-Space-40. He will make 3 alpha credits per year, which is a ton of alpha credits if you know anything about that sort of thing.
"At the All-Star Game (where Guillen managed him in 2006), I looked around to see if he has anything I don't like. No. He's the perfect man. Too bad I don't have a daughter."
Calling out Ozzie Guillen for saying crazy things is like calling Robin Williams out for being ... really really funny! I love you, Robin. Big fan of RV. Anyway, here's the part where Ozzie talks about wishing he had a daughter so Jeter could get all up in that hot mess. I always sort of thought Ozzie would raise his daughter to like guys with shittier OBPs, though. Then little female Ozzie could rebel and date Jack Cust or something.
Let's also not overlook the fact that Ozzie went all the way to "He's the perfect man" to describe Jeter. We've reached the point where you can't outdo other Jeter-praisers with talk of baseball or sports or sportsmanship or leadership. You have to go to overall quality of personhood. I look forward to the day when Time Magazine crowns Jeter "Invention of the Millennium."
"He's the best thing ever in the game. He's got everything he wants. He lives in New York. Even [ George] Steinbrenner loves him. Nobody is better than Derek Jeter in the game. Nobody."
There's one thing Derek Jeter doesn't have: true love.
For reals question: would Jeter's life be better, in the eyes of Ozzie and people like him, if Jeter had a super hot wife? Like Alba or someone? Or is the mystery and majesty of widespread single-dude starlet/model boning so vicariously alluring that it's an essential part of his celebrated Jeterdom?
You know what I'm talking about. Three days into the season, a sportswriter disembowels a player for "hitting .028!!! He's killing his team!!!!" Then a month or two later, it's completely forgotten because baseball's season is eternal.
Exhibit A, NUMBER ONE, AWESOME today: Wallace Matthews in Newsday.
Reyes, do you want to be a Jeter or a Rey Ordonez?
We're 18 games in, Wallace. Please don't use statistics -- which I'm sure you claim not to trust anyway -- to crucify a guy who is 24 years old and in all likelihood is going to be fine.
I'll summarize the intro for you: Derek Jeter is a supergod amongst gods, like all Titan-style, like Cronus and shit. Rey Ordonez was a bust. Jeter rules, Ordonez drools. Et cetera, ad nauseam.
