FIRE JOE MORGAN: Yes. Yes. I Love This.

FIRE JOE MORGAN

Where Bad Sports Journalism Came To Die

FJM has gone dark for the foreseeable future. Sorry folks. We may post once in a while, but it's pretty much over. You can still e-mail dak, Ken Tremendous, Junior, Matthew Murbles, or Coach.

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Sunday, March 04, 2007

 

Yes. Yes. I Love This.

It's Baseball Tonight Bold Prediction Time! You may recall Krukie's brilliant "Randy Johnson will win 30 games" prophecy in 2005. (I certainly do, fondly.) I love that the producers force these already mentally-taxed guys to make increasingly outlandish, totally baseless guesses just so the graphic beneath them can say they're "bold." The on-air guys are doing poorly enough on their own. Now you're basically holding a gun to their head until they crack and say that Jason Schmidt will record 400 strikeouts.

You're up, Orestes Destrade:

All right, you want bold? I'll give you bold.

He says this in a totally unconvincing tone of voice.

Ichiro Suzuki will be the first guy to hit .400 since Ted Williams. How about that?

He clearly doesn't believe this. Why are you making him say this thing? This is great.

If he can walk more and strike out less, this guy has the opportunity to do that.

Ichiro has walked more than 49 times once in his career. As a point of reference, the year Ted Williams hit .406, he walked 147 times. It was only the fourth-highest walk total of his career.

And by the way, he's a free agent. 20% spike. They have done a survey and it's quantifiable. 20% spike. Guys that are in their survey year.

What? What "survey" is he talking about? Can anyone produce this for us? Also, it's solid gold that he ends this insane rant by mumbling "Guys that are in their survey year," a nonsense phrase that got stuck in his brain because he just said the word "survey" (and used that incorrectly).

Steve Phillips goes with the following retarded nonsense:

Alex Rodriguez is going to be the MVP of the All-Star Game, the 2007 season, he's going to be the MVP of the World Series.


Who the fuck cares about the All-Star Game? This prediction made me laugh out loud.

He's going to finally become a Yankee,

This actually happened February 17, 2004. Unless you left out the word "True."

and he's going to opt out of his contract for next year.

So Steve Phillips understood the request "make a bold prediction" as "make five predictions and combine them together in an awkward list."

This segment has proved that in the context of the Baseball Tonight Bold Prediction, bold = crazy = pointless. Great TV, gentlemen.

Peter Gammons goes with "Grady Sizemore is going to be the MVP" and follows it up with some numbers or some shit. WRONG. Too defensible. Too uncrazy. Totally unpointless.

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posted by Junior  # 7:17 PM
Comments:
From reader Anthony:

Just as a reminder, there was a chapter in Baseball Prospectus's "Baseball Between the Numbers" that showed something like a 10% boost in walk-year performance.
 
I forgot about that. I trust BP over that Prince Town College fellow.
 
More info, from Matthew:

Baseball Prospectus used WARP to compare the walk years of 212
"prominent" free agents ('76 to '00) with their immediate pre- and post-walk years. Dayn Perry found that players experience a 9.4% spike in their WARP. Further, the average age of these FAs was 31, so the spike is probably not age-related. Perry also found that players played/pitched in more games in their walk years, by a margin of 6.3 pre-walk and 4.8
post-walk.

 
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