FIRE JOE MORGAN

He only had 2 at bats, and they have no bearing on his merits as a sports columnist, but still: -100!

Guess what: the man with a career 35 OPS+ in 38 major league at bats has some opinions on baseball. Namely --

Aggressive offense is good baseball

Now, if you were a man who had a career .211 slugging percentage, then yes, I would assume you would have tirelessly learned all of the "fundamentals" and "little things" and "aggressive baseball actions" and "scrappitabulous bunty sacrifice hit-em-ups," because frankly, that's the only way you're going to ingratiate yourself to the manager enough to get any playing time whatsoever.

But that doesn't mean you're right when you throw out unsupported claims in an Internet column some 13 years later. That is why I'm calling you on this, Jose Mota, even though you seem like a nice man when you're on my TV.

National League-style baseball: “Wow. So exciting.”

Subjective opinion -- I got no complaints with this.

Several A.L. teams have adopted the so-called N.L. approach. The Los Angeles Angels and Tampa Bay Rays are at the top of the list.

The Rays lead the AL in steals and the Angels are third. So far, so accurate. (The Boston Red Sox are 2nd! In the AL! In steals! (Insert shocked-face emoticon))

“It’s just downright a more alert way of playing the game from the offensive side: Execution to the max,” Rays manager Joe Maddon told me, and I couldn’t agree more.

Do you think Rays manager Joe Maddon put up an inspirational poster of like Yosemite's Half Dome in the clubhouse with the inspirational phrase "EXECUTION TO THE MAX" written in an inspirational font?

I do.

It’s no coincidence that the Rays have been near the top of the A.L. East all season. Look at how they play, moving runners along, flying around the bases aggressively and focusing on fundamentally sound defense.

This is where I deplane from Mota Airlines Flight -100. The defense -- sure. Good on you for mentioning that. The offense? Well, last year the Rays had a .407 winning percentage (terrible) and they finished 8th in the AL in runs scored (not great). This year, they've got a .587 winning percentage (very good) and they are...8th in the AL in runs scored (the very same as last year, if you've been paying attention and read the first half of this sentence).

** EDIT **

I wrote this yesterday -- then, to sabotage me, the Rays scored 13 runs against the Angels (a smallball conspiracy??). They now rank 4th in runs scored, with the 4th through 7th place teams scoring between 293 and 296 runs. Guess what, though -- the Rays hit four giant, evil, AL-style home runs, including three in the first inning.

** END EDIT **

The difference? The same culprit that always seems to rear its head whenever someone starts praising a team's offensive aggressiveness to the high heavens (see: 2005 Chicago White Sox). Pitching. With a 3.82 team ERA, the Rays are currently the fourth-best pitching team in the AL, as compared to last year, when they had a 5.53 team ERA, dadgum dead-last in the league.

And yes, part of that is improved defense, but exactly zero percent of it is about "flying around the bases aggressively."

Traditional National League style means a manager not sitting with arms crossed and waiting on the homer to win ballgames.

It means a manager wildly flailing his arms around and loudly shouting at his team to "STOP FUCKING HOMERING ALL THE GODDAMN TIME," and then having Adam Dunn attempt to bunt repeatedly.

It’s a strategy that means constantly having players, no matter their speed, looking to take the extra base,

A strategy that involves Bengie Molina stealing home, "percentages" and "probabilities" and "sanity" be damned --

figuring out a pitcher’s delivery to steal a base, charging from first to third on singles, and bunting for base hits to pull infielders out of their comfort zone.

Bunt, Pujols, bunt!

I also know that it is a thrilling way of playing the game,

We got that. You think it's aesthetically preferable to majestic home run balls piercing the blackness of the night sky. Do you have any evidence that it's actually effective? You know, baseball-wise?

of gaining a mental edge by forcing defenders to think more and make plays. Defending against a team that goes station-to-station is much easier. As a former middle infielder, trust me, it is not an easy task to defend against a team that puts runners in motion and keeps them that way.

Okay, well done. That's at least an argument. But to be fair:

Aggressive, motion-heavy, NL-style teams:

Tampa Bay: 1st in steals, 4th in runs scored
L.A.A.A.A.: 3rd in steals, 10th in runs scored

Passive, station-to-station, home run-hitting AL-style teams:

Chi. Sox: 1st in home runs, 3rd in runs scored
Texas: 2nd in home runs, 1st in runs scored

So -- results at best inconclusive?

Aggressiveness is not a style, but the right way to play the game, and it is the right way to teach the game.

Oh. It's black and white. Home runs are wrong. Walking is wrong. Clogging the basepaths is wrong. We should accept this wisdom because...why again?

We can go back to our Little League days when our best coaches encouraged us to be aggressive and to have fun on the basepaths, to move a buddy over with a bunt so he can get closer to scoring that big run, to be unafraid of taking a chance on a wild pitch, to choke up on the bat with two strikes and make contact. Most of us can remember the coach who said, “I won’t be upset if you get thrown out as long as you are being aggressive and smart.”

It's funny, because so many of these well-worn baseball ostensible truisms are diametrically opposed to say, Bill James' 10 Commandments of Sabermetrics, which include:

1) Thou Shalt not Bunt.

2) Thou Shalt Have no Low On Base Percentages Before the Cleanup Hitter.

3) Honor the three-run homer and the leadoff walk.

4) Thou shalt not steal at anything less than a 70% success rate.

5) Thou shalt make no idol of the light-hitting middle infielder.

But then again, I have no idea if Bill James ever coached Little League, and he certainly never accumulated 36 at bats for the 1991 San Diego Padres, so you can probably throw his opinions out the window. That's all they are, right? Opinions, from some nerd who's only pored over reams and reams of data and carefully used statistical analysis to determine what baseball plays actually contribute most to scoring baseball runs.

Who needs that kind of opinion?

What changes in the professional game? Personnel, and organizational philosophies. Personnel is a key element, obviously, since a manager must play the cards he is dealt. A manager loaded with a bunch of sluggers cannot afford to employ a fast-paced offense; just like a manager loaded with a bunch of speedsters can’t be asking them to go hit home runs.

Yes. Yes. This is so right. Why is the rest of your article so dogmatic? This part makes so much sense.

I played with seven organizations during my 12-year career, including big league stints with the Padres and Royals, and I can tell you that every one of them emphasized what they thought were the key components to winning. During spring training, we spent countless hours not talking about hitting three-run homers, but on how to maximize opportunities when it was our turn to hit.

Argh. Back to the craziness. Those Padres and those Royals OPS+ed 94 and 87, respectively. Maybe you should've chatted more about power hitting, yeah?

Many lessons had to do with playing the game with a high level of awareness. Every morning during spring training the routines were similar when talking about creating runs: bunt runners over, execute the hit-and-run, move the runner over from second to third with nobody out by hitting the ball to the right side. And when baserunning, recognize where the outfielders are positioned and know their arm strength. Tag the bases and slide properly. The ways to gain an edge are endless.

Other ways to gain an edge:

1. Get on base more than the other guys.
2. Make the other guys throw more pitches than your guys.
3. Don't bunt (except for the rarest of circumstances).
4. Don't give away outs.
5. Have more powerful dudes.
6. Force Edwin Encarnacion to bunt, making him so angry he hits a gargantuan home run.
7. Repeat with Adam Dunn.
8. Hit nine 3-run home runs every game.
9. Fold your arms in the dugout and smile.

Labels: bill james, execution to the max, jose mota

Finally...the perfect pun. Nailed it.

Mauf to the races! (I can't turn it off, people.)

First off, reader Joseph Z. -- just to be sure, reader Joseph M. Z. -- reminds us that Dusty Baker is still a crazy person:

"Junior has given a lot to this game and this city," Baker said. "You go look at his body and his injury list, and he's left a lot of bones, muscles, tendons and ligaments out on that field. You dig up that field, and there's a lot of Junior bones in it."

What a weird fucking way to make a point. You guys, I'm not doing anything tomorrow night. Anybody want to go look at Ken Griffey Junior's body and injury list?

Interesting side note: if you do dig up the Junior bones under the outfield of the Funtimes USA Ballpark, Carl Everett will insist that those bones were merely put there to test us, and that Ken Griffey Jr. has in fact never existed.

Mauf with their heads!

Jeff B., hit my shit:

In case nobody has notified you guys yet, it appears the idea of the "base-clogger" has taken root among the MLB scouting bureau itself. Check out these official scouting reports on a few top prospects in last week's draft: Yonder Alonso; Eric Hosmer; Petey Paramore.

I'm sure there are plenty more, but these are a few among the biggest names in the draft. These reports raise a few questions. What is the cutoff speed between cloggers and non-cloggers? What "instincts" does Alonso have that keep him from being a clogger? Do Hosmer and Paramore have bad instincts on the basepaths? Does Alonso take a running start two seconds before the pitcher delivers? Could the folks at MLB.com really not find any better scouting reports than these to post on the web?

Really, no. They couldn't. It's only the official site of Major League Baseball. I wouldn't worry about it too much.

Several of you have written us about this unholy nightmare of a column from that most preeminent source of revisionist SABR-related material: The Huffington Post.

Wherever Cliff Floyd goes, his teams win. Not only do they win, they turnaround. It's as if before Floyd got there not only weren't they winning but his teams appeared to have little idea how to win...It's not like Floyd carries his teams. He's typically not the best player. It's something about his presence that does it.

We don't think is a joke, but you can never be sure. Dave Hollander says the 2008 Rays, the 2007 Cubs, the 2003 Mets, and the 1997 Marlins all have Cliff Floyd to thank for their success. I'm not exaggerating -- read the article. It's hysterical.

You ever notice how some guys, team after team, always end up on the championship teams? Why did Robert Horry, Dennis Johnson and Bob Dandridge always show up in the NBA Finals?...Why did David Eckstein, Paul O'Neill and Curt Schilling figure prominently in multiple World Series with multiple teams?

Would it be worth having a discussion with this guy? A discussion that turned into an argument? Almost everyone reading this website thinks the answer is something like "coincidence" or "just because they played for multiple good teams doesn't mean they have the power to lift their teammates' performance any more so than tens of thousands of ballplayers in the history of sport." In the other corner, Dave Hollander thinks Cliff Floyd is a demigod. How do you even start a dialogue?

The piece ends with more nonsense from Rays' skipper Joe Maddon:

Tampa Bay skipper Joe Maddon told MLB.com that Floyd's dramatic homer sent his jubilant Rays rushing onto Tropicana Field, but the celebration didn't erupt until Floyd got to home plate.

"They were waiting on Cliff Floyd ... and that really stood out for me -- what they think of him," Maddon said. "Cliff from the very first day I met him, among the position players, he had that influence."

Following a walk-off tater, when have you ever seen a team "erupt" in celebration before the dude gets to home plate? This article designed to convince me that Cliff Floyd is a special kind of player has only reaffirmed my belief that he is almost exactly like every other baseball player. I hate people.

Finally, Brian R. made a nice point about Jay Bruce, who I was pretty enamored with following his small sample size quote. Lest we get too excited...

Of course, he also said, "There's only one Ken Griffey."

(Yes, I know what he meant, but I still laughed at that.)

So did we, Brian. So. Did. W.

e.



Sign Bonds

Labels: bill james, clogging up the basepaths, dusty baker, gallimaufry

Dear Ken Tremendous,

I was on the internet today and happened to read your Open Letter to Theo Epstein. I'd like to talk about that letter, and I apologize to you and anyone else reading that this is going to be boring and unfunny. I blame you.

As far as points 1-4, 7, 8 and 10: as I said from the beginning, I'm leaving it up to Theo as to whether or not the Sox would be better off spending their resources on Bonds. They probably aren't. Bill James has already made a great case for not signing Bonds on a pure baseball-performance level; I don't need Ken Tremendous running the numbers for me when it's already been done by the pros. (Why does anybody read this website anyway?)

I didn't think this was going to be about numbers or even baseball analysis. I also didn't think you were going to call me an asshole.

5. Barry Bonds hated Boston and thought it was racist, before he had ever been there. That seems like a dude you definitely want on your team, which plays in Boston.

I'm fine with it. I'm fine with a guy saying that he didn't want to play in Boston because he thought it was racist, four years ago. I'd be even more fine if that same guy decided to retract his statement, and play in that very same city if it proved to be his only viable option (which again, it won't; this is all hypothetical and pointless).

As I said before in the comments to the original post, I think it might help repair the racist image of the Boston sports world if the Sox signed one of the most high-profile African-American athletes in the country, especially at a time when no one else wanted him. I don't think it would make a big difference, but I certainly don't see the problem. I mean, if you don't like Bonds for calling Boston racist, wouldn't you want to see him admit that he was wrong, put on the Sox uniform, and (hopefully) find out that he was, in fact, at least kind of wrong?

That might be an unlikely scenario, but, within the universe of scenarios wherein Bonds plays for the Red Sox (I'm so bored right now), I submit that it's more unlikely that he would end up saying something like "Man, this place is even more racist than I thought." To be sure, Boston has its problems, but I like to think that (a) the situation is not nearly as bad as Bonds thought it was and (b) he'd be on his best behavior anyway and therefore pretty careful about what he said about his new team's town.

6...Now, I know a lot of guys in professional sports can proudly claim one or more of (a)-(f). But only one has all of them. And you want to put that guy -- that 43 year-old mini-scrotumed douchebag -- on your team?

There are hundreds of guys who are guilty of (a) and (b) (using PEDs and lying about it). Are you certain that none of them played on the 2004 or 2007 Red Sox? (Again, Gagne.)

I'm going to assume that every single baseball player cheats on his wife until proven otherwise, and I don't really care much if a guy cheats on his taxes or buys a house for his mistress (c). I'm not in favor of these things, and I also don't think it speaks very well for him. But I also don't root for my sports teams based on character. I root for the Boston Red Sox, and so do you. Sure, I'd prefer that they sign nothing but dudes who spend every non-baseball-playing-moment volunteering at the Jimmy Fund, but I tend not to worry about this kind of thing.

As far as calling racism everywhere he went (d), yeah, I'm not fond of that neither. But I'd also be willing to bet that he's been the victim of racism more often than you or I. In fact, I give him a pretty long leash on this one...do you think he would have booed so vehemently if he had been white? Hard to say.

As far as the kids thing (e), well, if you're going to lie about using steroids (which again, dozens of players have), you might as well use your kids, right? I give him points for creativity. And skipping a Home Run Derby (f)...you really care about that?

I can't defend everything Bonds has done. My main point is that many of his transgressions have been unnecessarily vilified, or seem worse relative to other players guilty of the same shit, simply because of how good he was, the stage he played on, and, perhaps, his race. None of those things are his fault.

Some people are jerks. Some of these jerks play baseball. Some of these people will end up playing for the team you root for. Would you root for a guy who was guilty of 1 of these a-f things (and surely you've rooted for at least one player who's taken steroids for years)? How about 3? Where do you draw the line?

I say once you're a fan of a team, you've signed up for the absurdity of the whole thing. You can't control who your team signs. You want to root for people you like, sure. But there's so much about these players we don't know, anyway. How sure can you be that Bonds is more of a douchebag than Mike Timlin? How can you even measure that? Why root for one but not the other, if they were wearing the same uniform? Are we still friends?

9. Let me ask you something -- and you too, dak. Is there any part of you...any part at all...that thinks that this would go well:

"Barry?"
"Yeah?"
"Hi. Allow me to introduce myself. I'm Dan Shaughnessey."

You want that? You want what follows that in your clubhouse?

Fuck, I don't care. Part of me thinks these two guys deserve each other. My biggest concern would be that Shaughnessy would garner more attention if he gets to cover the Bonds beat.

Do you want to be the guy who makes a case that this clubhouse atmosphere would adversely affect the performance of the other players? Go ahead, dude. Be my guest. I thought I knew you.

11...With (dak')s logic, there is no crime, no matter how heinous, that a player on your favorite team could commit that would sour a positive result on the playing field.

Of course there are crimes that are so heinous. I would not root for a team of convicted murderers, or players who have been proven to fix or throw games. I don't know how I would feel if this guy turned out to be Curtis Leskanic, but it would certainly wouldn't make me feel great about the Sox '04 Most Awesome Thing Ever.

As you know, I don't think Pete Rose belongs in the hall of fame. I think Barry Bonds does. I also don't really care that much, because almost everything about the Hall of Fame (again, the Hall, not the Museum) is poopyshoes.

Every day Pete Rose passed a sign on the wall explaining to him that anyone who engaged in the exact kind of behavior he was engaging in would be banned from baseball for life. Until 2003, MLB didn't even have a penalty in place for steroid users until 2003. (First time violators faced the near unbearable penalty of...counseling.)

But I just can't fault a guy for taking steroids when there wasn't a penalty for it. I'll take it to the extreme: I still think there's a case to be made that it's worth taking steroids today, in certain dire injury circumstances, and risking the first time 50-game suspension. People have broken the rules in every sport since the day they were invented. In the case of steroids, Bill James' travelling analogy seems worth bringing up (remember when he was on your side of the argument?).

Fortunately, sins of the highest magnitude (incest; game fixing; finding SJP more attractive than Trachtenberg) are weeded out by a combination of the law and MLB policy. Of course, those are the easy calls. The real question for both/all of us: where do you draw the line?

I don't have an answer.

Aaaaaand, I win!

Labels: barry bonds, bill james, michelle trachtenberg, red sox, steroids, theo epstein

in Cincinnati. On one side: the Dustyites. On the other side: common sense. Articles are being written every day celebrating the folksy wisdom of a man who thinks bases are only good when there's no one standing on them. This is exactly what happened in L.A. when Grady Little was hired -- "He's folksy! He's down-home! He has a drawl!" (one year later) "He kind of stinks!"

If you could fart into a kind of microprocessing funnel, and the funnel poured the fart into a computer, which converted the fart into words, this is what it would look like.

Dusty Baker can literally smell whether a guy has a couple hits in his bat. And if his bones ache while a starter is warming up, that means 6 2/3, 4H, 1R. Welcome to the age of divining rods and augurs, Cincinnati.

The best baseball managing is done by the seat of your pants, using good, old-fashioned, pre-sabermetric logic.

If I live in Cincinnati, I have just purchased a one-way ticket to Canada, draft-fleeing-style.

That's another reason to like Dusty Baker. (Beyond his knowledge of single-malt Scotches and Van Morrison lyrics, which is merely astounding and downright Renaissance.)

"It doesn't matter to me if a guy gets on base if he can't run. If he can't run he's just clogging up the bases. Also, in an unrelated matter, it's a marvelous night for a moondance." (does a shot of Lagavulin 21)

If Baker manages by a book, it's one inside his head, not one written by Bill James.

Unfortunately, the book inside Dusty's head is "Lightning" by Dean R. Koontz. This will not help him.

The other day, the Reds manager decided he wanted Joey Votto and Adam Dunn to swing their bats more. "I don't like called third strikes," Baker said.

Can we get an Amen?

That's the thing about saberguys. We love called third strikes. I know it's controversial and counterintuitive, but we think batters should take more called third strikes. Statistics clearly show that offenses are best when the hitters take called 3rd strikes at least 16 times per game. That's why sabermetricians generally put on the permanent take sign for the first seven innings. Here's an equation to prove why this is good:

See? Called third strikes are awesome.

It always amuses when fans defend heart-of-the-order hitters by pointing to their on-base percentage. Wow, look at all those walks.

Yes. And then look at the corresponding runs that those walks create. And then look at the wins created by those runs! We are watching successful baseball! This is fun!

Five of the top six teams in walks last year were playoff teams.

Unless they're intentional walks, or the big boppers are being pitched around, walks aren't what you want from players hitting third through sixth. You want them up there smart-hacking.

You want these guys to brain-swing. You want them to think-swipe. You don't want your 3-6-hole hitters to engage in torque ignorance. You want them to cognitive-swivel.

As Baker said: "(Votto) needs to swing more. I'd like to see him more aggressive."

Joey Votto has hit .289/.385/.476 in the minors. He's ranked as one of the top infield prospects in baseball by nearly anyone who ranks top prospects. Here's Dusty's idea: let's change his plate approach.

By-the-book managing is for men who aren't confident in their ability to read players and situations. It's for managers who don't know their players' personalities. It's what you do so you can say later, after it backfires: "Don't blame me. I went by the book."

What you are calling "by the book managing" is often completely thoughtless, ignorance-steeped tradition. 2-1 count with a guy on first? Hit and run. Leadoff guy gets on? Bunt him over. That's by-the-book managing, and it's dumb. What people like Bill James, and Rob Neyer, and BP, and Billy Beane advocate is: research, analysis, thought, science. But fuck that. Let's read some tea leaves.

The best thing about Baker is that from all accounts, it's important to him to know his players individually: what jazzes them, what scares them, the situations that best suit their talents and temperaments. Contrary to the notions of the seamheads and stat freaks, players are not numbers.

Don't use jazz as a verb, please. Also: stat freaks and seam heads hate baseball. They are fucking ASIMO robots who make managerial moves through NASA press releases. Eric Wedge makes his moves from home, via on-line chats. Terry Francona has never met anyone on his 25-man roster. Joe Maddon is a 2.4 gigahertz Linksys router. Manny Acta is actually M.A.N. eACTA, the black-ops code-name for the Mechanized Algorithmic Numerical (internet-ready) Actionable Computation Techno-Automaton. When his "contract" runs out with the Nats he is going to be launched into space. We are weaponizing space. Deal with it, China.

"Managing" means exactly what it says: the ability to manage people. How Baker runs a game strategically is far less important than what he is able to pull from his employees, 162 times a summer.

"How he runs a game strategically" and "what the results are of his moves?" are somehow mutually exclusive things.

Anyone with a laptop can locate the Web site baseball- reference.com and sound like an expert. Anyone with a library card can pick up one of James' mind-numbing baseball "abstracts," in which the author makes the game sound like a first cousin to biomechanical engineering.

Which is why it boggles the mind that some people don't. Especially the ones paid millions of dollars to operate one of 30 several-hundred-million-dollar franchises. And for the record, I'm not trying to sound like an expert. I'm trying to sound like a dude with a computer who can look shit up and point out that Adam Dunn is doing just fine, thank you, and if you start making him swing at pitches he doesn't like, you're going to screw up your team.

It ain't that scientific.

It's not purely scientific. But it goddamn is kind of scientific.

The NFL does the same thing, in a different fashion. To convince you that pro football is actually a 17-week MENSA convention, The League whips out its 800-page playbooks and offers up oh-so-serious coaches who work 20 hours a day and act as if their jobs involve brain surgery and a red telephone.

QB: What play are we running, coach?

Coach: (furious) What "play" are we "running?" This ain't science, you jackass! You, Johnson. Just run down the field, and kind of squiggle around. Henderson? I want you to just groove. Bergleson -- let your soul take over. I want you to feel it. Smithson? Put this welding helmet on and close your eyes. Run wherever you feel like you should run. And Thompson? When the ball is snapped, I want a long primal scream. Don't worry about "blocking" or "patterns" or "execution." This game is about emotion, people.

Assistant Coach: Have you noticed that everyone on this team is named "something-son?"

Coach: You're fired. I don't pay you to think. Now. Soul-Ball Gut Check 34 on 3.

Possibly, it's less complex. Block. Tackle. Win.

If you try to win a modern-day NFL game solely by telling your players to "Block and tackle" you will lose 100-0.

Baseball's cerebral side involves numbers. While I believe in baseball-card wisdom - you are who the back of your card says you are - it's just a little piece of the whole. When some of us (OK, me mostly) advocated dealing, say, Votto and Homer Bailey for Oakland pitcher Joe Blanton, the Statboys came out flame-throwing numbers:

Homer Bailey: 21, awesome in the minors. Walks too many guys but gave up 6.55 H/9IP at AAA. Votto: potential stud at 1st for years. Blanton: pretty good 27 year-old pitcher, maybe hitting his stride. Also arb-eligible for the next 3 years, and will get very expensive. Chances that Bailey outpitches him in 2009 for 1/20 the price? Decent. This would be a trade you make at the deadline if you are one starter away from the World Series, not if you're Cincy and you have to basically start from the ground-up. Also, if you want to trade Bailey and Votto, you can do a whole lot better than Joe Blanton, I think.

Blanton's a creation of his spacious home ballpark! Look at his ERA, home and away! Blanton's a flyball pitcher! Check out his ratio of groundballs to flies!

This is fucking fantastic. These are his examples of ridiculous, opaque, arcane stat-geek numbers. Home/Away ERA. GB/FB ratio. If you think that's complicated, you are a simpleton of the highest order.

If you shot back that Blanton has won 42 times in the last three years - and that he went 7-5 at home last year and 7-5 on the road - if you suggested that no number matters but Games Won, you were dismissed as an illiterate.

Not an illiterate. I believe you can read. But maybe an ignoramus? Yes, let's go with ignoramus.

(Actually, maybe Blanton won as many on the road as at home, even with a much higher road ERA, because Oakland's hitters worked under the same conditions as their pitcher. Allow more runs, score more runs. And factually, flyball man Blanton gave up only 16 home runs in 230 innings last year. But never mind.)

First of all, if he actually is worse on the road, it would be a dumb idea to make him pitch 16 times a year in Cincinnati, where the RF fence is 115 feet from the plate. However, Blanton did have a very good year in 2007. He may be entering his prime. His HR rate and BB both dipped last year. Good work using numbers to show that.

Numbers are fun to look at but dangerous to dwell on.

But...didn't...you...just...

Baker understands this. If Dunn walks 30 fewer times this year, he'll drive in 15 more runs. His on-base percentage will dip. Oh, no.

If Dunn walks 30 fewer times, he'll drive in 15 more runs. This is thanks to the scientifically proven formula: RBI = (this is nonsense) (I made it all up).

If Votto takes fewer first-pitch strikes, his run production will improve.

You're right. He should hit more 1st-pitch home runs. Why doesn't anyone besides Dusty Baker and Paul Daugherty think home runs are better than walks?

And so on. Here's a stat: Wins as manager: Dusty Baker, 1,162; Bill James, 0.

This...this is the dumbest thing I have ever read.

Here's a stat: U.S. Presidents: All Americans Besides Paul Daugherty: 43. Paul Daugherty: 0. Suck on that, Paul Daugherty! You've never won the Presidency. What a jerk!

At bats are complicated things. The best result of an AB is a home run. The worst is an out that advances no runners. (Or a triple play, I guess, but you get the idea.) In between are several thousand other possibilities. A walk is a successful AB no matter how you slice it. Patient hitters are good hitters, by and large, who help their teams a great deal more than impatient hitters, and the more a guy is patient, the more he will swing at a good pitch instead of any pitch, which increases the chances he will succeed.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to run a level-5 diagnostic on the M.A.N. eACTA. His verillion modulator is on the fritz.

Labels: bill james, dusty baker, paul daugherty, sabermetrics, statistics

Otherwise, Bill James's computers would not have declared this computer-hating man the second baseman on his all-time All-Star team.

See, Joe? Sabermetrics loves you. Don't be afraid. Come. Join us.

(Thanks to reader Joe for the tip.)

Labels: bill james, joe morgan