FIRE JOE MORGAN

We might as well get to this. Yes, the first entry in Murray Chass' blog, a blog written by a professional sportswriter and and semi-professional blogophobe, needs a little editing ("Whatever impact honmefield [sic] advantage has").

The most glaring error in logic-slash-sanity, though, occurs two-thirds of the way through:

One way would be to reward [with home field advantage] the team with the better won-lost record. But that idea wouldn’t work logistically. Baseball can’t wait until days or even a week before the World Series is scheduled to start to determine where Series game will be played. Airlines and hotels don’t work that way.

Unless all of professional baseball is actually one long kabuki play, I'm pretty sure that at no point in history has anyone known where the World Series will be played until the winners of the two leagues have been determined (in modern times, that means waiting until the League Championship Series are finished). As reader Rob points out, last year "the host of World Series game one wasn't known until 11:33 PM on October 21st when the Red Sox finished off the Indians. Game one of the World Series was played on October 24th."

And yet those diabolical airlines and hotels, true gatekeepers of baseball's ultimate prize, acquiesced and let the Rockies fly to and stay in the city of Boston. Weird how modern society works, isn't it?

Someone may have even used a computer to book those flights and hotels.

*** UPDATE ***

Reader Chris contributes the following:

While I loathe having to defend Murray Chass, even a little, as someone who works in baseball, I can tell you that his point about booking hotels and flights is actually sort of right.

What reporters and others do is reserve hotels and flights for the four (or two, if they wait until the LCS starts) possible cities in each league for the dates that are already set based on the All-Star outcome. That's a lot better than having to do it for eight (or, uh, four, if you wait) for a whole host of possible combinations.

Thanks, Chris. I'm also hearing that the reason the NBA and NHL can use home-court/ice advantage in their playoffs is that they simply don't use as many hotel rooms overall compared to the World Series, so it's a little easier logistically.

*** UPDATE TO THE UPDATE ***

This is riveting stuff for some of you guys, so I'll print this rebuttal to Chris, which comes from Timothy.

MLB wouldn't have to book for 4 or 8 cities if they give it to the team with the best record. This is because, obviously, you can eliminate the team with the worst record from having home field. So, if they wait until the LCS, they would have to book in 3 cities instead of 2. If they do it before the LDS, they would book in 7 cities as opposed to 4. I doubt they do it before the LCS though, for two reasons:

1. The LCS typically runs almost 2 weeks, so doing it before this is probably enough time

2. If you book before the LDS, you would have to book several different cities for the LCS, then also several cities for the World Series to account for all possible combinations. Even in their current system, I doubt they do this.

So, presuming they wait until the outcome of the LDS to be final, booking 3 cities instead of 2 is a small inconvenience to have a better system in place for the team with the best record to get 4 games at home.

*** THE "WILL THIS BE THE LAST UPDATE?" UPDATE ***

From reader Matty:

As the director of reservations in an MLB city, and former director at a hotel that was the contractual home of MLB visiting teams in Chicago, I have SOME insight here (also, I was here both when the White Sox won the World Series, and the Cubs went to the playoffs on the last 2 occasions, so I’ve worked the situation). Every MLB city has a contracted “home” hotel for visiting teams. The contracts contain language that force the hotel to accommodate teams during the playoffs. Reservations are not a concern for them.

The media, does, indeed, make “speculative” reservations – but only a few days in advance. For instance, when the Cubs took a 3-1 lead on the Marlins, we had a huge spike in press reservations. After the Bartman game, roughly half of these cancelled. BUT, we didn’t get the big spike until the Cubs went up 3-1.

Labels: murray chass

A: It's still a blog. Its author is just in denial.

I felt a lot better about giving the Flooky and the Beans guy a boost in traffic, but I feel like it's our duty to report the following news: Murray Chass has started a blog. It's about shodo, the ancient Japanese art of calligraphy. Well, not really. Primarily, so far it seems to be a blog about hating blogs. At least that's what the very first words of its mission statement proclaim:

This is a site for baseball columns, not for baseball blogs. The proprietor of the site is not a fan of blogs.

Let me translate that into confusing ChassOrwellian-speak:

This is a blog for baseball columns, not for baseball blogs. The proprietor of the blog is not a fan of blogs.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. This blog is not a blog. Ceci n'est pas une pipe.

He made that abundantly clear on a radio show with Charlie Steiner when Steiner asked him what he thought of blogs and he replied, “I hate blogs.”

[shaking fist] You hear that, James Fallows, Malcolm Gladwell, and Murray Chass? I hate what you do. I hate it because of what it's called. It sounds funny. I hate it because there are some bad blogs. Meanwhile, there has never been a bad newspaper column, book, magazine, painting, mobile, or stele. Those forms of expression are fine.

Keep watching the space at http://www.murraychass.com/about.php to receive updates as to which types of media are acceptable. (Conundrum: http://www.murraychass.com/about.php has recently ruled that websites are now, in fact, unacceptable. So should you visit again? It's up to you.)

He later heartily applauded Buzz Bissinger when the best-selling author denounced bloggers on a Bob Costas HBO show.

He was alone, watching in his living room, but he remained convinced that the television machine had an applause input microphone (A.I.M.) that would allow Mr. Bissinger to hear his ovation. No amount of research on the nonexistence of the A.I.M. would convince him otherwise.

Bloggers, however, are welcome to visit this site; so are stats freaks, fantasy leaguers and Red Sox fans. How else will they know what is being said about them by a columnist they love to hate?

I, for one, am sick of wrongheaded writers telling me I love to hate them when in fact I hate to hate them. A note to Baylessian contrarians: you should take no joy in being so wrong about something that throngs of people rise up as one to denounce you. This should not be what it means to be a writer. When thousands of people write you angry emails about something you said or wrote that was wrong, you should not shrug your shoulders and say, "I must be doing something right if I got so many people interested!" No, sir. Sir, no. You were wrong. That is the end of the story. You were so wrong you made people angry. There is no glory in your profound wrongitude. Please stop doing this.

Otherwise, this site will most likely appeal primarily to older fans whose interest in good old baseball is largely ignored in this day of young bloggers who know it all,

Ignored? I would argue that no matter what kind of baseball fan you are, there is more baseball writing, research, opinion, and debate than there ever has been in the sport's history. Verducci is still writing some excellent, longer pieces for Sports Illustrated. Gammons writes a thing or three every week. Your man Buzz is still kicking around. Reilly, if you like his sort of thing, just signed an 18-year, $400-million deal, mainly (we hope) for writing. Every time I write a post, a Roger Angell column does not disappear from this plane of reality.

and new- fangled statistics (VORP, for one excuse-me example),

May I remind people that in this fateful piece for the New York Times, Murray Chass wrote "To me, VORP epitomized the new-age nonsense" and "For the longest time, I had no idea what VORP meant and didn’t care enough to go to any great lengths to find out." and "Finally, not long ago, I came across VORP spelled out. It stands for value over replacement player. How thrilling. How absurd. Value over replacement player. Don’t ask what it means. I don’t know."

So it is possible -- no, probable -- no, certain -- that Murray Chass still does not know what VORP means, and yet hates it with every fiber of his wizened being. This is the equivalent of a person who's lived in Muncie, Indiana his whole life hating a specific dish in a restaurant in Doha, Qatar.

which are drowning the game in numbers and making people forget that human beings, not numbers, play the games.

February 27, 2007, New York Times: "People play baseball. Numbers don’t."

Maybe Murray Chass just doesn't have that much more to say. That's okay. He's had a long, storied career. He's won awards. He was inducted, as he tells us in his biography, "into the Western Pennsylvania Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in Pittsburgh." But there's no need, Murray, to spit such vitriol at new ways of enjoying sports simply because you aren't interested in them.

E-mail comments are also invited, but visitors to the site are asked to omit the obscenities.

Remember, this is a man who several paragraphs earlier informed us that he "heartily applauded Buzz Bissinger when the best-selling author denounced bloggers on a Bob Costas HBO show." Bissinger began his applause-worthy, highly informed, well-reasoned, level-headed argument by telling the gentleman next to him "I really think you're full of shit."

“I have spent my professional life in the print world, where obscenities don’t see the light of day,” Chass said. “They will remain in the dark here as well. It will be a good test for bloggers and Red Sox fans to see if they can control themselves.”

"The time for obscenities is on national pay cable television, where a grown man and father of three can ambush an unsuspecting young writer with a torrent of spittle-accompanied expletives, thoughtlessly and carelessly excoriating an entire medium without retribution or moderation from the host. That is where obscenities belong, and that is where I applaud them. Shouted at other people, on television."

Mr. Chass: you're angry at nomenclature. Really. Ideas are ideas. Writing is writing. By starting this blog, you're acknowledging as much. Welcome to the blogosphere.

Labels: murray chass

Did we contribute, in some minuscule, 0.000000001% way to Murray Chass allegedly being bought out by the New York Times? The Big Lead is reporting Chass' impending departure. The news, of course, will take a few days to reach Murray, as he depends solely on the Pony Express for communication (the Postal Service, he maintains, is a passing fad that he won't abide).

I'm really torn. Should I feel bad about this? Or terrific?

To be honest, I'm already mourning the loss of hundreds of future statphobic-fish-in-a-barrel posts. If this news is true, FJM has lost a goldmine. (The VORPies flag flies at half mast today.)

Labels: murray chass

... and I use it to bludgeon him to death.

Look, the column is no good. Boring, stale, rehashed -- and the big revelation is an allegation by an anonymous source that gasp! the Red Sox wanted to keep Daisuke Matsuzaka away from the Yankees.

Well, no shit.

My issue is with this paragraph, which appears in an odd little below-the-dot addendum at the end of the piece:

Varitek was speaking before the Red Sox abandoned their plan to make Jonathan Papelbon a starter and restored him to the closer role he filled so capably for most of last season. But his exit from the starting rotation presumably weakens it. It now has two 40-year-olds, one of whom, Tim Wakefield, had a losing record last season that might have made the difference between the Red Sox making and not making the playoffs.

Read that last sentence again. According to Murray Chass, Tim Wakefield was (okay, "might have" been) the reason the Red Sox didn't make the playoffs last year. This is sort of like blaming Azerbaijan for fucking up the war in Iraq, except a million times more egregious and important and serious.

Mr. Chass, let me explain to you how you go about not writing a sentence like that. I know you don't cotton to VORP or WARP or people who believe, as I do, that the game of baseball is played by animatronic numbers swinging bats and fielding balls. Unfortunately, this method involves a computer, which you may have to purchase, and the Internet, which you may have to look up in a dictionary and then dismiss as a fad.

Alternatively, you could probably find this information at the library with your knowledge of card catalogs and the Dewey Decimal Classification System. It would only take several more hours and ten times the work.

First, find last year's baseball standings. You will discover that the Red Sox finished eleven games behind the AL East champion Yankees and nine games behind the Wild Card Tigers. So we'll go with nine games as the ground the Sox needed to make up to reach the playoffs.

Now look up Tim Wakefield. Yahoo (don't worry about what that is) provides a record of all of the games he pitched in last year. Huh. Look at that. In 23 games started by Wakefield, the Red Sox went 11-12.

Your claim, remember, is that "Tim Wakefield had a losing record last season that might have made the difference between the Red Sox making and not making the playoffs."

11-12. Nine games out. So Tim Wakefield would've had to have willed his team to go 20-3 in his games he started in order for them to even pull into a tie with the Tigers.

I think it's pretty fair to blame him for that.

---

I'm jumping all over Chass for a minor mistake in a minor piece written before the season has even started. But I think it's a minor mistake that reflects either carelessness (if you're willing to be charitable) or a fundamental misunderstanding of very basic statistics and player value. It's like Chass saw on a piece of paper that Wakefield went 7-11 and decided he had a terrible year because hey, that's losing and losing is bad. The year before he went 16-12. That's winning! There you have it: Tim Wakefield, 2006 goat.

Here's the thing: Wakefield may have finished 16-12, but in games Wakefield started in 2005, the Red Sox went 17-16. That's basically .500. Which is basically what they did in his starts in 2006. Because that's what Tim Wakefield gives you -- league-average ERA and hopefully, lots of innings. (His last three ERA+ years have looked like this: 100, 106, 100.)

Wakefield did miss starts last year, and that hurt the Red Sox, but keep in mind that that's not what Chass is saying. No: he is saying that 7-11 (losing!) somehow damned the Red Sox to that ignominious third place finish.

See, being afraid of numbers and resistant to change and unwilling to learn new things doesn't just make you look like a sad, anachronistic old kook. It can actually hurt your writing in concrete, demonstrable ways. It can make you assert things that with an ounce of research can be shown to be patently ridiculous.

I am beginning to think that Murray Chass could improve as a sportswriter.

Labels: murray chass, red sox, tim wakefield

I would guess that something like ninety percent of people still consume all of their sportswriting in the form of newspapers. (I mean, factor in old people and casual fans, right?) They wake up in the morning, pour themselves some orange juice, sit down and read drivel like this willfully uninformed screed from cantakerous, crotchety Murray Chass.

As Season Approaches, Some Topics Should Be Off Limits

Things I don’t want to read or hear about anymore:

Let's cut to the juicy part.

Statistics mongers promoting VORP and other new-age baseball statistics.

"New age" is touchy-feely. New age is spiritual. New age is intangible. VORP, Mr. Chass, is not new age. It may be relatively new, but it is not new age. It is the opposite of new age. It is an attempt to quantify, to measure, to analyze. You know, a more scientific approach to knowledge. Science -- that thing that humans do to find out more about the world around them. Not new age -- a fake thing that involves pan flutes and rubbing crystals on your body.

I receive a daily e-mail message from Baseball Prospectus, an electronic publication filled with articles and information about statistics, mostly statistics that only stats mongers can love.

You can feel the sneer curling on his face as he writes "electronic publication" with a quill pen in Olde English, then rolls up the parchment and sends it on its three-day horseback journey to his publisher, Lord Sulzberger, Jr.

He's kidding about the e-mail of course. He doesn't have an "e-mail address." E-mail is for new age wack jobs.

To me, VORP epitomized the new-age nonsense.

Sir. Sir. You're still using "new age" incorrectly. Excuse me, sir?

(Murray Chass ignores me and continues brushing his teeth with a small rubber fish.)

For the longest time, I had no idea what VORP meant and didn’t care enough to go to any great lengths to find out.

That's cool. You're just a baseball writer for the fucking New York fucking Times. Thanks for caring about your fucking job so much you won't type "define:vorp" into Google, hit return, and then read the literally two sentences that result. I just did it ten times in the last three seconds. You're right, though: I guess those are "great lengths" for a 479-year-old member of the tribe of living undead.

I asked some colleagues whose work I respect, and they didn’t know what it meant either.

Those colleagues:

Tim McCarver
Branch Rickey
Abner Doubleday
Alexander Joy Cartwright
Scoop Jackson
Herodotus
John Kruk

Finally, not long ago, I came across VORP spelled out. It stands for value over replacement player. How thrilling. How absurd. Value over replacement player. Don’t ask what it means. I don’t know.

If you read this paragraph again, you'll find that it doesn't really contain an argument in any sense of the word. Since when are baseball statistics supposed to be "thrilling"? How thrilling is ERA, a thing you presmuably think is fine? And you still don't know what VORP means, even after writing about it in a professional column in a professional newspaper, professionally?

I suppose that if stats mongers want to sit at their computers and play with these things all day long, that’s their prerogative.

In their parents' basements, not getting a date for prom, wearing nerd glasses and playing the violin. Even at age 9,354, Murray gets a thrill out of nailing these dorks. Good luck getting laid, dorks! Gotcha!

But their attempt to introduce these new-age statistics into the game threatens to undermine most fans’ enjoyment of baseball and the human factor therein.

Murray Chass: New age new age new age new age the end. My column's done!

Nurse: Very good, Murray! We're going out into the garden now for some fresh air. The garden. Won't that be fun?

Saying that VORP undermines "enjoyment" and the "human factor" is like creationists saying that evolution takes away the "wonder" and "mystery" of the universe. It doesn't. It makes it awesomer.

People play baseball. Numbers don’t.

I actually believe that goofy, anthropomorphic numbers with arms and legs and silly oversize white gloves play all of the games we know of in what we call professional baseball. Call me crazy, but that is what I believe.

Murray Chass: proof that there is still a reason we behave like true dickheads on this site.

Labels: mother's basement, murray chass, new age, vorp

I knew you'd write something stupid, you old fart of a washed-up, retarded NY Times baseball reporter!

And here it is:

The explanation is so obvious, it's difficult to understand why no one has thought of it. The Yankees are enduring their worst start to a season in the 10-year Joe Torre era, and one person who had been with the Yankees for that entire era is missing this year. Instead of helping Torre catapult the Yankees into another dominant lead in the division, Willie Randolph is managing the Mets - and doing a first-rate job at it.

...[Yesterday's] 7-5 victory over Philadelphia improved the Mets record to 15-14, including 12-11 in their division. The Yankees, after losing to Tampa Bay by 6-2 last night, had an 11-18 record, including 9-14 in their division.

Okay. The reason the Yankees are struggling, the reason they're 11-18, is because of the absence of WILLIE RANDOLPH?

The former bench coach?

Not an aging line-up. Not Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada, Tino Martinez, Ruben Sierra, and Tony Womack being terrible hitters. Not Randy Johnson being injured after a sub-par start. Not Jaret Wright being a $21 million mistake, and also being injured. Not Carl Pavano and Mike Mussina being mediocre. Not Tom Gordon and Paul Quantrill being terrible, or Tanyon Sturtze being terrible and also injured. Not any of these things.

The reason they are struggling is because they didn't retain Willie Randolph.

Their bench coach.

Who, for the record, is a shitty manager. 15-14 is no great shakes. It's about right for that team. A team that added Carlos Beltran and Pedro Martinez in the off season.

Now read this, from the same article (it's long, but worth reading):

"Consider what Randolph did yesterday. In a move calculated to test his other players and learn something about his team, he took his hottest hitter out of the lineup and won without him. Cliff Floyd, with a 20-game hitting streak, longest in the major leagues this season, had been carrying the Mets, leading the team with a .391 batting average, 8 home runs, 25 runs batted in, a .701 slugging percentage and a .443 on-base percentage.

Take that bat out of the lineup when the Mets are trying to snatch every victory they can get? What kind of a rookie move is that?

Randolph, however, knows that the Mets can't rely on Floyd to produce that kind of offense all season. Even if Floyd were to remain hot for the next five months, which we know he will not, the Mets would need other hitters - Mike Piazza, Mike Cameron, David Wright - to contribute for them to win consistently. So Randolph quietly put the challenge before Floyd's teammates, and they responded.

Piazza, batting .198 when the game began, slugged four hits, including a three-run home run that turned out to be the decisive blow. Wright socked a tie-breaking two-run double. Cameron, who had missed the first 28 games with a wrist injury, began his season by drilling a pair of doubles.

Floyd watched it all from the bench. So did Randolph.

"I'm looking at the long haul," Randolph said afterward. "The guy's in a nice little groove, but I think it's more important to look at the big picture. One guy isn't going to carry us and do everything for us. I came in feeling this way and thinking this way, and I'm not going to change."

He did not want to "try to milk him for every little thing because he's in a streak," Randolph said of Floyd, adding, "It's more important what he's going to do the next few weeks and month."

Randolph didn't say that by resting Floyd he was seeking to learn something about his other players, but that was what he had in mind. It was a bold move for a rookie manager, one that could have backfired if the other hitters had not met the unspoken challenge. But they did, and that was the point.

Oh my God. This is a good managerial move? Sitting your hottest player? Maybe if he just wanted him to get a day of rest, fine, whatever. But Chass states authoritatively that this is not the reason Randolph did it. It was to test the mettle of the other gus on the team? Whaaaat?

And then Randolph says: "The guy's in a nice little groove, but I think it's more important to look at the big picture. One guy isn't going to carry us and do everything for us. I came in feeling this way and thinking this way, and I'm not going to change."

Whhhhaaaaaaaaaaaatttt?

What does that mean? What is the "big picture?" Why not keep him in the line-up to help the other guys feel less pressure? And does anyone really think that Mike Piazza had four hits yesterday because Cliff Floyd wasn't in the line-up? (They were playing the Phillies. A bad team with a bad pitching staff.) What kind of insane sense does that make?

Murray Chass and Willie Randolph. A match made in heaven.

Labels: murray chass