We aren't depressed, or "bitter" (though we remember those specious claims from years ago, and laugh bitterly at them, then as now). We remain committed to not being disgusted, but rather (as angry young ironist Elvis Costello suggested to himself) amused. Here are a few sources of our grimly gleaming mirth...
WAR: WHO NEEDS THE ORANGE MENACE v. IRAN WHEN BASEBALL's NUMBEROLOGISTS HAVE A COMPETING SYSTEM IN EVERY GRIDLOCKED DIRECTION??
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| Yuniesky: still butting heads (and still burning it up in the Mexican League...) |
No, there's still the specter of the Baseball Prospectus (of which Sam is a "distinguished alumnus"), where the oddball obsessions of those petulant pioneers add more cognitive dissonance to a "system" that more often than not resembles a check-kiting scheme. What Sam reveals is a method (pardon...that should be: multiple methods...) with escalating probabilities for distortion as it (they) take(s) on levels of detail greater than the amount of water that accumulated in the hull of the Titanic.
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| Sorry...wrong Donovan. |
Thanks, Tom, but we just ate. That Anti-Christ penchant for trying to oversimplify the overly complicated really does have an expiration date, as does the reign of (t)error by the Orange Menace, but the difference in such an admittedly demeaning comparison is as follows: at least in your case that expiration date is not one that might coincide with the world's expiration date. Statcast WAR is adding the southerly direction to a method that already covers the other inclinations while already having gone south. It isn't surprising, either, that an Anti-Christ wants to beat a dead horse and raise it from the dead at the same time. Best of luck with that...
And--again, disturbingly like that Orange Menace, TLP doubles down on rhetorical stances that purport to resolve complex issues by force of will as opposed to reason. In love with a graphic depiction of a hitter's relationship to the pitches he faces as they cluster around the home plate zone, he recrafts a truism about selectivity into a "golden rule" grafted to the inside fringe of the strike zone, what used to be called the "black" but he now (tellingly) calls the "shadow." We are presented with three or four charts that show us how hitters who optimize the use of this area have improved their performance, with the statistics show based not on OPS, or even on TLP's opaque "improvement" called wOBA (weighted on-base average, which--again--mashes together two stats--OBP and SLG--in order to create a new hegemonic value at the expense of any sense of statistical shape), but on "runs."
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| Howie: in the zone in 2019 no matter what zone it might be... |
Could it be that Howie simply hung in better in 2019 when faced with a 1-2 count? He was 1-for-27 in those situations in 2018; this past year, he had 25 more at-bats in that unpromising two-strike count--and banged out 14 hits in them, bringing his BA up from .037 to .288 in such a situation (which also brought his OPS up from a microscopic .111 to a slightly more robust .668--the highest such yearly value in his fourteen-year career...and 64% higher than the 2019 NL average).
That's just as likely an explanation for Howie's resurgence as his work in the "shadow" zone...but it doesn't involve newfangled technology or higher sample size based on data compilations that don't actually track to plate appearances: TLP is working with pitches here, and presuming that it's the plate discipline that produced better results. (Hint: it could be more random than that...)
Or--could it be that playing so many more home games in a ballpark (Nationals Park) where he's always hit well (.314 going into 2019) just clicked in even further? Howie hit .374 at home in 2019.
But somehow all of these other explanations are (apparently) just supposed to lay down and die, blown up by the incursion of a pitch-driven metric that subdivides hitting solely (and, somehow, definitely) into four zones.
We're not buying it--and neither should you.
BILL JAMES APOLOGIZES, CALLS DICK ALLEN AN ALCOHOLIC...
Bill is, as you know, more interested in criminals than in their victims. And, let's face it, criminals are in many ways more interesting than victims. But it continues to color his outlook on baseball and American history, where he blames the victims of the sixties for things they could not overcome in situations where the deck was stacked against them.
With another of his fascinating but internally contradictory meta-value systems ("potential" careers vs. actual performance), Bill doubles down on certain value judgments (it is the tragic age of doubling down, is it not? If only folks would triple down, so that triples would go up in frequency, we'd be happy--albeit briefly, of course, because if the Orange Menace triples down before they invoke the 25th Amendment, the world's annihilation will indeed be upon us...) via another attempt to impose rules on chance.
And, of course, it's Dick Allen who winds up in the vise of Bill's pretzel logic. After stating categorically in 1994 that Dick did more than anyone in baseball history to steal wins from the teams he played for, Bill has kinda sorta backtracked...but like a certain other Orange someone, he just can't keep his mouth shut on the subject.
After having arrogantly claiming that he starts fresh every time he revisits questions of value in baseball (thereby reneging on any claims he made previously and thus being absolved of any and all responsibility for them), Bill returns to Dick Allen with the "potential career" method, suggesting that Dick's career "should have been" as great as Hank Aaron and Willie Mays--neglecting, of course, to look at the fact that those two estimable gentlemen began in more favorable hitting eras, were venerated in the press during their formative years, and were two of the most remarkably durable players in the history of the game.
Rather than noting that Allen, not blessed with the perfect eyesight of Aaron and Mays, still managed to hit at similar levels of achievement (based on OPS+), Bill obsesses on the dark side of Allen's personality. Did it occur to Bill that Allen might have developed a drinking problem because of what happened to him in Philadelphia, and then was caught in a spiral that he had to find ways to control, only to find that all efforts to do so were doomed to a Kafkaesque failure?
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| Brimstone...or Leviathan? |
Was Allen a perfectly innocent victim? Of course not. He made many errors in judgment, but most of these have been blown out of proportion. Was he a malingerer, or just a slow healer? Did his career come to an end because his fractured ankle forced an adjustment in his stance that undermined his ability to hit right-handed pitching?
Can it really be possible, as Bill claims--after calling Dick an alcoholic and a sociopath--that every misfortune that befell Allen is solely on him? Or that by claiming that there is more to the story than pinning the tale on the donkey (so to speak) that his defenders are absolving him of all blame?
In two words: hell no. Allen's foibles are not relevant to his case for the Hall of Fame. He is not an "inner circle" member of that elite group of players. But his achievements as a hitter, despite injuries, in light of the offensive era in which he performed, are more than sufficient to put him in.
What the baseball world needs to do is put Dick in the Hall before he dies, and what Bill needs to do is to say nothing more about Dick Allen for the rest of his natural days. It's a blight upon a man who has accomplished so much over a forty-year career. It's time to quit stepping in it, Bill, lest the stench stay with you into the next world.
HOPE FOR LARRY WALKER, SCOTT ROLEN, GARY SHEFFIELD...AND BILLY THE KID
Let's not go away "mad" or "bitter" (and let's be sure to, once again, thank our invisible sponsor: the one, the only Fright Quotes R Us, the company that turns every cotton-pickin' word into a conversation--they truly make us look sane, if only by comparison).
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| We really do need a little lefty in the Hall of Fame... |
All four are gaining Hall of Fame support at a solid clip this year. For Walker, it's going to be close on two counts--he's in his tenth and final year on the ballot, and he is going to need a surge in "private ballots" (that stubborn subset of BBWAA voters who eschew transparency, thus leaving us guessing to the "bitter" end) to crack the 75% barrier. Any and all calcs show that it's too close to call.
Neither Rolen nor Sheffield nor Billy the Kid are even close to such a suspensefully suspended moment, but their gains in support are sizable and highly encouraging for the future. All of these guys are, in our book, entirely worthy of a slot in Cooperstown.
Oh, yes: our 2020 Hall of Fame ballot, if they were "mad" enough to let us cast it, would be as follows: Bonds, Clemens, Jeter, Kent, Ramirez, Rolen, Schilling, Sheffield, Wagner and Walker.
Wouldn't it be ironic if Curt Schilling made it into Cooperstown only to have his beloved Orange Menace blow up the world a week before the induction ceremony? And wouldn't it be nice if that were only a sick joke rather than an actual possibility?
