Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Jobs, Terrible And Not-So-Terrible

My thoughts on the Red Sox as of mid-January:

Front office: Totally fine. Everything's under control.

Pitching: Really good. Fine and dandy.

Hitting: Manny and Ortiz plus any seven other dudes plus our pitching equals 90 win team. Fine.

So there you have it. My point is, there are a few holes, they will be filled, and none of them involve pitching. There are question marks in terms of Schilling and Foulke, but overall, I'm just not worried. If I start to worry, I'll let you know. I definitely want to get to March before making any final judgments.

You might give me a whole bunch of stats that show how guys are going to start doing bad. That brings me to my next topic.

I love stats. I love the concept. It's one of the reasons why baseball is the best game. I could pore over one box score for a year. But I'm not a big fan of projections. Granted, that's partially the point of keeping statistics. To me, though, stats are all about the past. Which is good. I'm down with the past. That's why I have hundreds of video tapes, basically documenting my entire life. That's why I write, too.

But projections just don't mean anything to me. You can tell me that Papelbon's projected Total Earned Run Ratio Indicator Before Last Earned Jug Of Brandy rating is a perfect 1.000, compared to Hansen's .004, but the games will still be played, and I'll still watch them. And I can hope against hope, when necessary, that the unthinkable happens, and sometimes it does.

It's almost like people are trying to figure out what happens before the games are played. I don't understand why you wouldn't want to watch and see what happens, without having to know ahead of time. It's almost like stats are being invented like they're new products. On-base percentage was like the erasable pen. When I first heard of it, it was revolutionary to me. And now I'm stuck holding it while everyone else has their iPods and DWARF ratings or whatever. But I seem to be fine with it, only occasionally and selectively joining modern times.

A-Rod could slip on horse dung in July and break his coccyx. Posada could get a sex-change operation and quit baseball after this season, choosing to run a hair salon instead. You can't project this stuff! (Although if either of these things happen, remember, you heard it here first.)

I'd like to know how often projections come true. That's the stat I want. Some kind of projection accuracy monitor. Don't tell me, they already have it, right?

All I'm saying is, none of these stats factor in the "how hard is Jere rooting for the guy in a key spot?/is he tapping his leg at the right speed to make the guy get a hit?" quotient. To me, that's where the fun is.

Jim Rice didn't make the Hall again. Maybe in some future year.

One more thing: I don't think I ever actually acknowledged the fact that the White Sox won the World Series. Probably because it was the most anti-climactic drought-breaking of all time. Sorry, guys.

Comments:
To add to your list... Ortiz could choke on a chicken bone while stuffing his fat face during a large Dominican feast. Manny could change his mind for the 1,000 time and once again piss on sox fans by saying he wants to leave, and Schilling could decide to say "Fuck Baseball, I'm going to dedicate the rest of my life to Jesus, Praise the Lord!" So Jere, bad shit could happen to your team too. Go enjoy a steak Jere.
 
//A-Rod could slip on horse dung in July and break his coccyx.//

I applaud the use of the word 'coccyx' here.
 
"A-Rod could slip on horse dung in July and break his coccyx."

Mental note to bring horse dung to every Yankee game I attend in July.

Recent pictures of Schilling have him looking (for HIM anyway) almost buff. I too am not worried thus far.

And "anonymous"...this is a Red Sox fan's blog, if you want to read post from people willing to blow Posada and his teammates...try nyfans.com.

And regarding the White Sox: I was at the HoF at the beginning of November and the friends I was with and myself could not for the life of us remember the name of the Chicago right fielder. It was pissing us off because it's something we should have known, right? So we happen upon a guy, FROM Chicago, in a White Sox cap and decide to ask HIM and guess what? HE didn't know. The White Sox fan didn't know who his team's right fielder was. A week or so after they won the World Series! He had just purchased a World Series program at the HoF shop, so we took it, flipped through and found out to ALL our embarrassment that it was, of course, Jermaine Dye. The freaking World Series MVP.

My point? If White Sox fans don't care that they won the World Series, why should we?
 
Why do all these nameless Dunbar fans leave messages on your blog? I can honestly say I've never read a Dunbar-related blog, because I really couldn't care less about what they would have to say. Maybe they still can't get over the biggest choke job in the history of professional sports (remember 2004? it happened).
 
Jere- of course stats can't predict the future, and I don't think anyone uses them to do so. What predictive stats (a better term would be prjectors) do is give you some idea of how a player might progress; it's a probability thing. Sure, next year Alex Cora might suddenly start hitting bombs and win himself an MVP, but what are the chances of that happening? Projecting forward from his previous performance, and taking into account age and position and all that stuff, we can take a pretty good guess. Ditto for other stuff. No one's suggesting that the 50% PECOTA projection WILL be what we see, just that it has a better probability of being close to what we see than other outcomes. It's intensely useful for a front office, and it can be a lot of fun for fans.
 
That woul be a good name for some of the people who are drawn here. The anonymous Dunbar and his merry friends. And then, ppof, and they are gone.
 
I love how the Dunbar fan thinks this was some "Let's talk about yankees getting hurt!" article, when I was really just trying to show how you never know what's going to happen in baseball, and bringing up ridiculous things that could happen to yankees, for example, that would make them go from doing awesome to sudddenly not having a career, to show extreme cases of improbable things happening.
 

Post a Comment

If you're "anonymous," please leave a name, even if it's a fake one, for differentiation purposes.

If you're having trouble commenting, try signing in to whatever account you're using first, then come back here once you're signed in.



<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

My Photo
Name:
Location: Rhode Island, United States