I was always much more impressed by Gehrig than I was Ruth (aside from when Ruth was also a pitcher), so I'm all for that.
MLB 2021 season: Corn-Driven Humidity
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Ser Barrold of House Bonds would like a word with you.
Let's say the greatest non-GMO hitter, then.
What are you talking about?
It’s perfectly natural for a man in his 40’s to gain 30 pounds of upper body muscle (including his head!)...
BTW: Rod Carew says hi.
Are we really going to re-litigate this yet again?
Baseball has never, in its entire existence, been clean.
Carew's a great hitter but he's missing the homers and rbi's.What are you talking about?
It’s perfectly natural for a man in his 40’s to gain 30 pounds of upper body muscle (including his head!)...
BTW: Rod Carew says hi.
Maybe not clean, but also not quite so non-authentic. The steroid era is a far cry from the "greeny" era.
No shit. Amphetamines have a demonstrable performance-enhancing effect, that's why they started putting them out for all to see in the clubhouses so people could just grab them like Halloween candy, and some of the greats like Mays and Mantle and Aaron used them. Whereas steroids make your balls shrink and might give you a little boost when it comes to recovering after a workout.
Who gives a shit about RBI? All that number means, at its core, is that a player was lucky enough to come up to bat when batters ahead of him had gotten on base. It's by no means a measure of skill or talent.
The only reason we focus on RBI is because that dipshit Henry Chadwick thought it was important.
You're fucking kidding, right? Henry Aaron had an 85% success rate at driving runners home from third with less than two outs. That is not a product of luck. How many hitters did not "get lucky" and drive in those runners who got on base? If you ask me, with runs being the ultimate statistic, RBIs may be the most important measure of batter clutch performance. Home runs are meaningless, exceeded in their meaninglessness only by WAR and any so-called metric with a + after it.
Pete Rose and Ty Cobb might wanna have a word too. Pete cheated, but in a different way. IDK about Cobb.
I would argue that we’re talking about two different measurements. RBI totals don’t say much about a hitter’s skill, in that he has no control over how many runners are in base ahead of him. Rod Carew played on some bad teams, it wasn’t his fault that there weren’t more men on base when he had his 3,000+ hits.
Now, percentage of times you get a hit when there happen to be runners in base, that’s a fair measure IMHO. That’s what’s “clutch”.
I think it’s kind of the way wins for a pitcher don’t mean very much. He doesn’t have control over how many runs his team scores. You can be a pretty good pitcher with a lousy W-L record on a poor hitting team, and vice-versa.
I don't think Cobb ever cheated, he was just an enormous asshole.
Case in point: Jacob deGrom has a 0.71 ERA and a fucking 544 ERA+.
His record is 4-2.
Pretty much. He's been re-evaluated in recent years ever since it was discovered that the author of his biography only spent a few days with Cobb and made up entire stories wholesale for the book, but basically the consensus is, "Hell of a hitter, hell of a racist."
Dude stole home 54 times, though. That's amazing.
It's so cute that you're so dismissive of any math that goes beyond 1+1=2. Weighted measurements are a thing, baseball statisticians didn't invent them.
And then getting into advanced stats, like BABIP against, can illustrate whether or not a pitcher is having an extremely unlucky year. One of the big mysteries in SABR for ages--this is actually what got Voros McCracken involved with SABR--has been why Greg Maddux had a comparatively bad year (by his standards) in 1999, because the explanation has to be more than "well, he was just off," and that's what makes it fun, even if there are occasional wrinkles.
For example, a few years ago, Kyle Freeland had an 8.2 bWAR but a 4.2 fWAR, and it boils down to the two groups using different metrics. fWAR estimates runs prevented using a pitcher's K / BB / HR profile, while bWAR uses the runs a pitcher actually allows. Usually the two are reasonably close, but sometimes players over- or under-perform their peripherals, and advanced stats help us understand why.
In the case of baseball "metrics" weighted means some "metrician" invented a set of conditions that may not have any resemblance to reality. For a statistic to be a true metric, there must be a basis in real math. To continue your cute metaphor, "metricians" have changed the simple 1 + 1 to 1 + (the era a guy played in +/- he played in a cold northern stadium +/- Sandy Koufax didn't pitch in his era +/- he didn't have to face African American opponents +/- there were no closers in his era . . .etc.). That, sir is why I am so cutely dismissive of "weighting." It is artificial, not scientific. In my days as an engineer we called it "pixie dust" - that number that when added to, subtracted from, multiplied by or divided by the answer you got gives you the answer you wanted.
I would trade all the statistics and MVP awards in the world for another championship before I die.
The last time the Cubs won a championship, the gates of Hell were opened and Donald Trump became president.
I don't wish to tempt fate again.
I think those gates were on an insane asylum.
Right now it seems that the downward escalator connects to a revolving door of madness.
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