:shrug: What else do you ever talk about *but *stats?
Thes discussions would be much more pleasurable if appreciation and discussion of other aspects of the game were not dismissed as “anti-intellectual” and so forth.
Thank you.
Not even that. The teams that are in the postseason are setting up for it, the teams that are out are setting up for the hot stove league. There’s no real point in discussing the remains of the regular season, I agree.
We can certainly talk about the playoff matchups, though.
Boston-LA: The Sox are suddenly healthy again (mostly), VMart, Gonzo and Wags were just what we needed to plug the holes, Bay and Drew are hot again (true, it’s against the O’s), Buchholz has grown into the job, and Dice-K looks like he should have looked all season. I like a Beckett-Lester-Buchholz-Matsuzaka rotation, with Bard and Wagner setting up Pap, better than anything the Angels can put together, and there’s that mental block issue they always have to deal with. Gathright is around for some pinch-run antics, too. Boston in 6, and that’s being cautious.
New York-Detroit: Tiggers’ hitting is just too spotty, and they can’t pitch Verlander every day, either. Yanks pitching has solidified in time, their older hitters have new life, and they should take it in 7, tops.
Boston-New York: Too early to be confident, but I’ll go with pitching in any postseason series, and Boston’s is better. I wouldn’t have said that in July and August, but that isn’t when the playoffs are played.
National League: I don’t follow the minors, sorry. 
That will be quite an accomplishment, considering the Division Series are the best of five games.
Ah, of course. :smack: So many championship-contending teams in so many sports in this area, it’s hard to keep track sometimes.
Gotta suck living in Kansas City or some other hopeless place like that.
It sure didn’t suck to be a Kansas City fan tonight! What a comeback! I think I’m going to become a fan of these guys with “KC” on their hats who came back from 6-0 and 8-2 deficits to beat the Red Sox, instead of being a fan of the Royals.
Who else? Greinke’s year is one of the 2 or 3 best of the last decade by a pitcher not named Pedro Martinez.
Yookeroo:
Actually, it’s one of the 2 or 3 best of the last decade including any by Pedro Martinez.
As a Royals fan who has tried to watch as many Grienke games as possible, I can only say that looking at his stats makes me appreciate him even more - because individual pitching performances can be so easily dismissed as aberrations (the other team was resting its starters; they had an off-night; the opposing pitcher was yadda yadda yadda).
In addition, it’s hard to nearly impossible to compare multiple pitchers by just watching the games. BBWAA writers are assigned to their home team (or the nearest MLB club) - they have a focus on 162 games for their own team. The Rangers’ beat writer isn’t focusing on comparing Grienke with Sabathia - all he knows is that after a night of writing about Kinsler struggling at the plate, Hamilton motorboating some barfly, and Chris Davis lowering the Arlington median temperature a few degrees with all his whiffs, he doesn’t have much time to watch 3 more games that night - he’s just looking to see who picked up the W. God forbid he take three more seconds to see who allowed one less run (each and every single game he enters).
Is it really necessary to point out that the Sox were using the game to assess if Wakefield is going to be physically able to pitch effectively this postseason, or if Delcarmen is going to pull it back together enough to even make the postseason roster (“No” to both, btw), *not *as an opportunity to win?
Gloating over winning an exhibition game is just sad. But you get so few opportunities, I suppose you can have this one. What does last place and hopeless taste like, anyway?
What else are you going to use besides statistics? No one is able to watch every game of every player. Even you could, you would probably be unlikely to tell who has given up less runs or a higher avg without keeping track unless there were major discrepencies. A hit a week is a huge difference in batting average, but barely noticable to the viewer. Same with a run every couple of weeks. Besides, a traditional baseball writer uses stats, he just uses different ones. So the question isn’t whether to use stats, but rather which stats to use. Do you like stats likes wins and rbis or ones like warp and dera? I prefer the latter, because I find they correlate much more with success on the field.
Greinke should win the Cy Young, and I think he probably will. The wins (at last check the Royals have a losing record when he starts, how is that even possible?) hurt him, but his other numbers are enough better than everyone else that I think the writers will overlook it. There also isn’t any other obvious candidate, the 2nd best pitcher, Felix Hernandez, doesn’t have any more wins than Greinke and no one else is going to put up a huge win total like Colon did when he won.
Now the interesting question is does Greinke have a MVP argument?
You have a weird definition of the word “gloat”. Oh - and you’ll have to ask Cleveland that last question.
ElvisL1ves:
25 years of it tastes pretty bad, but only about 1/3 as bad as 80 years of it must have…
Wow. Really?
A guy who supports a losing team takes some pleasure in the fact that they have a couple of surprising, exciting comeback wins over a playoff team, and you feel the need to talk that sort of smack? Not only that, but you started it with, “Gotta suck living in Kansas City or some other hopeless place like that.”
You’re a really unpleasant person to talk baseball with. Are all Boston fans like you?
Oh Christ, DNFTT, please.
As to AL MVP, I think Mauer’s easily the choice, but then I thought he should have won it it 2006 and had a pretty good argument last year.
To do what? Enjoy the game? There’s TV highlights, news reports, insider stories … the Web is full of fun stuff.
Agreed, mainly because he’s gotten people out so consistently well without a solid team behind him.
Oooh, oooh, is it time for the “Pitchers have an award of their own already” argument yet? Is it?
Yep, nobody misses it, despite all that bullshit from the dilettante pseudointellectual literary crowd about expecting and even wanting failure to be ingrained in the New England psychology or something. Claiming to be a Red Sox fan is still trendy, but among a different set of dilettantes now, not the John Updike wannabes anymore.
And you have your memories of George Brett and Frank White to sustain you.
RickJay, mhendo, get a grip, both of you, okay? Enough with the threadshitting, please.
Yeah, Mauer is so far ahead of the other position players that it isn’t really even close.
He leads in both OBP (27 points ahead of his nearest rival), and in SLG (56 points ahead.
What is, perhaps, the most amazing is that Mauer also leads in VORP. This is incredible because VORP is an incremental or “count” statistic (like hits or home runs), one that basically increases with every game you play. So, the more games you play, the higher your VORP will be. Mauer leads the AL in VORP by 25 runs worth of value, despite missing a month on the DL. He’s that far ahead of the second place hitter (Derek Jeter), despite having 135 fewer plate appearances.
Greinke isn’t too far behind Mauer in VORP (87 v. 80 right now), but if i were voting it would be Mauer all the way. He could sit out the rest of the season and still get my vote.
If Greinke does win the Cy Young (which i believe he should), he will be the first pitcher ever to win it with fewer than 18 wins (excluding years where there was not a full season of games). I think it’s a good year for it, because the win leader (Sabathia) hasn’t been near as good as Greinke, and has had an incredible amount of run support for some of his more mediocre starts. Greinke, on the other hand, has had some diabolically bad run support from the Royal, including four starts where they couldn’t score at all.
Well, I have always felt Cy Young should go to the best pitcher, but I am one of those dunces that consider Wins important too. So silly of me where in the end, it is the most important stat even if you don’t actually have control over it. It is his very lack of Wins and innings per game that make me question him as a sure fire Cy Young candidate. He is a very good candidate, but not sure fire.
As to MVP, I feel it is meant to go to a player that helped his team the most and all players on non-competing teams do not qualify unless there is no good candidate. As the Twins climbed back into the race and made September meaningful, I think Mauer should win easily. Earlier in the month when it looked like they might finish under .500 and not contending in September, I would not have given him a vote.
More importantly, the Yanks are playing poorly and the Sox are red hot, meaning that the AL East race I thought was done is not. Though like the Dodgers and Rockies, the Yanks and Red Sox are simply jockeying for position, not elimination.
In my experience, yes.
I keed, I keed…
So, What Exit?: how many wins does Mauer have? Since they’re assigned to pitchers (who as you say have no direct control over them) - there’s no reason to not assign them to the other eight/nine players on the field, right?