Yeah, I thought it was pretty fun. But wow, he's alomst totally gray, maybe that explains the goatee.
Grantland
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Yeah, I thought it was pretty fun. But wow, he's alomst totally gray, maybe that explains the goatee.
Yeah the photo essay took like no time to read, and was actally pretty fun. "Look what goofy shit sports nerds collect" is actually a surprisingly rich vein to mine for laughs.
solid photo essay, and i actually learned something because of it, for some reason I always assumed the usa-ussr miracle on ice game was the semi-finals and usa-finland was the final gold medal game, when in fact it was a round robin and it just happened to work out that way, but seeing the ussr silver medal got me to go look it up, thanks bill
The Barnwell article today on his move to Vegas, idea to write about living there and his look at NFL O/U wins was outstanding. I am looking forward to seeing where this is going to go. although he said he has only a couple thousand dollars in his account to play with. That might not last past 2:00am at the Gold Club
I suspect that the WWL will stake him a reasonable amount of betting scratch - and keep him solvent - for this experiment as long the dough isn't winding up stuffed in g-strings at the Spearmint Rhino. Heck, maybe they won't even mind that.
I'm more than a little envious.
QUoting a week-old post because I just read that Barnwell piece tonight. On top of your point about Ellis' one year deal, how the hell does he figure Mayo "would be marginalized in the 4-3?" Mayo's going to be a beast in the 4-3.
One other nitpick: In an article about free agency, he comes down hard on KC for their Tamba Hali signing. Hali wasn't a free agent so I expected him to explain how a resigning of their own player limited their ability to sign free agents but he didn't ... he only went on to talk about the Piscitelli deal. I have absolutely no idea what one has to do with the other.
Really sloppy writing.
Have to chime in that I thought the collectibles photo essay thing was pretty enjoyable. It gave me a real flavor of the show and it played well to Simmons' strengths. He's always best when he's being flippant and self-effacing rather than strident and bombastic.
Remember, back in early June, when Chris Jones did a big, self-referential piece about how he was going back to the baseball beat and would cover the AL East all season - referring to the division as The Beast?
Yeah, he wrote exactly one AL East story after June. That brought his grand total of Beast stories to, ummm, five.
Tough beat.
Yeah, he wrote exactly one AL East story after June. That brought his grand total of Beast stories to, ummm, five.
Tough beat.
Gladwell wrote his first article. http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6874079/psychic-benefits-nba-lockout
I think it's a pretty smart article and while the argument that sports franchises aren't normal business might not be earth shaking it's probably a novel thought to many readers.
The article is also a good test piece to determine whether editing matters to you. Read any Gladwell article in the rigorously edited New Yorker and then read this. Gladwell is a solid writer with a clean, conversational style, but even he benefits greatly from a good editor. If you're a prose style Nazi you'll see a a lot of clutter that you don't see in his New Yorker articles. For example, he uses the crutch phrase "of course" four times in the short Grantland piece, he uses hyperbole like calling baseball's pre free agency wage system "feudalism," and he has multiple parentheical thoughts set off with em dashes in almost every paragraph.
I suspect that most readers don't notice or, perhaps more likely, don't care about the difference and suspect that Grantland's loose editing is good enough for internet sports/pop culture work.
EDIT: And just like that SJH shows that if you dig into a Grantland piece the facts in the article aren't always that sound.
I think it's a pretty smart article and while the argument that sports franchises aren't normal business might not be earth shaking it's probably a novel thought to many readers.
The article is also a good test piece to determine whether editing matters to you. Read any Gladwell article in the rigorously edited New Yorker and then read this. Gladwell is a solid writer with a clean, conversational style, but even he benefits greatly from a good editor. If you're a prose style Nazi you'll see a a lot of clutter that you don't see in his New Yorker articles. For example, he uses the crutch phrase "of course" four times in the short Grantland piece, he uses hyperbole like calling baseball's pre free agency wage system "feudalism," and he has multiple parentheical thoughts set off with em dashes in almost every paragraph.
I suspect that most readers don't notice or, perhaps more likely, don't care about the difference and suspect that Grantland's loose editing is good enough for internet sports/pop culture work.
EDIT: And just like that SJH shows that if you dig into a Grantland piece the facts in the article aren't always that sound.
I posted this in the Port Cellar but it fits better here.
I have some issues with the Gladwell article and they have to do with his baseball stuff:
And he's 100% wrong about when the Sox had their first full time black player. Earl Wilson made 28 starts and threw 191 innings in 1962.
I have some issues with the Gladwell article and they have to do with his baseball stuff:
The Sox being last to integrate was a horrific chapter in the franchise's history and I'd argue it still stains them to this day. But he's writing as if the Sox held out for 10 or 20 years after the rest of baseball integrated. Detroit integrated 11 years after Jackie, Philly 10. The Sox were the worst in integrating but they had some close competition.
And he's 100% wrong about when the Sox had their first full time black player. Earl Wilson made 28 starts and threw 191 innings in 1962.
That's not how the story goes. That incredibly offensive comment was apparently yelled out, anonymously, from the grandstands while the black players were working out on the field. No one knows who shouted it, but the betting has for years been that it was Eddie Collins, Sox GM at the time. None of this makes the Sox' attitude towards black players at all acceptable, but Gladwell's sloppiness with the facts bugs me.
What happened to Katie Baker?
Yes, even writers take summer vacations, but after she finally took the plunge by quitting Goldman for a full-time writing gig, it's odd to see her go several weeks with only one feature article on the site.
Yes, even writers take summer vacations, but after she finally took the plunge by quitting Goldman for a full-time writing gig, it's odd to see her go several weeks with only one feature article on the site.
She's written several blog entries, etc.
http://www.grantland.com/search?query=katie+baker
She writes weekly or so for one of the Grantland blogs. They put a lot of good material on the blogs but that material isn't so obvious due to the site's piss poor design.
http://www.grantland.com/search?query=katie+baker
Yeah, you have no idea what's even there unless you specifically look to go to the Triangle. Baker actually writes pretty frequently for them and her pieces aren't that much shorter than some of the Grantland articles.
OTOH, Hollywood Prospectus sounds like total crap so it's nice I can almost completely ignore it.
OTOH, Hollywood Prospectus sounds like total crap so it's nice I can almost completely ignore it.
I thought the Rick Flair article would be interesting, but instead it read like the fact section of a complaint.
The 32 combined videos of rappers pitching St. Ides and Sprite completely make up for the somewhat lame writing here.
I didn't care enough to go through the whole exercise of the brackets with him after he'd narrowed it down to the elite 8, but I watched about half the videos, easily, and that made for a pretty enjoyable 10 minutes wasted. What a crazy window back into late-80s, early-90s marketing ideas (mostly bad ones).
I vote for the Grand Puba freestyle as my personal winner.
I didn't care enough to go through the whole exercise of the brackets with him after he'd narrowed it down to the elite 8, but I watched about half the videos, easily, and that made for a pretty enjoyable 10 minutes wasted. What a crazy window back into late-80s, early-90s marketing ideas (mostly bad ones).
I vote for the Grand Puba freestyle as my personal winner.
Grantland has a college football writer. John Brandon, who oddly enough was most recently a novelist, wrote his first of what will become a weekly column about college football. While I am happy that Grantland will not ignore college football like Bill Simmons does, I was not too impressed with Brandon's first effort, which was about Jim Tressel. I did, however, thoroughly enjoy the overreactions from Ohio State fans on Grantland's facebook page. Brandon's article really didn't add anything to ongoing debates about the NCAA and amateurism in general, including this lengthy thread on SoSH which veered off topic from the allegations at the University of Miami. The column did have its moments and Brandon does have a solid reputation as a writer, so I, as a college football fan, look forward to reading him again, but it remains to be seen if he can write effectively about college football.
It didn't add anything, but it did serve as a pretty solid accounting of the different angles, and explanation of his view on the matter. The line (para) "That's because many students don't own a fucking car." was almost jarring for me, but in a good way.
It remains to be seen if he'll be a good college football writer in much the same way it remains to be seen if he can write effectively about comparative farming techniques in the Bronze Age (NOTE: I did not read his book, my apologies if it's related to early agrarian societies), but while the angle wasn't exactly new, the style was one you don't really find anywhere else. That's at least encouraging for me - and the broader topic lends itself better to this style of writing than the ill-fated "Beast" it would seem.
Opinion pieces that aren't just intended to stir sports-radio-style page views would be most welcome.
If Grantland is insistent on writing about Rap music they really need to hire some more knowledgeable writers on the topic. The most recent article on Jay-Z is laughably bad. Without getting into too much detail, Jay-Z has, and does respond to the rappers the writer said he didn't respond too. Name's are usually withheld but it's clear who he's referencing when he says it. The whole article doesn't stand because the relevant question would be will Jay-Z continue to throw little lines here and there that those in the know catch, or will being insulted on such a large scale album and so blatantly make him dedicate a full song attempting to dismantle Lil' Wayne.
Just saw ESPN is plastering their front page with Grantland ads (sponsored by Subway!). It made me realize again, and I can't emphasize this enough, how bad a name Grantland is for that page. I don't care how prestigious Grantland Rice is, it's simply not a familiar enough name to most Americans (not counting SOSHers), meaning ESPN will have to work twice as hard to get the name to stick with readers. It would be like naming a pop-culture-meets-editorial-integrity astronomy site 'Ptolemy.'
It's also a stodgy, rarefied moniker at odds with the sites content, which is often not stodgy or rarefied at all (Q&A with Paul Rudd, Simmons' columns, Drankoff 2011, YouTube Hall of Fame, etc. etc.).
Grantland may succeed long term but it will be in spite of its name.
It's also a stodgy, rarefied moniker at odds with the sites content, which is often not stodgy or rarefied at all (Q&A with Paul Rudd, Simmons' columns, Drankoff 2011, YouTube Hall of Fame, etc. etc.).
Grantland may succeed long term but it will be in spite of its name.
I really enjoyed Jonah Keri's article on the Angels. Well-written, great use of stats, and a nice attempt to explain how stats don't necessarily tell the whole story regarding their success. I especially liked the way he used stats to show that Weaver's getting a little lucky, then explained how some of what's usually dismissed as luck may be a skill/by design.
I enjoyed the article too, but I think he missed out on a chance to make it even better, when he explained his two theories. He talks about the defense helping the starting pitching and therefore the bullpen, but he doesn't give any stats as to how the Angels rank in starting pitcher innings. Also, he states that more SP innings allow the better RP to pitch in higher leverage innings and therefore improve bullpen performance, but earlier in the article he states that the Angels are only 19th in reliever WPA. So it doesn't seem like the defense is leading to the cascade effect that he mentions. He also talks about not injuring SP's, with the effect that you wouldn't have to bring up a guy from Triple A or find a replacement outside the organization. Again, some stats here on # of starts and/or IP by their opening day 5 man rotation would be really helpful here to illustrate the point, but instead I'm left wondering if this theory of Jonah's holds any water whatsoever.
Edit: because I'm a curious guy, I went and looked up some of the stats to see if any of his arguments hold water. The Angels rank #2 in the AL in average innings pitched per start, at 6.49. The AL Average is 6.12, so the Angels are about 6.1% better than league average.
Their bullpen ERA is 3.44, which ranks 4th in the AL. However, their sOPS+ (split relative to league split) is a 102, which means that their bullpen is slightly below league average in OPS against. They are also tied for 9th in WAR (Baseball Reference), suggesting that they are below average from that perspective as well. I take all this to mean that the starters exellent innings-eating ability has not really helped the bullpen. The defense, however, has probably helped the relievers, as their FIP / x FIP are 4.08 / 4.04.
As for the second part of the argument, about SP's not getting injured, their core starting 5 has made 123 of a possible 130 starts. So this would support Keri's argument.
I enjoyed the article as well, but my main problem is that he didn't directly address the argument he presented. He said the Angles consistently outperform their run differential, then he presented a bunch of stats about why the Angels defense and pitching is good. But those things all are part of the run differential. The "cascading effect of a good defense" (fresher pitchers, less injuries, shorter innings, a better bullpen, etc.) doesn't directly have anything to do with outperforming their run differential. Those things should all contribute to giving up less runs, and improve run differential.
Now if he wanted to prove those attributes are important to winning close games, and help them always beat their pythag. record, that would be interesting. But unless I missed it, he didn't really get into that. Basically he just said the Angles manage to keep winning even though many of the numbers say they shouldn't be. But the question, at least to me, is why do they keep winning more games than their run differential would suggest? Is it just a great streak of luck? He certainly didn;t convince me that this cascading effect of defense has any value other than to help pitching and further prevent runs.
His discussion of Scioscia's impact suffers the same problem. Sure, maybe he has great strategies, great motivation, etc. But shouldn;t these all manifest themselves as improving run differential? If you motivate a hitter and he does better, shouldn't you just score more runs? If you motivate a pitcher, and it helps him pitch better, shouldn't he just give up fewer runs?
Does he have particularly great "close game" strategies? Does he have certain strategies that can backfire and lead to blowouts (and falsely decrease run differential compared to their talent level)? Perhaps in blow outs, he keeps his pitchers in longer (even if they are getting shelled) and accepts losing by even more, to keep the rest of the pen fresh for the next game? Do the Angels get blown out more than most teams in the first place? This stuff is more interesting than just saying the Angels don't have a bunch of MVP candidates but still win.
Well, they weren't doing this out of the box, and I'm sure they would rather sell that time for money.
That's kind of what I thought, I just don't know enough about what late August ad space runs for to draw a conclusion.
Well, it could very well be part of the deal that ESPN engages in a certain amount of Grantland promotion every few months, or simply 3 months after launch to refresh interest, especially now that kids are going back to school (i.e. college) so their target audience will have more time in front of the computer.
August is a slow time of year. Slow for ad sales, slow for sports generally. If ever there were a time to show a valued member of the team some love by throwing him some on-air promo, now is that time. I wouldn't take it to mean anything about Grantland doing or not doing well.
Molly Lambert hasn't written anything in a while, maybe they wised up and axed her. Of course I've probably jinxed and they'll post something from her today, which I'll read for three sentences before giving up.
Look, a shout out from Keri, in his email exchange with Simmons:
Also thought this was funny, Grantland's first threatened lawsuit, over the Ric Flair column: TMZ.com
Anyway I think so far, their sports pieces have been consistently good, and their sports blog is quality. Outside of Klosterman, I'm not as into their pop culture material.
Also, Grantland is finally debuting its podcast:
First one up today is their EPL podcast, with Davies and Bennett.
Also thought this was funny, Grantland's first threatened lawsuit, over the Ric Flair column: TMZ.com
Anyway I think so far, their sports pieces have been consistently good, and their sports blog is quality. Outside of Klosterman, I'm not as into their pop culture material.
She writes the True Blood recaps each week on the Hollywood blog on the left, there was a piece by her on a Sade concert a week ago too.
Simmons take on the MVP debate was actually pretty solid, and sort of un-Simmonsy in that he actually goes fairly in-depth and looks at the issue from a number of different angles, from the purely statistical to the historical to what I think of as the typical Simmons angle (stuff like "who makes for the most unmissable television moments") and stuff like that. Usually, he answers questions like this in a pretty glib way, like citing one game that jumped out at him without giving any context, or just saying "I never go to the bathroom when player X is playing so he's MVP". But he seemed to actually have put in a bit of effort fleshing out his points here.
I mean... I guess. But:
[Note: I had a pretty lengthy breakdown of why I think he, as is always the case when he attempts to tackle statistics, loses his train of thought and contradicts himself. But, I think the following ultimately sums up why I think the piece sucks, even if he deserves credit for pretending to care about stats]:
Tom "Hooooch! Ohh OH...DON'T EAT MY CLOTHES!" Hanks in fucking "Turner and Hooch"?
There are no fucking words.
Ultimately, he doesn't want Bautista to win because he plays on a second-rate team. That's his whole point, statistics be damned. He just took 3 pages to come to that cliched conclusion.
Fine. A valid point, I suppose. But don't be lazy about it: figure out somehow what the Jays record would be without Bautista.
Oh I see. So "Valuable" is determined by precedent. BUT FUCKING WAIT, BACK UP:
So...precedent only matters to Bill Simmons when he approves of it. Great.
Thanks.
If any other writer wrote this "analysis" he'd be pilloried.
EDIT: I give him partial credit for at least using statistics, but I don't think he really buys into them. He spends the first half of the piece talking about how statistics are great, then spends some time talking himself out of it (more or less: they don't matter if the team sucks), then talks about how people have voted in the past, then talks about Pedro, and concludes that Verlander reminds him of Pedro, so he should win on that basis.
He sounds like a shitty politician trying to make everyone happy but not really taking a stand on anything at all.
Dr. Leather covered a lot of why this article annoyed me. A couple more things
Then the train goes off the rails. He has to go seven or more each start (he has done that in 21 of 28 starts, so not quite each time. Averaging 7.5 per start which is awesome, but not each time). He has to save the bullpen, but their SPs usually go about six per start, so while not ideal it doesn't seem to me that much more of a burden than any other ace. John Lackey goes under 6 per start, Tim Wakefield goes about six per start (6.15), I am just eyeballing the 99 qualified MLB SPs for the ERA title. Most of them fall around 6 IP per start. You'll have oddballs like Chris Carpenter (6.7) or Derek Lowe (5.6), but most average MLB pitchers probably go 6 or 6 1/3 in an average start. Every bullpen should be expecting to pitch three innings per game unless you have an ace like Verlander going, and even then, he's probably saving one reliever an outing every five days. Value's there in that you can have each of your bullpen guys pitch five less innings over the course of a years, but that effect seems overblown. They had to win? Bill points out that they are 21-8 in Verlander starts. The Tigers have been a slightly above average offense this year, let's say that a league average pitcher goes .500 with them (so let's say 15-14 in his starts, about six wins). If you make that record 15-14 instead they are in a dead heat for the AL Central, not fourth place that Bill imagines. If they went to 4th place with Verlander replaced by an average pitcher, that means Verlander is responsible for about SEVENTEEN WINS OVER AN AVERAGE MLB SP. I mean, he is probably a player who is their division lead, but they wouldn't be FUBAR without him. If he loses a game, they aren't dead in the water. The rest of it is psychological babble. Does he really think that Jose Bautista has never thought "Wow, I have Eric Themes and Adam Lind surrounding me in the lineup, and the second best hitter in my lineup is Edwin Encarnancion or Brett Lawrie, I need to play well or we will lose?". And he has to deal with that every day, unlike every five days for Verlander. Really, Jose Bautista's OPS is almost THREE HUNDRED POINTS HIGHER than the next highest starter in the lineup (over the whole year, excluding Lawrie due to SSS). 300! The next closest hitter in WAR in his lineup is Yunel Escobar at 4.4. He is at 8.0. After those two is Brett Lawrie at 2.0, the highest pitcher is Brandon Morrow with 3.0. Verlander has a similar gap for pitchers (he has 6.3, Porcello is next at 2.0). They also happen to have three of the top thirteen AL hitters in WAR (Avila, Cabrera, Peralta), and three more just behind Lawrie (Jackson, Martinez, and Boesch)
Then he brings up the team argument. OK, this drives me nuts. You know what the difference is between the Detroit Tigers and the Toronto Blue Jays? Their division. The Blue Jays are 20-15 against the AL West, the Tigers are 16-16. They both did poorly in interleague play (8-10 and 7-11 respectively). They have been very similar against each other's division (17-13 and 18-14) The Tigers got to play 56 games against the AL Central (35-21), while the Blue Jays have had to play 55 games in the AL East (24-31). I am not sure if they would be even if they had an even schedule, or if they would swap records if they switched divisions, but it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to say that Toronto would be competing for the AL Central title if they got 19 games against Cleveland, Chicago, Minnesota, and Kansas City instead of Boston, New York, Tampa, and Baltimore. Detroit, even with their current record, would be seven games back of second place in the AL East.
Beyond that, they have performed very similarly this year. Toronto's Pythagorean Record is actually a game better than Detroit. Toronto has scored an extra fifth of a run per game, and allowed .07 more runs per game. Would Bautista be a more valuable player if Toronto had Detroit's record in one run games? Would Verlander be less valuable if instead of having Jose Valverde as his closer (40 saves, 58 games finished in 62 appearances, no blown saves, 2.5 ERA, 1.8 B-Ref WAR) he had the Toronto conglomeration of Jon Rauch and Frankie Francisco?
Bill seems to be running on the theory that a baseball team cannot have an MVP if they are not a playoff contender, but they can also not have an MVP if they are too good. Essentially, his MVP has to come from the Rangers, Angels, or Tigers (and the Tigers are questionable enough for me, they are as far ahead in a playoff race as the Red Sox are). It's like saying that the most valuable teacher in a school district has to come from the school whose students rank 3rd to 5th in standardized test scores. The #1 and #2 schools have a lot of good teachers so they're out, and the #6 through #14 schools are in need of improvement so there's no way the best teacher can be hidden in there. I'll never get that argument.
He also complains that Ivan Rodriguez beat out Pedro from MVP in 1999 and that's perfectly valid. He notes Pudge's WAR was about 2 lower, he had offensive players in the league that were just as good, even one on his own team, okay. He calls this a Sabermetric disaster. All good and well, I am fully on board with this.
To recap, he said that Pedro Martinez should have won the MVP and Cy Young because he was by far the best pitcher in baseball/on the Sox, he had a higher WAR than Rodriguez, drew a ton of fans in, and so on and so forth. Steve Carlton did the same damn thing. His WAR was 2.4 higher (B-Ref) than any other NL player that year and 5 higher than any other NL pitcher, as is noted. Bill says Pedro drew the crowds in, but Carlton was one of only two or three redeeming players on his team as well (and Boston did have Nomar Garciaparra and a good offense at the time). He was not Pedro, but he was a different kind of monster. Bill then says he would have voted for Bench as the "key player on a stacked Reds team". Ivan Rodriguez was also the key player on a playoff-caliber Texas Rangers team (a catcher who went 30-20 who was the best defensive catcher in the game by most metrics) who had a b-ref WAR that was at least the highest on his own team (unlike Bench). The situations are very similar, except Carlton's Phillies still sucked and Pedro's Sox were good enough in other areas to cobble together wins outside of Pedro. He says in his article he's not voting for a Red Sox because there are too many good players on the team, but he will vote for Johnny Bench (on the Reds with Joe Morgan and Tony Perez) as the "key player on a stacked team), who had a bigger playoff cushion than the Sox have! He says earlier in the article that a player on a non-contender has to be substantially better than the rest of the field and there has to be no standout from a winning team. I disagree but it's a common enough idea. What exactly is a substantially better player if not someone whose WAR is 2.5 higher than #2 and the highest for a pitcher in that generation? I mean, really. Morgan and Bench were great that year, but the drop from #1 to #2 (2.5) was more than the drop from #2 to #5 (1.9), and about the drop from #5 out of the Top 10. It's only one stat of course, but Steve Carlton's 12.4 WAR that year has only been beaten three times in the last forty years: twice by Barry Bonds and once by Doc Gooden. I'm not saying his Pedro point is wrong, but I don't know how you can say that you would vote for Bench after what you have put out unless you literally DQ anyone from a losing team (and he didn't do that).
I don't consider myself a Bill Simmons hater. I actually like the guy and I tend to agree with a lot of what he says, but this article was a hot mess and that's coming from someone who buys the idea that a pitcher can be MVP.
It starts off fine. Technically, it's 4.9 runs per non Verlander start but it's not important. The records argument is weak but sure, why not? I mean, you have a pitcher like Justin Masterson whose team is 18-10 when he starts and is 50-56 when he doesn't pitch, but I can see some value in it. I don't think there's a huge value with "winning after a loss" when your team doesn't follow suit (he says it's a .500 team otherwise). The pitch count argument just means he doesn't get bombed. You know who else has pitched for 6+ inning in the vast majority of his starts (all but two this year)? Mark Buehrle. I mean, Mark Buehrle and Justin Masterson are very good pitchers, we'd all love to have them on our teams, but we're arguing for MVP here. The wins argument is useless, WHIP, K's, IP all have value. It then falls apart for me. First of all, he goes later on to say that pitchers who are dominant win MVP, and then points out that Jered Weaver has a nearly identical ERA/ERA+! Looking over the rest of their stats, Verlander's WAR is higher but the rest of it? Verlander sees an extra couple batters each time, and he K's more players. Does Weaver suddenly not warrant discussion because, somehow, Anaheim isn't contending for a playoff spot (they are of course) and he has two other great pitchers in the rotation with a comparably worse offense? If you put any value in WPA, Weaver leads by about .8 there over any other AL pitcher, and Jose Bautista leads any other AL hitter by 1.7. He says Verlander has the highest WAR...if you go by Baseball-Reference. He neglects to mention Fangraphs WAR, where he is tied for the lead...among AL pitchers, behind four more AL Hitters. He then goes on to say, by the numbers, Bautista has been more impressive! After all that.
Then the train goes off the rails. He has to go seven or more each start (he has done that in 21 of 28 starts, so not quite each time. Averaging 7.5 per start which is awesome, but not each time). He has to save the bullpen, but their SPs usually go about six per start, so while not ideal it doesn't seem to me that much more of a burden than any other ace. John Lackey goes under 6 per start, Tim Wakefield goes about six per start (6.15), I am just eyeballing the 99 qualified MLB SPs for the ERA title. Most of them fall around 6 IP per start. You'll have oddballs like Chris Carpenter (6.7) or Derek Lowe (5.6), but most average MLB pitchers probably go 6 or 6 1/3 in an average start. Every bullpen should be expecting to pitch three innings per game unless you have an ace like Verlander going, and even then, he's probably saving one reliever an outing every five days. Value's there in that you can have each of your bullpen guys pitch five less innings over the course of a years, but that effect seems overblown. They had to win? Bill points out that they are 21-8 in Verlander starts. The Tigers have been a slightly above average offense this year, let's say that a league average pitcher goes .500 with them (so let's say 15-14 in his starts, about six wins). If you make that record 15-14 instead they are in a dead heat for the AL Central, not fourth place that Bill imagines. If they went to 4th place with Verlander replaced by an average pitcher, that means Verlander is responsible for about SEVENTEEN WINS OVER AN AVERAGE MLB SP. I mean, he is probably a player who is their division lead, but they wouldn't be FUBAR without him. If he loses a game, they aren't dead in the water. The rest of it is psychological babble. Does he really think that Jose Bautista has never thought "Wow, I have Eric Themes and Adam Lind surrounding me in the lineup, and the second best hitter in my lineup is Edwin Encarnancion or Brett Lawrie, I need to play well or we will lose?". And he has to deal with that every day, unlike every five days for Verlander. Really, Jose Bautista's OPS is almost THREE HUNDRED POINTS HIGHER than the next highest starter in the lineup (over the whole year, excluding Lawrie due to SSS). 300! The next closest hitter in WAR in his lineup is Yunel Escobar at 4.4. He is at 8.0. After those two is Brett Lawrie at 2.0, the highest pitcher is Brandon Morrow with 3.0. Verlander has a similar gap for pitchers (he has 6.3, Porcello is next at 2.0). They also happen to have three of the top thirteen AL hitters in WAR (Avila, Cabrera, Peralta), and three more just behind Lawrie (Jackson, Martinez, and Boesch)
Then he brings up the team argument. OK, this drives me nuts. You know what the difference is between the Detroit Tigers and the Toronto Blue Jays? Their division. The Blue Jays are 20-15 against the AL West, the Tigers are 16-16. They both did poorly in interleague play (8-10 and 7-11 respectively). They have been very similar against each other's division (17-13 and 18-14) The Tigers got to play 56 games against the AL Central (35-21), while the Blue Jays have had to play 55 games in the AL East (24-31). I am not sure if they would be even if they had an even schedule, or if they would swap records if they switched divisions, but it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to say that Toronto would be competing for the AL Central title if they got 19 games against Cleveland, Chicago, Minnesota, and Kansas City instead of Boston, New York, Tampa, and Baltimore. Detroit, even with their current record, would be seven games back of second place in the AL East.
Beyond that, they have performed very similarly this year. Toronto's Pythagorean Record is actually a game better than Detroit. Toronto has scored an extra fifth of a run per game, and allowed .07 more runs per game. Would Bautista be a more valuable player if Toronto had Detroit's record in one run games? Would Verlander be less valuable if instead of having Jose Valverde as his closer (40 saves, 58 games finished in 62 appearances, no blown saves, 2.5 ERA, 1.8 B-Ref WAR) he had the Toronto conglomeration of Jon Rauch and Frankie Francisco?
I don't disagree with the idea that the MVP of a league can be a starting pitcher. But saying it's because Lefty Grove won the first MVP is bizarre. Wings won the first Oscar, does that mean a silent film (in 2011) can be the best film? Maybe. But I don't think the fact that Wings won the first Oscar for Best Film is justification of that. The Lefty Grove argument also doesn't work because Lefty Grove was by far the best pitcher in baseball that year. He had an ERA+ of 220. His ERA was lower than Verlander's in a league where the average team scored more runs than 12 of 14 AL teams this year. His WAR was 3.4 more than the next AL pitcher, second most innings in the league, so on and so forth. I mean, he was way better than any other pitcher, unlike Verlander who is better but C.C. and Weaver are also there.
Bill seems to be running on the theory that a baseball team cannot have an MVP if they are not a playoff contender, but they can also not have an MVP if they are too good. Essentially, his MVP has to come from the Rangers, Angels, or Tigers (and the Tigers are questionable enough for me, they are as far ahead in a playoff race as the Red Sox are). It's like saying that the most valuable teacher in a school district has to come from the school whose students rank 3rd to 5th in standardized test scores. The #1 and #2 schools have a lot of good teachers so they're out, and the #6 through #14 schools are in need of improvement so there's no way the best teacher can be hidden in there. I'll never get that argument.
He also complains that Ivan Rodriguez beat out Pedro from MVP in 1999 and that's perfectly valid. He notes Pudge's WAR was about 2 lower, he had offensive players in the league that were just as good, even one on his own team, okay. He calls this a Sabermetric disaster. All good and well, I am fully on board with this.
To recap, he said that Pedro Martinez should have won the MVP and Cy Young because he was by far the best pitcher in baseball/on the Sox, he had a higher WAR than Rodriguez, drew a ton of fans in, and so on and so forth. Steve Carlton did the same damn thing. His WAR was 2.4 higher (B-Ref) than any other NL player that year and 5 higher than any other NL pitcher, as is noted. Bill says Pedro drew the crowds in, but Carlton was one of only two or three redeeming players on his team as well (and Boston did have Nomar Garciaparra and a good offense at the time). He was not Pedro, but he was a different kind of monster. Bill then says he would have voted for Bench as the "key player on a stacked Reds team". Ivan Rodriguez was also the key player on a playoff-caliber Texas Rangers team (a catcher who went 30-20 who was the best defensive catcher in the game by most metrics) who had a b-ref WAR that was at least the highest on his own team (unlike Bench). The situations are very similar, except Carlton's Phillies still sucked and Pedro's Sox were good enough in other areas to cobble together wins outside of Pedro. He says in his article he's not voting for a Red Sox because there are too many good players on the team, but he will vote for Johnny Bench (on the Reds with Joe Morgan and Tony Perez) as the "key player on a stacked team), who had a bigger playoff cushion than the Sox have! He says earlier in the article that a player on a non-contender has to be substantially better than the rest of the field and there has to be no standout from a winning team. I disagree but it's a common enough idea. What exactly is a substantially better player if not someone whose WAR is 2.5 higher than #2 and the highest for a pitcher in that generation? I mean, really. Morgan and Bench were great that year, but the drop from #1 to #2 (2.5) was more than the drop from #2 to #5 (1.9), and about the drop from #5 out of the Top 10. It's only one stat of course, but Steve Carlton's 12.4 WAR that year has only been beaten three times in the last forty years: twice by Barry Bonds and once by Doc Gooden. I'm not saying his Pedro point is wrong, but I don't know how you can say that you would vote for Bench after what you have put out unless you literally DQ anyone from a losing team (and he didn't do that).
I don't consider myself a Bill Simmons hater. I actually like the guy and I tend to agree with a lot of what he says, but this article was a hot mess and that's coming from someone who buys the idea that a pitcher can be MVP.
I think thats oversimplifying it. He thinks team performance absolutely should be a factor, but not the sole factor. Thats not an especially unusual position to take.
"Buys into them" in what sense? Recognizing that they offer a really accurate window into how good a player was? I think he does that. But one can recognize that stats are the best/only way we have to reliably gauge how well a player performed, but not necessarily think that individual performance is all that matters when determining MVP. If holding players accountable for shit beyond their control (who they played with, when and where they played, who they played against) seems unfair, it shouldn't, because we as a society do this for EVERYTHING. Presidents are judged on economic performance which they very rarely have any real control over. Oscars are taken from movies that fulfill a fairly narrow range of criteria regardless of how good the performance of any one actor might have been. CEOs are credited when their company does well or badly, even if said companies are simply performing in line with the rest of the market.
"Greatness" in American society has never been about an individual doing everything they can with what they can control, it has always been about also benefiting from being in the right circumstances. One can recognize this without disagreeing with it. Stats give us a better way to isolate individual performance, but they don't override the fundamental fact that as a culture we like holding people accountable for stuff they can't control.
Its not that strange an argument at all. It comes to two simple questions:
What did player x's team accomplish?
How much of that accomplishment should be credited to player X?
If your team didn't actually win much at all, then the answer to question 1 is "not much", and so no matter how much of that meager accomplishment you want to credit to player X, they're still operating with a ceiling.
If your team won a shitload, but were so stacked that it is questionable whether player X was absolutely critical to all of those wins, then they're also going to suffer. Call this the "Lebron James can't be MVP while he's playing with Wade and Bosh unless they collectively shatter every record in the books" corollary.
Again, you see this thinking all over the place. The best presidents are always considered the ones who took over the country at a shitty/tough time, and then performed "well", even if a lot of that wasn't stuff they really controlled (like they came in when the economy sucked, then it improved, so they are seen as great for the economy regardless of what they did). If the country went to shit when you were president, sorry, you can't be one of the greats. But if it was in great shape when you found it, you can't be one of the greats either even if you kept the ship sailing smoothlly. How good you actually were as a leader is but one of many factors in determining how history will view you.
We don't have sabermetrics for presidents, but if we did, I don't think this dynamic would change in at all.
Edit: To expand upon this a bit, Americans don't like people who "make excuses". But what is "making excuses", really? Well, more often than not, it means putting outcomes in context. "Sure I was late to work, but only because there was a pileup on the freeway." "The only reason we lost is because our starting quarterback had the flu". That kind of thing. It takes a black and white outcomes and muddies the waters, and we've never liked that, which is why we have so many sayings like "no excuses." We like tasking people with outcomes they may or may not be able to entirely control, then holding them fully accountable for those outcomes.
Well, a lot of sabermetrics is fundamentally about context. "Pitcher X might have given up a shitton of runs, but only because he got super unlucky on balls in play." "Player Y might have had a zillion RBIs, but really thats because he played in a hitter's park with 3 speedy, high onbase guys in front of him in the lineup." That kind of thing. They're a direct challenge to the prevailing "no excuses" ethic, because they are all about providing more in-depth context.
I suppose one might therefore say that to buy into sabermetrics, you have to reject the "no excuses" ethic that blames or rewards people for outcomes regardless of context. But I don't think thats true. Its possible to recognize that one is holding people accountable for stuff beyond their control, and then happily do it anyway. Like, one can say, "RBIs are clearly only tangentially related to individual performance. They are massively dependent on having hitters around you in the lineup get on base." and fully believe that. Then one can also say, "The MVP is the hitter who best took advantage of opportunities created for him by teammmates who get on base a lot." There's no contradiction there. Its an eyes-wide-open, fully conscious embrace of an ethic that knowingly takes into account factors beyond the control of the individual.
Of course, thats hugely unfair to those individuals, to the guy who might have hit every bit as well but simply had worse teammmates. But who ever said life, let alone baseball, was fair?