Joe Posnanski: Lord of Lists

Leather

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As I watched her, all I could think was how grown up she has become, how deeply I already miss the 4- and 5- and 6-year old versions of her, but also how fantastic the 9-year-old version is. No, I don’t want to start singing “Sunrise, Sunset” here … fathers understand.
 
 
This part got me.  I already miss the 12 month and 18 month versions of my kids.  Yes, they are more interesting and fun at 2, but they'll never be that cuddly and sweet again.  And, like, that's it, it's over.  Gone.  Just like that.
 

Leather

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His blog post on Ted Williams and the Boudreau Shift is classic Pos, though, with his unique blend of youthful, amused, fascination and down to earth explanation.
 

Brianish

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Per his Twitter, Joe was apparently at Harry Potter world with his kids today.
 
Hilarious. 
 

JimD

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Joe's new NBC Sports venture is up - SportsWorld  http://sportsworld.nbcsports.com/
 


There’s a beautiful scene in the movie “Heaven Can Wait” where the Warren Beatty character tries to convince his best friend that he didn’t really die. He explains and explains, sounding crazier with every sentence, until finally Mr. Jordan, his guardian angel, makes a suggestion.
 
“Try a little music,” Mr. Jordan says as he points to the saxophone that Warren Beatty’s character used to play. “That’s a great persuader.”
 
It is when I heard the music for the old Saturday Afternoon show NBC’s “SportsWorld” that everything rushed back. I loved everything about “SportsWorld.”
 
Sports television was different then … mostly because there just wasn’t very much of it. The baseball game of the week was exactly what it claimed to be – the only baseball game on television that week. There was no Sunday night NFL game, no 18-hole coverage of golf events, and even NBA playoff games were sometimes tape delayed.
 
And so we craved anything that resembled sports. And that’s precisely what “SportsWorld” was: Anything that resembled sports. Bowling? Yes. Pro wrestling? Yes. Horse races you had never heard of? Yes. Two guys racing down the side of a mountain? Yes.
 
That music would kick in, and this amazing feeling of expectation bubbled over. You had absolutely no idea what kind of athletic event you were about to see. I vividly remember one “SportsWorld” that featured the Bucketeers – a basketball team that Meadowlark Lemon had formed after he left the Harlem Globetrotters. I remember they played outside, on the beach, and it was brilliantly sunny, and a 44-year-old Wilt Chamberlain played for the Bucketeers. It was absolutely fantastic.
 
That feeling is what we’re hoping to recreate here as we reach into the past and revive NBC’s “SportsWorld.” The world has changed, and the media landscape has changed, and there are a lot of ways to tell a good sports story. We want to tell those stories in every way we can.
 
The guts of the new SportsWorld will be the writing. We will feature in-depth stories from the great writers we have throughout NBC – writers from the SportsTalks and the Golf Channel and Rotoworld and the regional sports networks.
 
Beyond that, SportsWorld will feature piercing and innovative video content from across the NBC Sports family. And, yes, we will have a few surprises lined up too because surprises were the essence of the old show.
 
Joe's first contributions are a column about Dale Earnhardt Jr. (http://sportsworld.nbcsports.com/this-is-40/) and a piece (not surprisingly) on Ned Yost and the Royals (http://sportsworld.nbcsports.com/better-off-ned/).
 

The Gray Eagle

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I never heard of SportsWorld on NBC. It sounds like a ripoff of ABC's Wide World of Sports, which was very famous and had a very memorable opening theme. Everything he wrote there would make way more sense (to me anyway) if you switch out SportsWorld with Wide World of Sports. 
 
But since it's NBC's website he can't do that I guess.
 
Sounds like the site is going to try to be like Grantland. I hope it's good.
 

The Gray Eagle

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Domer said:
Well, it has only existed for fewer than 24 hours at this point.
Yeah, I said I never heard of SportsWorld on NBC, not sportsworld.nbcsports.com. I was talking about the TV show Joe wrote four paragraphs about, that were posted right above my comment. Which is why I also talked about Wide World of Sports, which was also a TV show, not a website.
 
JoePos nailing it again. I think a few months ago I said he's got his fastball back and I don't think it's wavered at all.
 
http://joeposnanski.com/joeblogs/talking-pitching-and-defense/
 
 
I was thinking about this when looking hard at two pitchers with very similar records: Curt Schilling and Kevin Brown.
By some statistics, Schilling’s career and Brown’s career are freakishly similar. They pitched almost the exact same number of innings:
Schilling: 3,261 innings
Brown: 3,256 innings
They had very similar won-loss records.
Schilling: 216-146
Brown: 211-144
They have ERAs that are close, and their ERA+ —which compares them against league average and considers park factors — is identical:
Schilling: 3.46 ERA, 127 ERA+
Brown: 3.28 ERA, 127 ERA+.
And yet most people — including me — think Schilling was a noticeably better pitcher (For instance: I annually vote Schilling for the Hall of Fame, and did not vote Kevin Brown). Why? Well, there are some clear reasons. Brown was mediocre in the postseason, Schilling was legendary. Schilling had more good seasons. Schilling has the greatest strikeout-to-walk ratio in baseball history.*
 
...
 
Now, you consider the ballparks they played in, the leagues, and so on — look, Kevin Brown was a superb pitcher. But, in reality, he wasn’t as good as Schilling at preventing runs. His ERA is, at least in part, an illusion.
This is when some people will say: No! Not an illusion! You can’t blame Kevin Brown for those unearned runs.
I want to talk about this word “blame” in a minute.
 
Really good stuff, which gets you thinking about how one applies statistics to baseball.
 

JimD

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Love this:
 

We were in Houston, at a ballgame, and I saw a man steal a foul ball from a boy. It was flagrant – the man just took the ball right away from the boy, and he held it up high like it was the head of Medusa, and I said: “Would you look at this jerk?”
 
“What’s that?” Buck said.
 
“That guy down there, he just took that ball away from that kid.”
 
Buck considered the situation. He said: “Don’t be so hard on him. He might have a kid of his own at home.”
 
Yes, that was Buck O’Neil – he just saw the best in people, even people who took foul balls away from little kids. Maybe he’s got a kid at home. That was a good one; I had to give Buck credit, only then something occurred to me.
 
“Wait a minute,” I said to Buck. “If he’s got a kid, why didn’t he bring him to ballgame?”
 
I smiled triumphantly. But Buck did not hesitate.
 
“Maybe,” he said, “the kid is sick.”
 

Harry Hooper

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The Gray Eagle said:
Yeah, I said I never heard of SportsWorld on NBC, not sportsworld.nbcsports.com. I was talking about the TV show Joe wrote four paragraphs about, that were posted right above my comment. Which is why I also talked about Wide World of Sports, which was also a TV show, not a website.
 
Agreed, I have zero recollection of the program he was gushing about. It's like he grew up in this alternate universe where "Wide World of Sports" never existed.
 

Leather

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Orel Miraculous said:
 
A perfectly fine article until the cringe-inducing last line. Poz walks a fine line between emotional and maudlin.
Ya. My only criticism of Pos is that sometimes he tries too hard to connect on an emotional level. I think it's inseparable from who he is as a person (see how he approached Paterno and how it translated in his coverage), but he's such a personal and insightful writer he doesn't need that extra, explicit, push. It comes off as gilding the lily.
 

dcmissle

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So we have, at most, 7 years left. Savor them. That's nothing. The almost perfect season was 7 years ago.

Gates and Buffet were asked, independently, for the single greatest factor in their success. Same answer: focus.

That's why he no time for meaningless bullshit. It takes away from focus.
 

Super Nomario

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Trlicek's Whip said:
This piece that Joe filed on Belichick is freaking outstanding
It's fine, it's well-written, but ...
1) He's written that Tony Gonzalez story at least three or four times before
2) I don't think he really scratched the surface as far as who Belichick is. If you read Halberstam's book on Belichick or Holley's books, you see different sides of Belichick than those portrayed by the media: the teacher, the mentor to coaches, the funny, sarcastic guy behind closed doors, the guy who had Lenny Clarke perform in front of the team, the guy who told Josh McDaniels after he got fired from Denver that he needed to call his wife because his family would worry. Posnanski doesn't seem to get any of these facets of Belichick's personality: he's writing about the dour, calculating guy that the media usually sees. It's a disappointingly shallow take from a writer who typically goes deeper.
 

Phil Plantier

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I just came here to post that. Who else could write a moving essay about finding their vocation in the third person? He is in touch with his emotions and his community to an enviable degree, aside from his writing style (he excels at structuring the piece to have a real moment of impact at the end). For each time he goes over the edge into mawkishness, there are ten more examples just like this, when he nails the emotional tone exactly. I hope that I can one day do something as well as he does his side project.
 

touchstone033

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I'm a Pos fan, but that Christmas piece...? Meh. It felt like one of those campaign videos you make when you run for president. It's Posnanski's creation myth. And isn't it time he stopped playing the humble card? I mean, the man's a pretty damn good writer. That "aw shucks/humble origin" tone is wearing thin, IMHO. 
 
Bah humbug.
 

John Marzano Olympic Hero

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Cool piece by Joe on the players on the HoF who will probably get less than 5%. He does this every year and it's one of my favorite articles. 
 

Spelunker

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John Marzano Olympic Hero said:
Cool piece by Joe on the players on the HoF who will probably get less than 5%. He does this every year and it's one of my favorite articles. 
A cool little factoid that I'm ashamed I didn't already know:

"Nomar Garciaparra (Prediction: 5 or so). You probably picked Nomah out of the players listed at the time. Among shortstops with 5,000 plate appearances, the highest OPS belongs to Nomah. Yep. Higher OPS than Wagner, Jeter, Larkin, Ripken, you name it."
 

DeJesus Built My Hotrod

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touchstone033 said:
I'm a Pos fan, but that Christmas piece...? Meh. It felt like one of those campaign videos you make when you run for president. It's Posnanski's creation myth. And isn't it time he stopped playing the humble card? I mean, the man's a pretty damn good writer. That "aw shucks/humble origin" tone is wearing thin, IMHO. 
 
Bah humbug.
 
Your take may be entirely spot on - maybe it was self-indulgent.  However I read it more as a thank you to all of those people who encouraged him along the way, even if they didn't know who he was or didn't need to make the effort.  Based on what he's written, the guy simply prefers not to see the more cynical or dark side of people and that blind-spot probably is even bigger when it comes to his own career.   Its part of the reason I love his pieces - he wants to believe in the good and I root for him to find it every time.
 

JimBoSox9

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Papelbon's Poutine said:
 
In short, unless I'm missing something, in no iteration or combination of filters does Nomar beat ARod. I'm not sue how he cherry picked to arrive at that statement, other than that he no longer considers ARod a SS in his classification (even though it will likely be another year until he has more career PA as a 3B than a SS). 
 
Nomar had 77% of his PAs at shortstop.  A-Rod, if I'm seeing it right, has 5667 PA at short and 5209 PA at 3B (as you note), but also an additional 468 accumulated at DH and PH, for a grand total of 11344.  That crunches out to just a tick under 50% of his career at SS, and I'll wager you dollars to donuts that's the cutoff filter Pos used in b-ref to pull it (I don't subscribe to play index)
 
Between 1997-2006 (10 years), Nomah averaged 475 AB with a .910 OPS and 130 OPS+.  If it wasn't for garbage bullshit around long declines and counting stats (and steroids), he'd have a strong case.  
 

Leather

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It's a good quote, but I don't think he's saying (half-jokingly) that the Hall of Fame was invented for Pedro, so much as Pedro is exactly the type of player that should be in the HOF.
 

touchstone033

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DeJesus Built My Hotrod said:
 
Your take may be entirely spot on - maybe it was self-indulgent.  However I read it more as a thank you to all of those people who encouraged him along the way, even if they didn't know who he was or didn't need to make the effort.  Based on what he's written, the guy simply prefers not to see the more cynical or dark side of people and that blind-spot probably is even bigger when it comes to his own career.   Its part of the reason I love his pieces - he wants to believe in the good and I root for him to find it every time.
 
Yes, Joe's especially good at this, and that part of the story was fantastic. I admit it was the third-person, broke-and-confused-boy-on-a-city-bus tone that grated some. Into his writer's broth went a lot of hard work, a dash of boldness, and not a little genius. And luck. He's not some poor schmuck. He's a damn great writer, and his self-depiction at times seems a little too fantastic.
 
Whatever. That's Pos for me! One day, he whips out a brilliant multi-thousand word piece on the HoF, the next he's weeping over the worn spots in the grass at his childhood home.
 

JimD

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As usual, Pos nails it:

— Almost nine percent of the voters saw Pedro Martinez pitch — they saw him just like you and me — and decided not to check his name. It doesn’t matter. But it’s such a loss for them. If you don’t get goosebumps of joy doing your part to elect players like Pedro Martinez into the Hall of Fame, I have no idea why you vote in the first place.