2014 World Series thread

It seems like for stuff like this they've been "Rules Are Rules!!!!!" but now rules aren't rules, in part because it's a girl.

Gotta believe Todd Gurley made less than Mo'Ne Davis.

 

She is swishing a half court shot in the commercial.

 

Correct.

 

Was it the video games? Was it how well they got along as a team?

Or did the Royals have an awesome second half and playoffs because MLB changed the strike zone mid-season in a way that benefited their crop of high-ball hitters?

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=24901

Nothing definitive, but an interesting hypothesis supported by actual data.

 

Rick, why does the video game thing strike you as so stupendously ridiculous?

 

No data. We would need to study the performance of every team on the days video games were allowed, beginning with Pong.

 

The 1964 Phillies were supposedly undone when Cookie Rojas brought one of these into the clubhouse:



And who can forget how the 1978 Red Sox collapsed after Bill Lee brought back a Space Invaders machine from a trip to Japan during the All-Star break?

 

Bobby V says everyone knows that the killer is always a bucket of fried chicken and beer.

 

It isn't inherently ridiculous. But it's also silly to accept it readily.

A hundred things happen to a baseball team over the course of a year. Rules are changed, added, dropped. Players come, players go. Team meetings are held. Different lineups are tried.

If a team gets hot, the odds are overwhelming that it's going to correlate with one of those things and the players and sportswriters will get on with their post hoc ergo prompter hoc.

 

Yep. Preposterous story narrated by a bunch of old coaches happy to have some attention from the media.

 

I don't know. I didn't feel like the writer attributed the turnaround completely to the video game. And he had contemporaneous quotes from players - some of which sounded like they may have been reported at the time - about how they needed to cut back on the game.

I highly suspect that if I mosied over to the video game thread on Anything Goes, I'd find contributions from a lot of the primary objectors here to this story.

 

I haven't owned a video game system in a long, long time.

I don't have a problem with the story being written. There's a lot of column inches to fill in a baseball season. But I'm still going to poke fun at it a little bit.

I haven't the slightest problem believing that the players believe it. I imagine they believe a lot of things that aren't true about why their baseball performances do or don't happen, and that's OK.