DMN's Evan Grant votes for Michael Young as AL MVP

Cabrera got a combined two first and second-place votes, the same as Young. Both were behind Verlander (16), Ellsbury (17), Bautista (12) and Granderson (7) in number of first and second-place votes. Again, they're all credible choices.

 

Young late & close: .406/.488/.580
Ellsbury late & close: .289/.373/.444

I want to know who those jackholes were who threw away their votes on Ellsbury and I want them fired.

 

Who says he should be fired?

 

So, lots of sports writers put lots of other players ahead of Miguel Cabrera. Huh.

 

Lone nut.

 

I don't particularly care about this MVP vote. I only sought to address the larger issues of journalism that are implicated by it. My arguments assumed a meritless vote regardless of whether Mr. Grant's actually was meritless.

As for my preference for statistical analysis, call me a heretic, but I trust the scientific method. Must I respect someone's disbelief in global warming because they "saw it with their eyes, in spite of scientific evidence to the contrary.

 

"I never said Ed Muskie was taking ibogaine. I said there was a rumor in Milwaukeee that he was. Which was true, and I started the rumor in Milwaukee. If you read that carefully, I’m a very accurate journalist."

 

Yet another bogus argument: People who don't agree with every judgment of sabermetricians on baseball also must not agree with climate change. Try again.

 

Man, it's getting warm in here. Globally? Perhaps!

 

Does position matter?

 

This all reminds me of when "Mark McGwire" could be envisioned bursting a blood vessel at the very thought that anyone could think Pujols would be the MVP over Votto, over one little stat line.

Repeating: Miguel Cabrera, w/in four runs OPS: 1.008 (.107 higher than Young)....What in the fuck makes this some kind of magic bullet that settles all arguments and renders all objectors as goobers?

For the record, I thought Verlander was a darn good choice. And picking Young for first place seemed out of place, but the defense of it shows this wasn't the equivalent of a Jim Deshaies for the Hall vote, and was a credible vote, even if, again, it wasn't one I would have made.

And sabermetrics is not scientific method, unless there is a scientific standard to "this will always lead to one team scoring more runs in a game than the other" that is as ironclad as one about an explosion occurring if two certain substances interact. Waaay too many variables to be able to say that, no matter how much a well-meaning mathematician formulizes away.

 

Bogus argument? You must be familiar with a very different type of argumentative reasoning than I am. As I understand it, it is generally considered acceptable to illuminate a point by comparing one set of relationships to another. To say that sabermetric skeptics are to sabermetrics as climate change deniers are to climate change is not to say sabe sabermetric metrics skeptics are also climate change deniers.