Salon's Kaufman accuses Kindred of 'ignorance'

nerd.

 

A comment like that just shows how low your PLARG score is, Tom.

 

Back in the olden times? You mean like when betting pools were common among kids in the neighborhood, wagering their alllowances on how many hits and runs a given player would have in a given week? When people of all ages studied box scores and looked forward to The Sporting News every week to look at -- believe it or not -- all the numbers and figure out the averages? When managers like Earl Weaver used situational numbers to gauge when he should bring in a lefty or a righty pinch-hitter?

Please. The good old days are only "simple" in your memories because you didn't know any better back then. That's innocence, not simplicity. Get over it. The world was never simple.

Plenty of people, young and old, were fascinated with numbers back then, just as much as today. Kids who played strat-o-matic and invented dice baseball games in their bedrooms and argued about whether Williams was better than Dimaggio or Hornsby was better than Sisler. That's all anybody's arguing about today, either, just in different ways. But blowhards like Bill Plaschke want to make it seem like anyone who thinks on-base percentage might just be a better way to measure how a batter performs than batting average would rather watch robots than baseball players. Couldn't be further from the truth.

So let's quit acting like the "good old days" were days when the only numbers anybody knew about were R-H-E and the Triple Crown stats. That's your memories ignoring reality, which was just as complicated then as it is now. Nobody says you need a math degree to understand a game. Except maybe King Kaufman. But he's a blowhard, too, or at least he is in this column.

Why you people let others hinder your enjoyment of the game, I'll never know.

 

Have raised this elsewhere, but I'd like to know exactly how many baseball lifers, and at what cost, and with what kind of organizational oversight, have been pushed out to make room for the Voros McCrackens and other stat guys.

The "fat scout" referenced and subtly mocked in Moneyball? He gone. He long gone.

 

Well, isn't that life?

Being a "lifer" doesn't guarantee you a job, especially iff what you provide -- like chewing tobacco, sitting in the stands and believing Juan Pierre is an above-average major-leaguer -- isn't a useful service. A hundred or so years ago, a bunch of life-long buggy-whip manufacturers could have explained this in some detail.

 

And more to the point, this sympathy for the vanished baseball lifer wasn't your original argument. Your original argument was that NERDS!!! are ruining the game, by God. Which really made no sense, as I said.

 

yeah, but believing maz is the best fucking second baseman in the history of the game is right on par with the pierre theory.

 

Who thinks that?

 

BJ has long had a chubby for maz.

 

But I don't think he's said he's the best second baseman in the history of the game, has he?

Suddenly, goalposts are moving all over the place...

 

This is the kind of stuff that creates so much unpleasantness in this debate.

I don't know how many real, honest-to-God "baseball people" you've talked with -- the Dork Brigade doesn't count -- but they bring a hell of a lot more than that. Something close to institutional knowledge, understanding of true human strength and weakness and limitation. Which used to be valued, before Bill James and friends decided they had to shatter conventions and cross the boundaries set up by those mediocre minds.