Why does the Triple Crown seem underhyped?

Sorry, JC, I just turned 66 and am retirerd on Social Securty disability so I guess I'm an idiot in your eyes, but I covered baseball for more than 30 years and I've followed it for about 60. I think I know the game pretty well.
And if batting average is so devalued, why was the Melky Cabrera situation so important to everyone?

 

Isn't there room to maneuver between "no value" and "extreme value"? Doesn't seem like a binary decision to me. Batting average matters. It doesn't matter as much as we used to think it did.

 

Casty, you're smart enough to understand advanced statistics, so I don't understand why you choose not to do so ... but, anyway, I don't think the Melky Cabrera situation is that important to anyone outside the oddity of a mid-season change to in the eligibility at Melky's request. That's what made it a story.

 

There is nothing the average American male hates to hear so much as that watching a lot of baseball doesn't make you an expert on baseball.

 

I could play 36 holes of golf every day. If I used my putter on the tee, I would suck at golf, even though I played it a lot.

 

or Trout

When Yaz did it all you really had was newspaper coverage so outside of Boston area most could not see with their own eyes so the feat seemed larger than life. Now you can see almost every game and highlight which I think has watered down the achievement a bit.

Also think it has to do a bit with Cabrera's past issues. Yaz at that time was the embodiment of the American spirit. The son of a Long Island potato farmer.

 

We know which SportsJournalists.commers are still resistant to sabermetrics.

Which have admittedly come around?

LTL jumps out as one.

 

Agree with this.

Also, I think some of the lack of love for the Triple Crown is because it's somewhat arbitrary. It's not an award - it's something neat that doesn't happen that often, and the popularity has probably slid a bit thanks to some stat categories that have lost popularity in the past 20 years because other stat categories have gotten more popular.

 

I never called you an idiot and you are obviously smart enough to understand OPS and WHIP if you choose. These aren't even considered advanced stats anymore, they are in every players stat line.

Of course batting average has value, just not as much as it used to considering it gives the same value to a base hit that it does for a home run.

 

This is total semantics, but batting average has the EXACT SAME VALUE that it used to. We just understand that value better today than we did in the past.

I know I'm picking nits, but I think the way you phrased that helps lead to the rift, in a way, because the traditionalists get pissy at the idea that something USED TO BE WORTH X, and it's CURRENTLY WORTH Y. That's inaccurate. It was worth Y before, but we just thought it was worth X.

 

Stat line for original Triple Crown "Winner" Paul Hines:

1878 NL Paul Hines PRO .358, 4 HR, 50 RBI

I guess HR's were hard to come by in that era of baseball.

 

Considering the baseballs in those days were so over-used that they sometimes resembled a busted grapefruit, I'd say that's correct.