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I Understood There Was to Be No Math

Firejoemorgan.blogspot.com is a pretty funny baseball site. The guys who run it can be entertaining writers. They also will never, ever achieve the wider audience they deserve unless they drop some bad habits.

Habit One: Don't Beat a Dead Horse. That's What Talk Radio is For. Fjm.com doesn't think David Eckstein is a very good player, and doesn't it like it when people who do, especially sportswriters, say so. OK. Truth be told, Eckstein is an OK player who'll buy a ticket to enter Cooperstown just like the rest of us. He's no bum, but he's no Jeter or Carlos Guillen either. Hell, he's no Jimmy Rollins.

The time to point this out, however, is not when the Cardinals' shortstop was one of the big contributors in a win that put his team one more win away from winning the World Series. All World Series heroes are made out to be better players than they are on their less well-noticed days. Go to the BPL and look up the stories on the first Series. Same deal. That's not writers making a categorical statement of baseball knowledge as bloggers do. It's hard to write about the World Series and not focus on the people in it. When they do good, there's an echo effect.

Habit Two: Don't use statistics only you and your nerd friends have heard of. If you can't make a good argument using the same stats God gave John McGraw, odds are there's a hole in your argument that needs mending.

One member of Fjm wrote, or more accurately, toted up a long post ridiculing the idea Jeter was the best offensive player in the American League in 2006. Jeter wasn't. He doesn't hit for enough power to be the best offensive player.

See how simple that was. I made the same point as Fjm in a mere 14 words, many of them short ones. The Jeter hater on the site needed almost 14 statistics I had never heard of. Forget VORP or win-shares, concepts I grasp although I don't use. These were VORPs love children. They were terms left over from that CBS cop show where the math nerd prodgy solves murders on the blackboard.

The post was in-crowd cult overkill. Those who know what the abbreviations mean were the hip crowd, a group I left in all aspects of life around 1973. Those who didn't were probably the clueless type of sportswriters who might point out that of all the GOOD offensive players in the AL, Jeter was the one who most raised his performance above his already high career norms, in a season where the Yankees would've sunk like a stone had he not.

I strongly suspect the Fjm post was a pre-emptive strike against the dire possibility Jeter will be named MVP next month, which he likely will, and deservedly so. Should that happen, I see more stats of the 23rd century in Forejoemorgan's future.

I'm all for amateur baseball commentators. At present, I AM one. I'm not even against math and science, as long as they give me a wide berth. And believe me, I love a good baseball argument.

But fellas, it's tough to conduct an argument when one side is speaking a language known only to itself. Fjm's problem is the same one many of the new-wave numbers crunchers have. Reading them is akin to reading the most popular baseball writer in Helsinki-in the original Finnish.

posted by Michael Gee @ 8:31 PM