It's time to be a fan again

Damn you got in here fast. It’s like your spider sense told you SUJU INC or something :O

Bated? I guess so.

I draw a parallel to looking at a magic trick. When you understand the optical illusion behind it, it is much less satisfying.

When Cain got off to the fantastic start last year, two things were constantly in the back of my mind that prevented me from fully enjoying it. Regression to the mean and BABIP. In the back of my mind I always knew it wasn’t real and he’s going to slow up in the 2nd half.

This is not to say I don’t appreciate FIP and BABIP. Just this year (at least at the beginning of the year) I would like to throw the projections out of the window and try to enjoy baseball as a fan instead of worrying about whether Matt Cain’s fastball has lost a couple of MPH and that his K/BB ratio isn’t indicative of a true ace.

For awhile at least. When we are 6 games back in June, I’ll be my normal bitchy self again.

…but sometimes the people that are really into stats leave the impression, whether they mean to or not, that:

• They’d rather be right about a player’s bad performance than wrong when he does well
• They’re quick to jump on a guy’s negatives and slow to recognize his positives
• They enjoy the number crunching more than the actual play
• They think if it can’t be explained statistically, it can’t possibly happen
• There’s no such thing as magic

“Magic” can be a number of thngs, from a team riding a wave of “Dustiny” to a starter struggling to hang on to his spot tossing a no hitter, to perhaps a pitching staff feeling more invested in the team results than ever now that they’re locked down and raising their level of play even more. You certainly want to put the best team you can on the field, but once the team takes the field, you need a certain amount of “magic” for thing to go your way.

I’ve made an effort to understand stats more and it’s definitely helped my understanding of the game, but I’m a fan first and I love watching me some baseball. While I don’t agree with every move management makes, I try to understand the possible motivation behind them and that makes me sometimes look like an apologist for Bochy Sabean. I also like rotting for a team I like and the 2010 Giants are hard to team to dislike. If the worst thing you can say about them is that their catcher is kind of sensitive or their closer is either cocky or crazy, that’s a pretty likable team.

I’m totally pumped for things to get rolling and REALLY interested to see how the season unfolds. This team should be more fun to watch than any recent team and could be really good if it plays to its potential.

Yeah. It’s a great vid up till that last moment where it goes for a cheap joke and completely deflates all the positivity that had been built. Unless the whole point of the video was just to make that joke, but based on the OP and the content of the vid, this doesn’t seem to be the case. I suppose it could be an elaborate troll…

I suppose if it were titled, “It’s time to be a hater again,” the last comment would work. As such, it is a bad ending to a great work of art.

my 2 favorite teams: The Giants and whoever is playing the Dodgers (so today, the Pirates)

Paint the puppy blue first – you’ll enjoy kicking it more.

Nice post in that it addresses the fundamental problem of the Giants way of evaluating performance as well as talent. It is actually the fundamental difference the hapless Bondsless Giants and the perennial post-season contenders.

It is the primary flaw in the free agency acquisitions of toads like Molina, Renteria, Sanchez, and the Giants as a whole, and it has nothing to do with metrics. It has to do with the value of not making outs. Not making outs is what defeats the team on defense. And even when you make an out, its about making the other team pay dearly for getting you out. To punish them and get to their second tier level of pitching as soon as possilbe. And the Giants teams under Sabean do not do that.

There were two main proponents of that long before Billy Beane came along.
The first was Branch Rickey in the 1940s when he utilized a minor league system in St. Louis as a way to compete with the big city East Coast teams. The ability to avoid making outs and making pitchers work was one of Rickey’s primary evaluation tools.

Earl Weaver during his 20 year run in Baltimore who had once upon a time been the hapless and feckless St. Louis Browns. We’re all familiar with his mantra of two-walks followed by a three run homer complemented by shut down pitching from the likes of McNally, Dobson, Palmer, and Cuellar. But he would carry on relentlessly about how valuable outs were.

In the early 80s when the Haas’ bought the A’s Sandy Alderson, old Walter’s son-in-law, was appointed GM. He was a huge proponent of using OBP (which has since evolved to wOBA) to evaluate hitters. So it could be said that Billy Beane is reallly just carrying on where Alderson left off.

Obviously there are more sophisticated criteria and observational judgements that are imputed into the talent and performance equations, but one thing is abundantly clear; especially in the post-Bonds era:

Brian Sabean and the Giants as a whole put little, if any value on not making outs. And that is the single biggest flaw.

It boggles my mind that even after all these years, how many unsuccessful college coaches and high school coaches do not understand this concept. Every year they go into the season with the recruits they think they need to compete for post-regular season play, and every year they come up short and blame it on injuries, bad luck, bad umpiring, the baseball gods, or bad player chemistry. And every year the good programs, even those with little money, have success with recruits and players that get overlooked or are minimized by their competitors, and their success is simply evaluated as “good coaching” and “overachievers”.

Sabean and Wade, and a few others, are not old school. Rickey, Weaver, and Alderson are old school. Sabean and Wade are just old tools stuck in their stubborn ways.