Mark Potash just made my blog

Congrates man. Now I know this was probably just a throw away introduction to the best White Sox players of all time, but you still spit the bit here. (Me in regular/Mark in italics)

No question Frank Thomas is the best hitter in White Sox history. But is he the best player?
Baseball purists probably would look elsewhere for the No. 1 player in the history of a franchise -- for somebody who not only produced at the plate, but in the field. Or at least played in the field.
That wouldn't be Thomas.

A valid assessment. Looks like you're going to pick someone else as the greatest players, maybe Shoeless Joe or Appling

As great of an athlete as he is, he was never a dancing bear at first base.

A dancing bear at first base seems like a promotional night from the ghost of Bill Veeck. And yes, it probably would have more range than Thomas. I think you might go with Luis Aparicio Mark, he was solid on both sides of the ball.

Eventually, his disdain for playing in the field tagged him as not only one-dimensional, but selfish.

Yes, it was selfish for him to not want to play a position he wasn't good at. Better he drag the team down with him, that's unselfish.

And counterproductive. As a designated hitter, Thomas batted .275 with 29 home runs and 94 RBI per 500 at-bats. As a first baseman, he hit .337 with 36 home runs and 117 RBI per 500 at-bats.

That's a really great job of cherry-picking statistics without giving any context. You see, Thomas played 1st base in the beginning of his career, when he was a monster. After age 30 he played DH mostly, when he was in decline and had nagging injuries. So of course his numbers as a DH are going to be worse. You're basically comparing two different players. A young healthy player in the prime of his career vs. an older player on his way out.

If he cares about his numbers as dearly as citics (sic) say he does, he should have been begging to play the field, maybe even working to get better at it.

I have no way to know if Frank worked on playing first base better or not. I wasn't at spring training or at their practices during the season. But I doubt a major league athlete with Thomas' ego just gave up and allowed himself to look like a minor leaguer at 1st base. And the idea that his hitting and fielding are directly correlated is ridiculous as I showed in the paragraph before.

If it were a close call, it would be tough to choose him. In 16 years with the Sox he played 971 games at first base, 960 as a DH.

Well, it looks like Mark is going to go with someone else from White Sox history.

But it's not a close call.

Wha?!?!?!

Besides being the Sox' all-time leader in home runs (448), RBI (1,465), doubles (447), runs scored (1,327), on-base percentage (.427) and OPS (.995), he has monstrous seasons that put him in a class with Ted Williams, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig among the best hitters of all-time. Two MVP awards, a second and two thirds.
Thomas' accomplishments are so far ahead of everybody else in Sox history, he is the clear choice as the No. 1 Sox player of all time. You can't say he didn't earn it.

SWERVE!!!! Someone went to the Vince Russo school of writing.

Case Closed!

Raw is Fire!

Vince McMahon inviting Bret back to Raw in the most disingenuous way possible was hilarious to watch. I don't know how Vince kept from smiling when he said he would hire a hydraulic lift to get Bret into the ring. A really great segment that will hopefully make up for the cartoonish turn this angle took last time.
The Batista and Cena angle was good. Apparently Sheamus was concussed the night before and could not be a part of Raw, so they had to throw this idea together, which worked. Dave is really getting some great heat from the crowd.
There was also the Shawn Michaels video. Bryan Alvarez claimed that you could show this video to anyone who had not been a fan for years and they would get the angle and be into it. He said this was the best video the WWE had produced in years. So I tested the theory out with a friend of mine who has not watched wrestling in probably 10-15 years...No buys.
His first observation was "why would I care about two 50-year-olds?" I didn't point out that both were only 45. Then I got to thinking. The two main events at WM are between wrestlers whose combined ages are 90 and two more (Vince 65/Bret 52) who combine for 117. Wow.
Anyway, he wasn't too thrilled about the idea of watching any of them wrestle each other. It makes me wonder if that is a general feeling out there. WM buys depend a lot on casual fans...and maybe you reach a point where they just feel 'this is stretching my imagination too far' when it comes to nostalgia acts, at least as far as main eventing goes. Those of us who follow wrestling know that Taker/Shawn can still go out and put on a great match, but does the casual fan think that? Eh, I'm probably over analyzing this, why do I care about WM buyrates anyway?

Sky's back!!!!

I was planning on writing a post about how great the WWE's lead up to Wrestlemania is going, but then I found an article written by my boy Sky Andrecheck...and well...it's too good to pass up. Here's the first one I did by Sky. And as you'll see in this article, he's still as unsure as a freshman asking out the hottest senior in school:


Spring training games aren't as meaningless as they may seem

Alright, way to take a stand Sky. Spring training games are kinda meaningless, but not totally meaningless. There's some meaning. Not a lot. But some. You're like that monk that burned himself alive, except you just lit a shoe box on fire and said "Well you get the idea."

One of the most hopeful sights of the year takes place this week: Pitchers and catchers report to spring training.

At this point I started humming "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year." Then I remembered there's still over a month before opening day. Damn it.

...in a couple weeks they'll even begin playing games. But pretty soon the novelty will wear off. Exhibition games are boring, and of course the results don't have any impact on the regular season.

He does have a point about the novelty wearing off. About 3 innings into the first spring training game I watch I slowly realize, "Why am I watching the Brewers B team facing the Royals B team?" I've found the cure is to throw 'Major League' into the DVD player. All are invited to come over and watch. And feel free to act out your favorite scene.

Count me as one who has never paid much heed to the results of spring training games. If my team gets beat up in a spring training game, I'm not going to get down.

Keep that in mind.

While of course that's technically true, is there a possibility that spring training games really do have some predictive power?

(Slams fists on keyboard) NO!!! The whole point of the article is that they don't matter. Don't go back on your word.

Last year the Los Angeles Angels and New York Yankees were the respective champions of the Cactus and Grapefruit Leagues. And which two teams played for the AL pennant in October? The Angels and Yankees. But don't tell that to the Milwaukee Brewers, who went 22-10 in spring training but struggled during a disappointing regular season, finishing under .500.

Come on Sky. You really want to contradict yourself within the same paragraph? Usually you wait one or two before you do that.

The history books are littered with teams that tore it up in spring training, only to fall to earth during the regular season. The 2006 Marlins come to mind, as do the 2008 Oakland A's. What's that? You don't remember those teams? Of course not, because no one pays attention to spring training records.

Alright, a little more back on track there...wait a second...

But should they? The examples above are just anecdotal.

No!! Don't beat you own argument up.

To get a better idea we need to go back and look at several years of hard data.

Hehehe, he said hard...

As one might expect, there is some association between a team's spring training record and its regular-season record.

Why would we expect that when you just gave a bunch of examples dispelling that notion?

Going back to 2003, there is a small but noticeable correlation (r-squared of .21) between the two.

Can you break that down for those of us who studied cosmetology at Triton Community College?


That's not a very strong correlation, but it certainly is more informative than nothing.

Yes, nothing holds up like facts that don't have a strong correlation. That's why Isaac Newton was so well known. It wasn't that he was right, it's just that he was "informative" and that's better than nothing. It's the Fox News style of science.

But of course we know a lot more about the teams than just their spring training records. We didn't need spring training to tell us that the 2009 Yankees were going to be pretty good and the 2009 Orioles were in for a rough year.

So we're back to spring training doesn't matter?

Sure, the spring training records bore out with those assessments, but the question is whether spring training records can tell us something that we don't already know.

Well you're almost to the end of the article so you better figure out which it is.

To describe what we do already know, there are a slew of expert projections, the most famous of which is the Baseball Prospectus' self-described "deadly accurate" PECOTA projection system, which has been produced since 2003. If spring training records can tell us something beyond what we already know from PECOTA, then they might be worth looking at after all.

Again, he uses "they might". Sky, you just refuse to let anyone pin your opinion down don't you?

Some initial evidence is striking: Of the 20 best spring training teams since 2003, 16 outperformed their PECOTA projections, indicating that there might be reason to give spring records a second look.

Yes!!! You did it. A real argument with facts to back it up!

Putting both a team's PECOTA projection and its spring training record into a statistical model, we can test this theory out more rigorously. Does a team's spring training record really tell us anything? Surprisingly, it does. A team's spring training record is a statistically significant predictor of its regular-season record, even when taking into account its pre-season projection.

Sky, my man, you're on a roll. What else you got for us?

The predictive power of spring training is small, but it's there. Prior to the 2009 season, PECOTA wasn't too high on the chances of the 2009 Angels, expecting them to go 84-78 on the season. However, the Halos had a fantastic spring training winning percentage of .779. Because of their great spring, the new statistical model added about three wins to their projection, predicting them to win 87 games instead of 84. Meanwhile, the Arizona Diamondbacks had a horrible spring training, in which they posted a .324 winning percentage -- vastly below their optimistic 87-75 PECOTA projection. Because their spring was so bad, however, the new model knocked more than three games off of their projected win totals. In this case their poor spring did indeed foreshadow a miserable 70-92 campaign.

What does it all mean? In a nutshell, if your team is having an extremely surprising spring training (for good or for bad), you would do well to adjust your expectations accordingly by about three games.

Check, instead of expecting the Pirates to win 67 games, I'll bump them up to 70. Wohoo!

The Diamondbacks and Angels are extreme examples, so the effect is generally not huge.

Don't go back on it now Sky!

Still, in a sport where every minute detail counts, spring training results can add some insight.

About as much as this article.

Case Closed!

Don't go by old man Shaughnessy's house...

He's got that mean pit bull in the back, the fences are wrapped by thorn bushes, and he never throws balls back that you hit onto his porch. Worst of all, if he catches you in his yard, he'll make you sit down in his kitchen while he prattles on about how things were better in his day. I'm serious, look here (me in regular/Dan in italics):


Unapologetic Jacobellis a poster girl for all the wrong reasons

Whoops. She did it again.

There's an up-to-date reference.

I can't say I'm a big fan of the Winter Olympics. Or snowboarding. But every four years we are force-fed hours of white-out, network coverage from frozen time zones. It's something to watch between the Super Bowl and spring training.

I agree with you there gramps.

In this post-millineum (sic) era, X Games sports get the same props as alpine skiing, speed skating and old-fashioned hockey. With this, we have a new generation of daredevil athletes, free birds who value image and fun over conventional standards of success.

I don't know how you even measure if this is true, but I'm pretty sure athletes like Wade or James measure success the same way athletes like Jordan and Bird did, by championships and how much snatch you got after the game. And God knows, Jordan wasn't concerned with his image.

Which brings us to Ms. Lindsey Jacobellis, of Stratton, Vt., the poster-girl of young fans and athletes who love X-treme sports.

Yes, the jump in athletes having fun at their chosen sport is all her fault. A horrifying trend among our youth, like meth.

Four years ago in Turin, Jacobellis was on her way to certain gold when she decided it would be a good idea to entertain herself and the masses with a hot-dog move as she neared the finish line. It was completely unnecessary. The gold was hers. She had the lead. But when she went into her inboard grab on the second-to-last jump, she stumbled and Tanja Frieden of Switzerland blew past her for the gold medal.

Well, somebody has to be the agony of defeat clip on Wide World of Sports.

Jacobellis was unapologetic and unembarrassed. She went on TV with Bob Costas and calmly explained that she was just having fun. No regrets about silver instead of gold. She had been true to herself and her sport. In an odd twist, the tainted silver only made her more famous. Gold? Silver? What's the diff?

Damn kids! Doesn't she know her life should have been destroyed by this moment. Old man Dan was a Boston Globe columnist. Do you think when Buckner let that ball go through his legs he just continued on with his life? Heck no! He got death threats for years from Red Sox fans who KNEW baseball was all that mattered. That's how things should be.


That's what kills me about the whole concept. Jacobellis has grown up in a video-highlight world in which values (and rewards) style over substance. Better to look good and fail than to succeed by doing something awkward.

Damn sports media! At least Old Man Dan would never take part in it...
Now imagine Dan sits down and offers you a bowl of hard candy before he starts this next paragraph:

You see this all the time in the NBA. I first noticed it with former Celtic Antoine Walker, a skilled player who could have been so much more than he was. Walker had a terrific post-up game.

Um, Mr. Shaunghnessy...I gotta get home.

Not exceptionally tall, he could play with his back to the basket, work to get his spot and score over most defenders.

I got dinner in like 15 minutes...

But he didn't like playing in the paint because it was ugly-ball. And sometimes he'd get his shot blocked. Better to look cool jacking up threes from beyond the arc.

I think my mom is calling me...

And now, Old Man Dan goes really nuts:

If Jacobellis played in the NBA, this is what she's do. Trailing by one point with the clock ticking down, she'd steal the ball at midcourt and rush toward an easy game-winning bucket. All alone. But instead of kissing it softly off the glass for a textbook layup, she'd go for a 360-reverse two-handed tomahawk. The ball would carom off the back rim and bounce all the way toward midcourt as the buzzer sounded. And she'd shrug and tell us it was more fun trying to win with style.

Wow. Complete hyperbole. And extra points for the whole "lay-ups are pure basketball" line of crap. There is nothing fans hate more than a dunk. That's why John Paxon was so popular. He knew the pure beauty of a textbook layup. Fans go nuts for that sort of thing.

Last week in Vancouver, Jacobellis had a shot at redemption from the '06 debacle. That's the
way we looked at it, anyway.

"We" I'm guessing means the evil sports media that perpetuated the style over substance attitude in sports society.

Lindsey didn't see it that way. This was not about redemption for Jacobellis. In her mind, she never did anything regrettable. She had fun. She served herself.

Darn her for not taking on the pressure that Old Man Dan and his cohorts tried to put on her. It's as if this young girl doesn't care what an out-of-touch columnist thinks.

And so she took to the hills in the Olympics again and this time blundered right out of the blocks. She slid off the Cypress Mountain course in the first turn of the snowboard cross semifinals. It was an automatic disqualification. Fine. It happens to the best of 'em.
But Lindsey had to remind us that she was right and we were wrong. So she went down the hill, knowing that the medal was gone, and finished her performance with a "truck driver grab.''

Well, she had already lost, what real difference does it make? Whether it was tacky or not, I can't say. I don't know the finer points of etiquette in snowboarding. Now I wish I had watched Snowboarding school.

I can't say I know what a "truck driver grab" is,

Not surprising...I looked it up and in one minute found this description on Wikipedia:

The rider grabs Melon and Stalefish at the same time putting the arms in the BS spin direction also known as a drunk driver.

Wow, I still don't know what it is...and I'm like 300 years younger than Old Man Dan.

...but I know when an athlete is flipping us the bird and this was it. Once again, her fun, her statement was more important that representing the United States of America in Olympic competition.

Yeah, she should have just laid in the snow and let a plow run her over. That would have brought a smile to Old Lady Liberty's face. (Old Lady Liberty is actually a great-niece of Old Man Dan)

Jacobellis blew off the assembled media after her DQ run,

Ooooooo...that's what this is about. The media HATES it when athletes blow them off. You can sit there and yell at them, spit on them, call them gay (Ozzie Guillen), but you better not act like they don't matter, or they will write long rambling articles ripping you 'till the space bar on their laptops doesn't work.

...but was cajoled back to the interview room by USOC officials long after her failed performance.
"It's unfortunate that the rest of the world only sees this race and the one four years ago,'' she said. "I guess I don't have a great track record with the general public.''

She sounds respectful and apologetic there. What else do you want?

What about the showboat move after she'd DQ'd?
"Since everyone was waiting for me to come down, they'd be watching,'' she reasoned. "I figured I would have some fun, show them I still have deep passion for the sport. If you haven't snowboarded before, maybe you should, because it's fun.''

Obviously she lying. She doesn't have a deep passion for the sport or she would have let Old Man Dan whip her "Passion"-style during the interview to make amends.

Cool. Swimming is fun, too. But when Michael Phelps gets to represent our country at the Olympics, I prefer that he dispense with his personal fun and go for the gold.

Now get off his lawn you damn kids!!!

Case Closed.

Mark DeCotis loves NASCAR

Which is a sport, when it comes to knowledge, he could...man I don't want to use the phrase 'run circles around me' but I can't think of anything else. Baseball, however, is a different story as we'll see in this piece published by FloridaToday.com (me in regular/Mark in italics):

Gotta love game of baseball

Couldn't agree more Mr. DeCotis.

Baseball's back and it should be savored for what it is: A game that demands perfection yet rewards with failure.

Que?

As the Washington Nationals pitchers and catchers hold their first formal workout of the spring this morning in Viera, they will prepare for the 162-game grind that will test them and their teammates to their limits for precious little in return aside from the monetary compensation.

Que? The monetary compensation is pretty good, even if you're a back up catcher on the Nationals. Right Will Nieves? He made $445,000 last year for a 65 OPS+. So let us not just toss aside the 'monetary compensation.' It's a pretty good return.

Quick, name another group of practitioners -- the lunkheads on Wall Street aside -- who are paid so well to come up short.

Take that! Lunkheads on Wall Street! Way to cause the downfall of the American Economy! You jerks.

I'm waiting. Meanwhile, consider these numbers:

Ooooo numbers...I love those.

Songs are written about teams such as the New York Yankees that won 103 regular-season games en route to their 27th World Series championship in 2009. But, they also lost 59 times.

I don't even know what to say about that. Good teams get songs written about them. And the 59 loses thing...wow...I really don't know how to respond to that. That's a really great season though either way you look at it.

As a team, the Los Angeles Angels led the big leagues with a .285 batting average. That means their batters failed at the plate more than seven out of 10 times.

If we're rounding, then yes. Also you wanted to use OBP there, not BA. NO ONE uses BA anymore, it's soooo...90's.

Conversely, the Nationals ranked 22nd out of the 30 teams with a .258 average.

Yeah, this is WHY no one uses BA anymore. The Nationals ranked 12th in OBP. Middle of the pack. So they actually made up for their poor BA by being patient and getting on base.

Minnesota catcher Joe Mauer won the American League batting title with a .365 average. Great, but he still failed more than six times out of 10.

Or we can say he was successful almost 4 times out of 10. Glass half full/glass broken into shards. Also, haven't half a dozen comedians done this bit about baseball players failing more times than not?

Pitching-wise, four players led the bigs with 19 wins apiece last season. So between them they won 76 games. But they also lost 30.

What does this have to do with loving baseball?

How can you not love a game that looks so simple that the guy balancing a beer on his belly in the Bob Uecker seats can maintain that he could have hit that ball or caught that ball or stole that base? After all, he did when he played Little League.
Guess what Bubba, this ain't kiddie ball.

That has nothing to do with what ANYONE loves about baseball. And should a guy who maintains a NASCAR blog be making fun of baseball fans by calling them 'Bubba'?

As Nationals senior assistant for player development and baseball lifer Pat Corrales -- he's in his 51st spring training -- said: "These are the best ballplayers in the world."

What, did he accidentally go to the Yankees spring training facility instead? I keed, I keed. The Nationals are a professional baseball team and therefore also have some great talent compared against everyday people. Compared against the rest of the league...well...

Any questions about the stature of the bigs were resolved on Friday. That's when a good number of Taiwanese journalists traveled halfway around the world to attend the Nationals introductory press conference at Space Coast Stadium for pitcher Chien-Ming Wang, considered the finest athlete his nation has ever produced.

Seriously? I'm just going to list two here on the site, but you can look it up on Wikipedia for more:
Tiger Mask IV
The Great Sasuke

Yet the claim to fame for the former Yankee is he won 19 games twice while losing six and seven games respectively in 2006 and 2007. OK, but his big league totals are 55 victories and 26 losses and a 4.16 earned run average, numbers that say big league hitters figured him out more than a few times.

Why did that paragraph start with 'yet?' Isn't that part of the reason why he's considered one of the greatest athletes Taiwan produced?
Wang was a pitcher I really liked because he screwed with all the sabermetric measurements for a few years (on the surface). He couldn't strike anyone one out and had no speed on his fastball. He just had a knack for getting guys to hit below the league average and not giving up homeruns. Oh yeah, his wins...HE PITCHED FOR THE YANKEES!!!! And the number that says big league hitters figured him out was last year's ERA (not the best stat I know) of 9.64. Not his 26 loses. Also he has shoulder problems.

That's the truth of baseball. The game day in and day out can engender enough self doubt to derail some careers.

Poetically stated. Pretty much meaningless, but poetic nonetheless.

After all, perfection over an entire season in the bigs is unachievable.

My gym teacher said all I had to do was believe and I could achieve anything. That's why I work as file clerk in Bronson Michigan. Some dreams do come true Jimmy.

And the margin is so thin as to be maddening. The Toronto Blue Jays had the best fielding percentage last season, .988 which translates to 76 errors in 6,169 chances. Still, they finished fourth in the American League East with a 75-87 record.

Alright Mr. DeCotis, this is the worst use of statistics in any article I've ready recently. You can't possibly think that team fielding percentage is the best way to gauge a teams final record. I mean, they're not completely unrelated, but come on. At least use HR's if you're going to choose a counting stat. You obviously sorted through a bunch of stats on the MLB website trying to find one that matched your argument, and since it's baseball and there's like ten-thousand statistics, you were bound to find ONE. Not enough to justify you're position though. To prove the point that the margin of error is "maddeningly thin" I would have gone with records in 1-run games. That shows you what teams were getting lucky and which one weren't when things were close.

As Corrales said, "the ball isn't always going to bounce your way."

A brilliant analysis by the assistant of player development for the Nationals. You really dug hard to get those quotes Mr. DeCotis. Either that, or the assistant of player development for the Nationals is literally a series of inspirational quote posters on the walls of the Washington office. That I'd buy.

To that end, we aren't here to disparage.

Well, you're not here for that...

It's more of a case of respecting the game for its potential to humble, but also to celebrate those who can master it to the extent that it allows.
And no current player has done that better than Seattle's Ichiro Suzuki, who over his stellar, Hall of Fame career has posted eye-popping numbers including a .333 batting average over nine seasons with 2,030 hits in 6,099 at bats.
On the other hand he failed at the plate 4,069 times.
How can you not love a game that difficult?

Baseball is great!

Case Closed!