What’s that you say, Joe Girardi?
I would much rather have a guy care and the emotion bring on himself that he has to talk about it, than him not care at all.
Right on! Or not! I can’t really tell.
So, yeah, about that
Jeff Passan, back on 25 May:
What passes for parity in the NFL goes by another term in baseball: mediocrity. A little past the quarter-pole in Major League Baseball’s season, and 18 teams are within four games of .500.
Okay, so it blows to have tight races. Got it. But, wait, here’s Kevin Kaduk just the other day:
Only the mediocre AL Central and the coup that the Arizona Diamondbacks are staging in the NL West are currently holding a shred of intrigue.
So baseball sucks if teams are close together, and baseball sucks if teams are far apart? You guys are some good baseball fans.
Oh, Kevin has one more thing to add:
This is undoubtedly a product of the three-division system and yet another reminder that the regular season doesn’t matter as much as it once did.
I guess Kevin’s forgetting how exciting the races have been for the last, like, five straight years. Or had the evil division system not started yet then? I’m not a Doctor of Baseballogy like you, so I guess I can’t be sure.
Jim Thome just hit his 600th home run
And economists are writing about baseball again. In honour of Thome Thumb’s achievement — and can you believe people are actually writing things like "oh, now that he has 600 HR he’s going to the Hall," as though Jim fucking Thome with yesterday’s 598 career HR wouldn’t be? — I’ll now mock the heck out of Tom Van Riper for getting in way over his head and writing about a subject so foreign to him that I don’t think he can watch the Yankees without subtitles.
Two years ago, Melky Cabrera seemed poised for a promising career with the New York Yankees.
Two years ago, Melky Cabrera was 24 years old, and he hit .274 / .336 / .416. His OPS+ was 93. 1.7 WAR (don’t be too shocked — he was a CF. Almost all defense and positional adjustment). Decent little player, I suppose, but your $200 million team would probably rather sign, you know, Curtis Granderson, worst defensive CF in baseball or not.
At age 24, the outfielder played a solid role in the Bombers’ 2009 championship season, hitting .274 with 13 homers in 485 at-bats.
So solid that the Yankees decided not to invite him back the next year.
Alas, it wasn’t to be. Reports floated that the team brass wasn’t fond of the influence that the partying Cabrera had on second baseman Robinson Cano, the Yankees’ best young player.
Floating reports or no floating reports, his ability to control Bobinson Cano’s mind with space lasers wasn’t really the issue. It was that he kind of smells as a baseball player. This is the same team, you’ll recall, that employed Jason Giambi for many years. Partying is the issue?
And despite flashing some talent, Cabrera also carried that dreaded "fourth outfielder" label – not quite athletic enough for center field and not quite powerful enough for a corner spot.
Prince Melkazar was a fine CF in 2009. Then he got fat. And, wait, not "quite" enough power for a corner spot?
Melky Cabrera, career ISO: 122
Matt Holliday, career ISO: 227
Carlos Zambrano, career ISO: 153
Yeah. Not quite.
So when the opportunity came that winter to ship him to Atlanta for an established starting pitcher, Javier Vasquez, the Yankees didn’t hesitate.
Melky Cabrera, 2010 WAR: -1.0
Sure, Vazquez sucked. But what did the Yankees really lose out on there?
After a mediocre 2010 season got him released by the Braves, the bottom feeding Kansas City Royals nabbed Cabrera for a modest $1.25 million.
Tom Van Cleef says Melky’s 2010 was "mediocre." I say it was the worst in all of baseball. Details!
He’s responded by giving the Royals the best offensive bargain in the majors this year: a .303 batting average, .798 on-base plus slugging percentage (OPS) and 62 RBI.
Sure, he’s .312 / .345 / .479. That ain’t bad, but consider ZiPS projected him at .307 / .344 / .466. His offense isn’t the surprise. The surprise is that he got back in shape a bit and is actually an almost-average CF again. Not going to talk about that at all? You know, defense and stuff? That .798 OPS would make him a footnote if the Royals had had to push him over to LF.
Vasquez, meanwhile, is getting lit up in Florida after he flopped in pinstripes for the second time in his career.
Vazquez has thrown 134.2 innings, and has a 4.28/4.24 FIP/xFIP to show for it. Worth a win and change. Not everything one could hope for, but the man’s 35 years old. And saying he’s getting "lit up" is horribly unfair.
… Oh. Right. He’s 7-10. Wins! Winning! Because Javier Vazquez’s utterly meaningless Win rate is below .500, he is the ass. This is how you play cavemanball!
Despite yet another losing season, the Royals have shown quite a knack for gobbling offensive production on the cheap.
Wouldn’t it be fun if hacks evaluated teams the way they do pitchers? The Royals have more losses than wins! This means they are complete shit. Anyway, let me rewrite your paragraph for you:
Despite… losing… the Royals have shown… the cheap.
There we are.
The 2011 club has pulled the outfield hat trick – Cabrera, Jeff Francouer and Alex Gordon all rank among baseball’s 10 best hitters for the buck this year.
One of these things is not like the others! See if you can pick out which one of these hitters is really, really bad if I just give you their slash lines and don’t tell you who they are:
.311 / .343 / .478 / .821 (127 OPS+)
.298 / .372 / .480 / .852 (137 OPS+)
.272 / / .460 / .784 (117 OPS+)
Need a hint? It’s the one whose OBP I didn’t list, because they don’t put that shit up on the scoreboard anyhow.
Okay, I’m being a little bit unfair. Frenchie’s having a decent year. But it’s being propped up mostly by his monster April and July — he’s been way below average the rest of the year. I mean, his BABIP is an utterly unreal .419 this month, and you know what he’s done with that? A .733 OPS.
Francoeur, who hit just .249 with 65 RBI for the Mets and Rangers last season, has rebounded to .273 with 15 homers and .798 OPS after signing a $2.5 million deal last winter.
Apparently these days "rebounding" is a phenomenon that includes a player who has been replacement-level his whole career having a big career year and being worth a couple of wins. Because, hey, check it:
Jeff Francoeur, career WAR: 5.6
Jeff Francoeur, 2011 WAR: 2.0
And, yes, that career number includes 2011. Rebound my ass.
And Gordon, a home grown outfielder with a career.258 batting average over five seasons, has surged to .305 in 2011. He’s also on pace to easily put up the best power numbers of his career, while pulling in just $1.4 million.
Great, but just one thing: Gordon is a third baseman. He has played almost twice as many games at 3B as he has at all outfield positions combined. Why is he in the outfield this year? I don’t know. I, like most other baseball fans, do not pay attention to the Royals.
We figured the best hitters for the buck by breaking down MLB’s everyday players (minimum 300 plate appearances through the first week of August) into three basic service categories: 1) those with less than three years experience who aren’t yet eligible for salary arbitration, 2) those with three or four years of service who qualify for arbitration but aren’t yet getting free agent money and 3) veterans with five or more years service time that have reached free agent money (players actually qualify for free agency after six seasons, though the big salary jump generally comes after year five, when a player is allowed to compare himself to free agents in the arbitration process).To avoid comparing apples to oranges to pears, we rated each player only within his service category – measuring production vs. salary against the average of the service class.
That’s insane. The stat you’re looking for, by your own admission, is "value for money." This is calculated by the following complex formula:
value / money
Why are we breaking players up into utterly arbitrary groups and comparing them only to other players we’ve randomly lumped into the same group? Both "value" and "money" mean the same thing regardless of group. So what’s the point of the rest of it? Some insane sense of
fairness?
Cabrera and Francoeur rate as especially good values because their modest salaries contrast with veterans in their service class earning much more (over $8 million, on average).
And this is the kind of boneheaded conclusion you can reach if you pollute your equation with lots of confounding variables. Here, let’s make it simple:
Cabrera: Value == $17.1M, Money == $1.25M. Value / Money == 13.68
Francoeur: Value == $9.8M, Money == $2.5M. Value / Money == 3.92
Not very similar, really. And now:
Starlin Castro: Value == $11.5M, Money == 0.44M. Value / Money == 26.14
Quick! Make up some more random rules so we can pretend trash like Francoeur is great!
Another veteran delivering on the cheap is Boston’s Adrian Gonzalez, who’s delivering a monster season (.962 OPS, 91 RBI) a year in front of his lucrative extension that will kick his salary to $21 million from the current $5.5 million.
Adrian Gonzalez: Value == $24.1M, Money == $5.5M. Value / Money == 4.38
Wow, it turns out costing a shitload more money really hampers one’s standing in the "value for money" rankings. Glad we added a bunch of noise to obscure that.
Curtis Granderson, defense, and swearing
That’s what this post is about, baby. Because this guy? He has a bone to pick with defensive metrics. And me? I have a bone to pick with his pickin’ bone.
What’s that? Where does the swearing come into play? Heck if I know!
Is Curtis Granderson the worst defensive centerfielder in baseball?
Nah, Nate McClouth’s worse. Why do you ask?
Of course he’s not. But that’s what the advanced defensive metrics say about him.
What? Fucking numbers! I cannot believe they’d disrespect a Yankees center fielder like this! Don’t they know that Joe DiMaggio played center field for the Yankees once? That is the kind of history you’re fucking with, numbers!
And Steve Berthiamue is right, if you take those numbers literally, it’s hard to really make the case for Granderson as the American League’s most valuable player.
Other things that make it hard to make the case for Granderson as MVP:
• Jose Bautista
• Dustin Pedroia
• Ben Zobrist
• Tacoby Bellsbury
• Adrian Gonzalez
• Miguel Cabrera
• Kevin Youkilis
• Asdrubal Cabrera
Those players are all better than Curtis Granderson this year. They all play in the American League. And for fuck’s sake, did you notice that four of them play for the Red Sox? Holy mother of pasta the Red Sox are good.
Of course, you shouldn’t take those numbers literally.
What? How should we take those numbers, then, Dr. Genius? We should take them figuratively? Like they’re some type of interpretive number-dance, and really they’re just here to remind us that, even though the Yankees are the fucking best (and don’t you forget it!), hey, other guys play too?
You should take them seriously, this isn’t going to be an anti-defensive metrics harangue by any means, but not literally.
I’m serious. What the hell do you think "literally" means? Because what you’ve just written is "pay attention to defensive metrics, except don’t."
Mostly because there’s still a lot we don’t know about scientifically measuring defense.
But one thing we do know is: shitty play doesn’t become awesome play because you’re a Yankee.
(click “view full post†to continue reading)
Grown-ups have solved the riddle of getting that not to display once you’ve already clicked through to the full article. Hell, even chimpanzees like me can manage it.
To illustrate this point, it’s worth considering the different nature of playing offense and defense in baseball.
Oh, by all means, professor! Let us indeed consider the Platonic form of fielding. That will be a good use of everybody’s time. If you could write about it like a nitwit too, that would be great.
Hitting, difficult as it may be from a physical standpoint, is actually amazingly simple conceptually. You have one batter at a time, and his goal is very straight forward; get on base so as not to cost the team an out, and get as many bases as possible.
Does that seem like two goals to anybody else? Let’s see, one, tw– yeah, definitely two.
ATTENTION HITTERS: Here is your goal!
1) Get on base.
2) Get on another base.
Dr. Baseball signing off!
Offensive statistics then are very easy to figure out, all things considered, because at the end of the day they’re simply measures of performance of a very straight forward and simple (to understand) task.
I’m starting to think this guy really believes "straightforward" is two words. Also I’m starting to think he’s never heard of park factor, and that he sincerely believes that hitting exists in a vacuum where the dead hand of defense cannot reach.
Defense, by contrast, has a lot more moving parts and a lot more strategic complexities.
In other words, "there are nine dudes."
Consider just one decision that has to be made by the typical outfielder; whether or not to dive for a ball in the air.
Meditate upon it. Behold its inner nature.
On the one hand, it’s very straight forward.
(giggle)
Dive and make the catch it’s an out, let the ball drop in and it’s a hit.
What happens if you just fucking sit down on the ball like Manny did that time? Wow, this is hard!
But of course, what happens if you dive and don’t catch the ball?
Oh, I know this one! It’s scored as either a hit or an error, depending on how clean-cut and likable you seem to the octogenarian in the scorer’s booth, which is why we should ignore advanced defensive metrics and just stick with good ol’ errors. How many errors does Curtis Granderson have this year? Zero, asshole. Because he’s a clean-cut Yankee boy!
In other words, there’s a lot of moving parts to consider just on this single kind of play, and it’s vey possible that allowing the base hit is in fact the best play in a number of cases.
No. No it is not. "Allowing" the base hit — as in, you could have gotten one or more outs, but your Master Baseball Plan involved giving up a base hit — is always a bad decision. That’s why dudes get benched for half-assing. Do you see?
And there’s a host of other factors we don’t really know how to control for. For example, how do you control for defensive positioning
Uh. That’s, like, the exact phenomenon zone-based metrics were created to handle. Which was like twenty years ago.
And this is something that seems highly relative to Granderson, since he often seems to be playing very shallow to me (something that seems to be noted very frequently when I watch national broadcasts of Yankees’ games).
"Relative?" Positioning is relative to Granderson? You mean like Joe Giardi sets up his defense by telling Nick Swisher "twelve steps to Granderson’s left and three steps back?" Or do you perchance just not know what words mean?
If you meant "relevant," then, yes, I agree: Curtis Granderson very very often sets up totally in the wrong place. It’s obvious enough that even the halfwits on YES have noticed it. This may not be good fodder for your argument, which is, if you recall, that Granderson is the best defensive CF since the Lord God Jesus himself, and there’s a big conspiracy involving number-manufacturing corporations to conceal the truth.
And indeed, when you dig deeper into the numbers, it’s going back on balls deep to centerfield where Granderson looks the worst.
So he sets up in the wrong place, and then he has trouble getting to the ball… so that means… hold on; carry the 7… Granderson for MVP!
If he’s not making the adjustment then maybe that should count against him, but what if it’s on the coaching staff?
It should count against him. If his horoscope said he should play shallow? It should count against him. Ancient Egyptian curse? It should count against him. Martian mind-control rays? It should count against him. You sir are thinking of "excusesball," where your goal is to blame your failings on other people and finish the season with a perfect 0.000 fault average. The 2011 champion of excusesball? Fucking LeBron James, of course.
This isn;t an argument for Granderson being the MVP
… it’s an argument for Granderson being my BFF. (fade out; sappy music plays; nobody notices that you’ve weirdly used a semi-colon where you should have an apostrophe)
nor is it an argument that you should ignore defensive metrics when they don’t fit your preconceived notions.
No, you should only ignore them when they say negative things about Yankees.
A counter-intuitive measurement may well be right, but it may also be completely random statisical noise, or the result of something that’s not wholly under the control of the player.
I love how it’s "counter-intuitive" that a dude who plays crazy shallow and doesn’t get to any hard hit balls — like, at all — might be stinking it up in the field. As for "not under the control of the player," hey dummy, we’re talking about things that have happened, not like potential future occurrences. Luck’s a factor. Big one. Deal with it.
And Curtis Granderson is most certainly not the worst defensive centerfielder in baseball.
No, Nate McClouth is. I told you that 1358 words ago. Pay attention.
Granderson’s second, though.
Bad players + bad strategy == badbad
Suck it, math.
So the Red Sox lost to the Royals last night. I watched a bunch of the game, but, come on, it went a billion innings after a three-hour delay. What can you do? So I didn’t realise how badly the Red Sox actually fucked up.
Marco Scutaro couldn’t believe what he was seeing when Josh Reddick started sprinting home after Scutaro took a pitch inside.
I know. I couldn’t believe it either. Marco Scutaro? Playing in the Majors?
The problem was: Scutaro knew right away what a gaffe he had made.
Well, no, I’d say the problem was Scutaro fucking it up in the first place. Noticing it? Not so much the problem.
Scutaro missed a suicide squeeze sign with Reddick on third base and one out in the 12th inning, and the Kansas City Royals scored twice two innings later to beat the Red Sox 3-1 in a rain-delayed game that ended early Tuesday morning.
Tee hee.
"I just didn’t see the sign," he said, with his head down as he got dressed at his locker. "My fault. It’s my fault."
Don’t take it too hard, Marky Scoots. I mean, sure, you fucked up pretty bad, but it was a boneheaded play in the first place. There was only one out; absolutely no need to compromise your baserunner in that situation. Especially not with Tacoby Bellsbury — a pretty good contact hitter — coming up next.
Reddick singled to lead off the 12th, and with one out he took two bases on an errant pickoff throw. But he was caught trying to steal home on the botched squeeze after Scutaro never squared around. Scutaro then lined a hit to left, but was thrown out trying to stretch it into a double.
Oh. Plus Scoots got a hit anyhow. Am I the only one who sees that maybe this plan wasn’t a good one?
In the 13th, Jacoby Ellsbury drew a leadoff walk and, one out later, Gonzalez hit a sinking liner that bounced under Francoeur’s glove. His leg kept it from going off the wall. Ellsbury wound up at third, and Gonzalez at first.
Even more betterer, then, that they pointlessly threw away their baserunner. By my count, after Scutaro’s hit and Gonzalez’s hit, he’d have been at seventh base.
I saw it on Yahoo sports
Foolishly, I neglected to get a screenshot, and now it’s lost in the ether. But they definitely ran a front-page headline earlier today reading "you don’t need to be a superstar to get 3000 hits these days. Wins are another story." The best I could do was this snapshot from the Google snapshotter:
So at least you can see I didn’t completely make this up. It happened. So, let’s tackle this in order.
First, I’d contend that "superstar" would not be sufficient description for a player who accumulated 3000 wins, since that player would have broken the all-time record by 2489. More to the point, Jon Lester’s .710 is the best win percentage of any active pitcher. He averages 24 starts per season. If he continues to start and win at his current averages, he’ll need to play another 171.89 seasons to get 3000 wins. So fucking get on that, Jon.
Okay, I know what they mean. They mean 300 wins is another story; it’s just that chimpanzees invaded their offices and wrote all the headlines today. Okay, fine. 3000 hits is no big deal, 300 wins is superstar stuff. But I’m wondering…
All-time total players with 3000 hits: 28
All-time total players with 300 wins: 24
Huh. That’s what I would not call "conclusive." But I suppose they did say "these days." I bet there are a shitload of current hitters in those 28, right?
Active players with 3000 hits:
D. Jeter
Oh. Damn, Yahoo sports, I’m trying to help you out here, but there’s one fucking guy in the set of people with 3000 hits "these days," and I’m not sure you’re 100% right that he isn’t a superstar. I think I’ve heard of this D. Jeter fellow. So I guess we should look at the players who might get 3000 hits soon; maybe those are the mad rush of non-superstars I’ve been warned about:
I. Rodriguez
A. Rodriguez
J. Damon
Pretty sure those also are among the most famous of baseball players. I see an O. Vizquel also, and I suppose he’s not really a superstar, but he’s also 44 years old and doesn’t have another 169 hits in him. It’s really just those four dudes. Which one of them is not a superstar again?
Economists writing about baseball alert!
If there are two things I love, they are economics and baseball. As we’ve seen before, economists writing about baseball generates a unique blend of inanity. Apparently that’s not true only when the economist in question is a Keynesian goofball trying to sell you a stock-picking service; even economists as great as Thomas Sowell can end up in the goof trap.
The St. Louis Cardinals’ great hitter Stan Musial was one of those stars who dominated his era in the 1940s and 1950s, and yet is almost forgotten today, even among baseball fans.
The funniest thing about this is that the other goofball I made fun of made a very similar claim. Stan Musial is forgotten? The same Stan Musial who has been chosen by baseball-reference readers as the ninth-greatest hitter of all time? The Stan Musial whose name brings up almost two million hits on Google? Whose 1955 walk-off homer was chosen (weirdly, in my mind — sorry, but I was for Cal all the way) as the greatest All-Star Game moment of all time? Who won the fucking Medal of Freedom five months ago?
Yeah, never heard of him. Give me Edgardo Alfonso any day.
Mention baseball in the 1940s and 1950s, and the names that come to mind immediately are Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio.
Sure. Those were great baseball players. It’s not like there’s a two-man limit; all three of them can be great at the same time.
Yet Stan Musial had a higher lifetime batting average than Joe DiMaggio – and Hank Greenberg hit more home runs in a season, and had more runs batted in, than either Williams or DiMaggio.
Oh lordy lord lord. Thomas. Thomas, Thomas, Thomas. Where to begin?
Okay, first of all: batting average and RBIs suck. But, sure, Musial was a better hitter than DiMaggio; that’s not really in dispute. But DiMaggio was a CF, whereas Musial played corner outfield and 1B. So DiMaggio’s production is correspondingly more valuable, right? Because he plays a harder position? DiMaggio averaged 7.6 WAR per 162 games, Musial only ("only!") 7.0 — because the CF thing gives DiMaggio a boost. DiMaggio also lost his prime years to World War 2, which Musial did not.
Hank Greenberg? Sure, he hit lots of home runs. And that matters — home runs are, contrary to what you may have heard John Kruk say on Baseball Tonight, a very valuable thing. But Greenberg was also a dedicated 1B who only played 13 seasons. Great player. Wonderful player. But you’re saying he’s better than T. Ballgame because T. Ballgame never had 183 RBIs in a season?
Hank Greenberg, career: .313 / .412 / .605 / 1.017, 158 OPS+, 56.8 WAR
Theodore Ballgame, career: .344 / *.482* / .634 / .1.116, 190 OPS+, 125.3 WAR
Come the fuck on. Sure, Teddy topped out at "only" 159 RBIs in a season playing for those piss-poor Red Sox teams, but he was so much better than Hank Greenberg there’s just no comparison. I mean, go here. Look at all the black numbers. Black numbers are best-in-league. Italic black numbers are best in all MLB. And the asterisks around his .482 career OBP? That means best all-time. In the most important raw offensive stat there is.
Seriously, Thomas. I love you, but you’re picking a fight with the third-greatest baseball player who ever lived.
Maybe the reason for the difference is that it is easier to remember some things when they are associated with other things. Ted Williams was the last .400 hitter and Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak is a record that may never be broken.
Or maybe the reason for the difference is this:
All-time leaders, career OPS+:
1. Babe Ruth (206)
2. Ted Williams (190)
… skip a bit …
15. Stan Musial (159)
16. Hank Greenberg (158)
There are no similarly spectacular records associated with Hank Greenberg or Stan Musial.
Stan Musial was chosen as the causal agent in the greatest All-Star Game moment in history and won a Medal of Freedom. Greenberg is still the single-season AL RHH RBI leader, which is a little bit of a cherry-pick, but the sort of thing people do care about.
And, of course, they’re both in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Greenberg hit 58 home runs in a season, so that two more would have tied Babe Ruth’s record at the time. Greenberg also had 183 runs batted in, just one short of Lou Gehrig’s American League record. But close only counts when pitching horseshoes or throwing hand grenades.
No, actually, it’s still pretty great. Whatever RBIs are worth (not much), Gherig’s 184-spot was set on the 1931 Yankees, who had a .383 team OBP and a 125 team OPS+. I’m fairly sure my grandmother could get at least 120 RBI with that kind of support, and she’s been dead for sixteen years. Greenberg’s 1937 Tigers weren’t as good — they had a .370 team OBP and a 104 team OPS+. Greenberg’s feat is more fantastical.
Then spontaneously the article is about boxing. I don’t really know why, but he spends the rest of it talking about how nobody remembers Joe Louis, despite the undeniable fact that I can name five boxers and Joe Louis is one of them. The others, of course, are Mike Tyson, Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, and Soda Popinski.
Let’s get this show on the road
Derek Jeter: Mr. 3000 himself. Also Mr. 3001, 3002, and 3003. Had a good day. And you knew it would happen: all the assholes are coming out of the woodwork, dusting off their absurd hagiographies, and shitting them all over the internet. Gotta start somewhere, so it may as well be my new best friend Les Carpenter!
A few years back, maybe five or six as Derek Jeter remembers, the shortstop sat in a spring training clubhouse examining a New York Yankees media guide with a few teammates. As they scrolled through the records section they noticed something startling: Never in the great, glorious history of the franchise had there been a player who had 3,000 hits as a Yankee.
Whoa, no fooling? You’ve done it again, Les: I absolutely had not heard this amazing fact ever in my life! Especially I have not heard it sixteen or seventeen times every day for the last three months.
Not Babe Ruth. Not Lou Gehrig. Not Joe DiMaggio.
Not Paul O’Neill. Not Scott Brosius. Not Lou Piniella.
And right there Jeter had to understand the legacy he could own on a franchise loaded with legends, several of whom were considered better players than he.
Pff. Can you believe it? Some people consider these players better than Derek Jeter! The audacity! Who is this Babe Ruth asshole to think he’s better than the Intangible Captain McGee?
The Yankees might have a garden of monuments dedicated to home run champions and triple crown winners, but none had 3,000 Yankee hits.
Chokers. Head-cases.
That distinction alone would belong to Jeter as long as he stayed healthy.
Actually, he didn’t stay healthy and he got it anyhow. But hey.
Of course he would never admit to such a realization. That wouldn’t be Jeter, forever careful to avoid seeming presumptuous or boastful in public. When he was asked about that spring day on Thursday afternoon he shook his head and quickly looked down.
(at his notes)
"I try to focus on the present," he said, just hours before getting his 2,998th hit Thursday night in a 5-1 loss to the Tampa Bay Rays. "I don’t like to think about the future. You may have an opportunity to play long enough but you don’t look too far ahead."
If you were hitting .257 / .321 / .329 (!), you wouldn’t think about the future either.
It was such a Jeter thing to say, offering a tiny window into his life – albeit with a humorous un-Jeter like stumble as he tried vainly to come up with the words "media guide," calling it a "little Yankee pamphlet" – then quickly shutting off the glimpse inside.
No, it’s a totally generic athlete quote. The sort of shit they say when they don’t want to say anything.
"That’s why you guys in the media always hated him," said Don Zimmer, a special assistant for the Rays who sat beside Joe Torre as the Yankees bench coach for the first eight full seasons of Jeter’s career.
What
I mean… am I reading this right? Did Don Zimmer — fucking Don Zimmer — just say that the media hates — and has always hated — Derek fucking Sanderson fucking Jeter? Am I still reading the same article? We’re talking about Derek Jeter and how much the media hates him? Great.
Like Jeter, Zimmer went years without knowing a Yankee player hadn’t gotten 3,000 hits until someone told him a couple of years ago.
And subsequently he heard it day-in and day-out for the rest of his life just like I have, yeah?
And as it did for Jeter and the players gathered on that spring day a few years ago, the fact shocked Zimmer. Surely on the franchise of Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle and Don Mattingly, there had been someone with 3,000 hits.
The franchise of Bubba Crosby, Joe Pepitone, and Don Mat–
Wait, what? Did you say Don Mattingly? Like, for-reals? ‘Cause I was going to say Don Mattingly as a joke, like making fun of goofball names you might say. You realise that Donnie Baseball retired at 34, right? Played 14 seasons? He only had 7003 AB — sucker would have had to hit .428 for his career to have 3000 hits.
But the closest one was Gehrig, who was the franchise leader with 2,721 for seven decades until Jeter passed him two years ago.
Oh, did that happen? I don’t think I heard about it.
A 3,000th hit is a milestone. But given the long lists of things dominated by the Yankees, including 27 World Series titles, Jeter becoming the only Yankee with 3,000 hits is indeed a record of sorts.
Uh, yes, it is a record "of sorts." If you’re interested in the specific "sort" of record it is, it is the record for most hits. Do you see?
There really seems little chance anyone else will accomplish this, certainly not in the next 1½ decades, which is what it has taken Jeter to get to this point, pecking away with nearly 200 hits a season. The only player on the roster with a chance is second baseman Robinson Cano, but Cano is already 28 and it’s hard to believe he could keep a steady pace of 200 hits deep into his 30s.
If Robinson Cano got 200 hits/year for the next fifteen years, he’d be at 4274 hits and would be the all-time hits leader by 18. So, no, he’s probably not going to do that. Getting to 3000 will be way easier. Let’s check:
Currently, Cano has 1174 hits. He’s on pace this year for just about bang-on 200, so let’s just say he gets it to make the math easier. So that means he finishes the year with 1275. To reach 300, he need 1725 more hits. If we assume he plays for just ten more years and then calls it quits, he’ll need to average 172.5 hits/year to reach 3000. Cano’s 162-game average is 194. Barring catastrophic injury or sudden inexplicable collapse, he’ll get 3000 hits, and he’ll get them at just about exactly the same age Jeter did.
Since the Yankees feel they must always produce a contender, they never go through the kind of youth movement other franchises do.
"Never?" You mean including 1996, when they brought Derek Jeter up?
It’s hard to imagine someone currently in the system rising to the same lifetime Yankee star status as Jeter.
Robinson Cano’s been doing okay for himself. Remember him? You seemed to know who he was a few paragraphs ago. He’s the best second baseman in baseball. I don’t think the Yankees consider him trade bait particularly.
In fact, were it not for a suspension to Yankees owner George Steinbrenner in the early 1990s followed by a commitment to a core of young players, Jeter might never have had a shot with the Yankees, something Jeter alluded to Thursday.
George Steinbrenner is dead. Robinson Cano plays second base for the Yankees every single day. This is not a weird phenomenon requiring an alignment of stars and a blessing from an elfin priestess.
We may never see another group of players like Jeter, Jorge Posada, Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera in New York again.
Or maybe we will. Who can say? Of the Cano / Joba / Hughes / Wang group that came up not long ago, three of them seem to have stuck, yeah?
That’s what will make Jeter’s 3,000th hit so remarkable. Who would have imagined a player sticking around long enough to accomplish this in the Steinbrenner era. No one will probably have the opportunity to be Derek Jeter again.
Jorge Posada and Mariano Rivera are still on the team. Bernie Williams stuck around until he literally could not play baseball anymore. Robbie Cano’s going noplace in a hurry. Really, it looks like Yankee lifers aren’t more rare than lifers on any other team; if anything, it kind of seems like they’re more common. I mean, the Yankees were so attached to Williams and Posada that they kept paying them and kept putting them out there on the field long after they were totally cooked. Jeter’s probably headed that way himself.
The long line of Yankee lifetime legends might well end with him.
Sure. It might. But I doubt it!
How fitting he should be the one to get more hits than any of them.
… Or at least until 2023, when Robbie Cano passes him.
Ichiro is slumping
And this guy apparently called Les Carpenter knows the solution: just start hitting way, way more home runs. Damn, Ichiro, why didn’t you think of this?
Ichiro Suzuki has been in a slump most of the season. This, in itself, is not unique; Ichiro has been in slumps before. He is no more immune from imperfection than anyone else. But in the past Ichiro’s slides were brief and usually followed by such a ferocious cluster of line-drive singles that everyone forgot the slump ever happened.
In the past, Ichiro was not 37 years old. There’s at least a decent chance that this isn’t a "slump" that he can voodoo his way out of. See also Pope Derek I.
But this season the slump has been prolonged, lasting well into June, with only a splurge of base hits coming the last few days. From May 19 to June 9 he hit .149, which is not like Ichiro.
I just checked: that stretch is only 87 AB. Lots of weird things can happen over 87 AB, Les. Especially when a hitter is looking at a .171 BABIP over that same period, which is awful. His season total is .302, which is bad for Ichiro, but come on. You’ve clearly cherry-picked a hard-luck stretch.
So much of his game is built on slapping singles to left field and beating out ground balls to shortstop, but he’s 37 now and doesn’t seem as fast as he once was.
Now, we all know that science is about our feelings, but let’s get crazy and look at some actual data instead of spending the whole damn evening trading in "seems" and "feels." Fangraphs has Ichiro’s speed as 6.4, which is considerably better than he’s been since 2008 and about bang-on career average. Detailed breakdown on BR concurs: Ichiro is stealing more bases and at a better rate than he has since 2008, and is taking the extra base on a hit more often, too. So I guess this is why we should ignore numbers: they don’t tell us that our feelings are important.
On Tuesday night in a game against the Washington Nationals, he grounded into a double play. It was his fourth double play this year. Once second basemen rushed throws to first on routine grounders, afraid they would be too late to catch him. Now infielders are turning double plays on him at a greater rate than ever in his career.
That’s ridiculously melodramatic. It’s four GIDP! Four. Project that out for the rest of the season, and he gets up to nine — which is, yes, just barely the most he’s ever had in a season. By one. But for fuck’s sake, it’s still only nine. This guy’s had nine already. This guy’s had ten. This guy? Sixteen. Seventeen for this one. And these are all super awesome players. You’re worried about four GIDP? Damn. Get a grip.
He has always appeared ageless with his lithe frame stretched to perfection, a rubber band that would never break. Many are beginning to wonder if his speed is finally leaving him.
And then the Mayor used math to prove that it isn’t, and you never wrote this awful article and we all got pie. Right?
And if it has, why doesn’t he use the one weapon he has consistently refused to employ? His power.
Ichiro Suzuki, career ISO: .097
Consistent indeed.
Anyone who arrives at the ballpark early is dazzled by the amazing sight of the tiny, slender Japanese left-handed hitter in the batting cage, swirling with that awkward but beautiful swing and smashing baseballs deep into the right-field bleachers. It’s a display as awesome as any of the great sluggers who made batting practice a show, like Mark McGwire, Darryl Strawberry and Albert Pujols. But these are giants, men whose arms ripple with muscle. Their games were built around home runs.
It’s batting practice! They don’t throw nice, easy meatballs in live games, dum-dum. Carlos Zambrano is notorious for putting on big power shows during BP. Maybe that guy needs to sack up and stop forgetting to hit homers, too.
As soon as batting practice is over, Ichiro returns to trying to outrace the throw from shortstop.
Two possibilities come to mind:
A) Ichiro can’t hit actual Major League pitching into the bleachers as easily as he can BP meatballs.
B) Ichiro’s a inscrutable, crafty Asian genius, and not hitting home runs is all part of his Secret Baseball Plan.
I know which one I’m choosing.
Ichiro’s power is not a secret. He hit more than 12 home runs in each of his seven full seasons in Japan before coming to the United States in 2001. Once he hit 25. And Japan’s seasons are some 30 games shorter than those here.
He averages nine homers/year in the States. That ain’t too far off twelve, man. Also, you know who hit 55 home runs in a season once in Japan? This guy. Career home runs in MLB: 13. So can we just please stop assuming his Japanese numbers mean dick?
Those who have coached or managed him are certain he is capable of hitting 30 home runs in a season.
They’re fooling themselves. Eighteen players in all of MLB hit thirty homers last year. Not on that list: V. Guerrero, D. Wright, A. Beltre (career year!), M. Holliday, T. Tulowitzki, J. Werth. But it’s an absolute certainty that 5’11”, 170 lb., 37-year-old I. Suzuki would join that club if he just tried? Uh-huh.
John McLaren, a coach and later a manager with the Mariners for large parts of Ichiro’s career in Seattle remembers how he looked overmatched when he first came to the team, lining foul balls over the third base dugout. One day Mariners manager Lou Piniella came up to Ichiro as they were walking onto the field.
"Do you ever try to turn on the ball (and pull it)?" Piniella asked.
Ichiro nodded.
In the first inning of that day’s spring training game, Ichrio did indeed turn, crushing a long home run to right field that could best be described as jaw dropping. When Ichrio returned to the dugout, he looked at Pinella and said in his then-awkward English: "Is that turn enough, Lou?"
Oddly precise quoting on that ten-year-old anecdote. Never mind. Here are the takeaways:
• Anecdote
• Spring training
• Smallest possible sample size
• Much younger Ichiro
Also, for whatever it’s worth, this page — which really, really hasn’t been updated since 2001 — says Ichiro hit a whacking great 2 HR during spring training that year. So either he was being a complete dick or else he got lucky.
He does not discuss his power much and has granted few interviews this season, even to the large contingent of Japanese media who cover every Mariners game. His most famous answer about the subject came in the news conference after he was named MVP of the 2007 All-Star game when he said: "If I’m allowed to hit .220 I could probably hit 40, but nobody wants that."
Five players hit forty home runs in 2007. Their names are A. Rodriguez, P. Fielder, R. Howard, C. Peña, and A. Dunn. Ichiro? He hit six. I’m sorry, but there’s no evidence his claim is true, and I’m not believing a dude could go from six homers to forty just based on his say-so.
"When he says that he’s not lying," said Mariners hitting coach Chris Chambliss, who is in his first year with the team.
He may still be wrong, however. Also, perhaps a first-year coach who’s only seen the guy while he’s in a huge slump doesn’t count as an authority.
"Guys like Ichiro can do anything with the bat. There is a way he can hit for more power but his focus is on being consistent, too."
Ah, I see we attended the Joe Morgan School Of What The Hell Do Words Mean Anyhow. If he hit a shitload of home runs year-in year-out, that would be consistent too, dummy. "Consistent" does not mean "batting average."
Through 72 games in 2011 Ichiro is batting .279. He’s a career .329 hitter and has never hit below .303 in any of his 10 full major league seasons.
Ichiro has had 301 AB this year. If he’d had just eight more hits all year long to this point, his batting average would be .305 and what the shit would the purpose of your article be then? Eight, Les. This tells you two things:
1) Batting average is something you do not understand
2) You are a nitwit who should stick to covering rock-paper-scissors tournaments. He lost on scissors! Scissors is a choker with no championship mettle!
Oh, also? His BABIP was a ludicrous .171 for 87 of those PA. Fluke.
Those who know him say Ichiro will never change his approach, that he was taught years ago to keep hitting singles, to get his 200 hits a year and steal bases.
And his offense has been worth about four WAR every year, which is pretty good.
It is an older style of game. One from a long-ago era, revived at times in the 1960s and 1980s, in which hitters were valued for getting lots of base hits and trying to disrupt pitchers by threatening to steal. In the modern era, where statistical analysis has replaced gut instinct, a bigger value is placed on doubles and home runs. Things like 200 hits and a .320 batting average aren’t perceived as helpful if the hits are only singles.
What? No, that’s wrong. I just replaced your guts with statistical analysis, and it said that Ichiro’s averaged slightly over four oWAR per year. Did you miss that part? It’s, like, right above this bit, though there’s no sense scrolling up to read it, since you just made me goddamn repeat it anyway. God, Les. Pay attention.
Also, aren’t you the one saying that Ichiro needs to stop everything he’s doing and swing for the fences instead? Yeah, I just checked: you, Les Carpenter, are the man making that argument, and you’re making it based entirely on your gut feelings and like tea-readings and séances with the ghost of Lou Piniella and shit.
For clarity: getting a lot of base hits is valuable so long as you get a lot of base hits, and then don’t piss them away by running into outs. Ichiro is good at these things, so he’s been valuable. Juan Pierre is not, on the other hand, so he has not been valuable. Do you see?
As time has gone on, Ichiro has been called selfish for his approach. And now that he doesn’t beat out as many ground balls or hit as many line drives into left field – the last week aside – those criticisms have grown louder. Isn’t it time for him to adapt?
No, because you’re making all this shit up.
"He’s like Wade Boggs, he does what he does best, he’s superstitious," McLaren said. He did not say this as a criticism, but rather as the frank assessment of a baseball man who has been around Ichiro as much as anybody in the major leagues.
I’d like to repeat part of this for you, so you can marvel at the insanity:
He did not say this as a criticism
Now once more:
He did not say this as a criticism
Now in Haitian Creole:
Li pa t ‘di sa a kòm yon kritik
And what is it that the man said that wasn’t intended as a yon kritik?
He’s like Wade Boggs
Les felt the need to explain to us that comparing Ichiro to Wade Boggs shouldn’t be taken as a criticism. Wade Boggs. Who is in the Hall of Fame. For hitting a shitload of singles.
Thanks for clearing that up, Les.
Ichiro is Ichiro.
And even if he is in a slump he will not change.
You know, I can only think of one player who went from being a slap-hitting speedster to a hulking power hitter at a late age. His name? I think you know perfectly well what it is. Is that your recommendation, then, Les Carpenter?
He always had more power than Ichiro anyhow.
This is why you’re a former GM
You remember Jim Bowden. He’s the former Nationals GM who is most famous for getting ridiculously roaring glass-eyed drunk, signing Cristian Guzman to a $34 million contract, and then driving really fast. Well, now he’s blogging at ESPN, and he’s helping us the home viewers to understand the logical processes that helped him transition from a career as a general manager in Major League Baseball to a career as a blogger at ESPN. Let’s see if we can catch him while he’s still sober enough to type.
Simple stats to evaluate teams, players
I think a bit of definition of terms is in order here:
1: free from guile : innocent
2a : free from vanity : modest
b : free from ostentation or display <a simple outfit>
3: of humble origin or modest position <a simple farmer>
4a : lacking in knowledge or expertise <a simple amateur of the arts>
b (1) : stupid (2) : mentally retarded
c : not socially or culturally sophisticated : naive; also : credulous
I’d like to thank Merriam-Webster for calling Jim Bowden names so I don’t have to.
I get some flack for this from time to time, so, as Ubaldo Jimenez would say, let me be clear: if you want to head out to the ballpark with your buddies and have a few beers and race-bait Milton Bradley and you don’t give a great goddamn what his WAR is or how his BABIP might be impacting his WPA, that’s cool with me. I find that understanding how the game of baseball works improves my enjoyment of it; if you don’t care, I have no beef with that. There’s room for both of us to do our things.
However. If one happens to be a former general manager of a baseball team — and here I’m talking about a real professional team, and not like in MLB Front Office Manager — and one is currently employed by an outfit that declares itself the "worldwide leader in sports" to write about one’s experience generally managing a professional baseball team, and if one’s article includes this:
Baseball also has a simple to side to it. I get asked all the time which two or three common statistics I would pick to evaluate a team or players. My quick answer would be the following:
1. For a team: Run differential
2. For a hitter: OPS + RBIs, or OPSBIs
3. For a pitcher: ERA, WHIP, SO
Then one should expect to have the shit ridiculed out of onesself on my blog.
Now, before I get accused of unfairness, I’ll admit that Bowden starts out pretty strong. Run differential is pretty much the right stat to use to do a quick-and-dirty evaluation of a team. Though he does crap it up in the calculations by doing it as Runs Scored – Earned Runs Allowed. What the eff, Jimbo? Do unearned runs not go up on the scoreboard these days? I know OBP doesn’t. The best thing about the way Bowden calculates run diff is that it will result in the league having a positive run differential against itself, which is one of those existential paradoxes that only Commander Data can solve.
So, yeah, that’s the good part. Let’s move right along into the next bit, where Bowden says:
2. For a hitter: OPS + RBIs, or OPSBIs
I had to quote that again so you could absorb the full impact of the ridiculous junk stat Bowden has just told you he relied on when making decisions as a GM. What the shit? Seriously, Jim Bowden. My goodness.
Okay, I’m coherent again. Let’s step through this. OPS + RBIs, huh? "OPSBIs" is a horrible neologism that doesn’t even parse properly; "on-base plus slugging batted in" indeed. But is it any good as a statistic? Pretend I haven’t already called it junk, and we’ll find out!
Well, it starts with OPS. OPS is not a very good statistic. I mean, it’s not very bad — if you’re just looking for a quick-and-dirty way to tell if a player sucks, it fits the bill. But it has the non-trivial flaw of weighting OBP and SLG equally, and OBP is way more important. If you’re a GM, and you use OPS to evaluate players, you’re liable to do things like give Juan Uribe 3/$21M, not realising that his career OBP of .299 will absolutely murder your offense. And only a fool would do that!
RBIs, unlike OPS, is a very bad statistic. Why? Well, you tell me. Which one of these players is the best?
Player X: 50 RBIs
Player Y: 44 RBIs
Player Z: 30 RBIs
Player F: 10 RBIs
Clearly it’s Player X, right? Good, we agree. Now let’s flesh them out a bit more:
Player X: 50 RBIs, 293 PA, .262 / .314 / .461, 109 OPS+, 1.4 oWAR. Had a total of 203 baserunners while at the plate.
Player Y: 44 RBIs, 278 PA, .332 / .486 / .678, 218 OPS+, 4.5 oWAR. Had a total of 176 baserunners while at the plate.
Player Z: 30 RBIs, 226 PA, .315 / .389 / .523, 133 OPS+, 1.2 oWAR. Had a total of 139 baserunners while at the plate.
Player F: 10 RBIs, 225 PA, .301 / .409 / .419, 124 OPS+, 1.2 oWAR. Had a total of 93 baserunners while at the plate.
Oh. So actually Player X is kind of shitty — he’s just had a ton of PA and a lot of inherited runners. Player Z has been almost as valuable to his team, and only has 77% as many PA, while Player F never ever inherits any runners to drive in. And Player Y is the best player in baseball. This is why RBIs are crap. They are too team-dependent.
So what happens when you add RBIs and OPS together, then? You get shit soup is what happens. So we’re not here all day, I’ll pass on another histrionic demonstration and just mention that the league average OPS is .710, while the league average RBIs is, who knows, something like 25. So, if you’ll excuse the presumption, Mr. Bowden: what the fuck is the fucking point? Why not just use OPS? He even makes this point for me, though he seems to be too drunk to figure it out, when he adds the ridiculous chart. Is it sorted by OPS or by "OPSBIs?" you tell me — the order’s the same either way.
But wait! Bowden isn’t done being dense about this:
The key for me is breaking down the RBIs to differentiate the ones that came against pitchers who throw with the most velocity, change in velocity, late-breaking action, change in planes or deceptive deliveries.
Which you didn’t do. You just, like, added RBIs — a counting stat — to OPS — a rate stat.
How often do the RBIs occur in one-run games against Mariano Rivera in the ninth inning as opposed to a 12-0 blowout in the fourth inning against a mopup reliever. It is essential to break this down in detail.
But maybe not so essential that he actually did it. Because he didn’t. Also not essential: caring about how many runners a hitter inherited.
Statistics can be misleading unless you blend them with the scouting aspect of baseball.
Statistics are more likely to be misleading if they’re garbage to begin with.
When you get to October, hitters need to hit Jon Lester, CC Sabathia, Roy Halladay or Tim Lincecum, so you need to have hitters who can hit the best pitchers in the game rather than hitters who put up good numbers against mediocre or below-average pitching.
Do you have any evidence for the existence of this fabled hitter who absolutely murders R.A. Dickey and Randy Wolf but is awful against Lincecum and Halladay? Of course you don’t, because there’s no such hitter. You might as well say that what’s important is getting hitters who can teleport so they don’t make outs on the basepaths.
Look. I get the emotional appeal of "clutch." I remember when Sammy Sosa hit a ninth-inning, two-out, two-strike pitch out into Waveland Avenue in game 1 of the 2003 NLCS to tie it up at the last possible moment. That was awesome. But "clutch hitting" simply is not a repeatable phenomenon. It is not a skill. It is a product of luck. David Ortiz is probably the most famous clutch hitter ever, right? Go here. Look at his WPA. See how it’s up-and-down? Now look at his "Clutch." Positive, negative, positive, negative. No year-over-year correlation at all. This is because it is mostly luck. You cannot get players who will be "clutch" in the future by going after players who were "clutch" in the past, or by any other means besides plain, ordinary luck.
The fact that you don’t understand this — and that you choose to define "clutch" as "RBIs in a blindingly arbitrary set of situations" — is terribly, terribly funny.
Still, OPS + RBIs gives me a general feel for the level of player.
Only about 7% worse than OPS by itself, even.
So what remedy do I suggest? What stat is best for evaluating a hitter at a glance? Well, Bowden makes a big stink about "simple" stats, so I’m assuming I can’t use something mildly esoteric like oWAR. In that case, I’d go with OPS+ — it’s like OPS, but it’s normalised for park effect and differences among eras, and the context is built-in, so you don’t have to try to guess at what the average is (it’s always 100).
(Of course, with leadoff hitters, OBP+R+SB would be a better barometer, so you have to know the type of hitter your looking at).
I… or, yeah, I guess you could do that. Just a quick question: since OBP already correlates to runs better than any other basic stat, is it really helpful to add runs? I mean, even assuming that adding a counting stat to a rate stat made sense to begin with. Which, by the way, it doesn’t. And are you sure you don’t want to control for caught stealing at all? Don’t even want to throw in a -CS for the sake of form, as though the 8 or 11 or whatever will be discernable against the 350 or so points of OBP you’re randomly adding it to?
Also, sorry, but: [sic]
Bowden doesn’t really say much about pitching. He says this:
3. For a pitcher: ERA, WHIP, SO
And he gives leaderboards for those three stats, but he doesn’t do anything as comical as create a whole new garbage statistic and then write three paragraphs making excuses for it. All he says is:
These are my three favorite quick-look pitching statistics. Combined, they give me a snapshot of their abilities and talent, although statistics are best analyzed in concert with video and scouting reports in a complex system.
Now, for being so short, it’s amazing how wrong that is. Why?
Well, ERA don’t tell you much about a player’s ability or talent, because it’s polluted by external influences and bullshit judged outcomes, and it’s not even adjusted for park factor, for fuck’s sake. WHIP is a bit better, but it still gets fouled by defense and judgment calls. As for strikeouts (which is what Bowden means by SO, even though most people — though, notably, not baseball-reference — use K for that and SO for shutouts): just, like, raw strikeouts? Not even going to consider the number of batters faced?
If you had to pick three simple stats to get a good idea of a pitcher’s true level of ability, the correct stats to choose are K/9, BB/9, and HR/9. These stats correlate well with themselves over time, have been shown to be a better predictor of future ERA than ERA itself is, and have been shown to be the only things a pitcher actually controls anyhow. Pretty much all advanced pitching statistics are built on those three.
Not that I’m saying scouting isn’t valuable, but, come on. perhaps you wouldn’t find statistics so "misleading" if you were bright enough to figure out which ones are worth using. And perhaps you wouldn’t be a professional blogger at this point in your life.
1: a new word, usage, or expression
2: a meaningless word coined by a psychotic
No points for guessing.
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