I like Japanese ball players. Irrationally so, I'll defend Kaz Matsui's spot on a mlb roster any day, even if in my heart I know any AAAA scrub could do what he does. I don't care about award voting, especially not post season award voting. But seriously? Matui barely even played rite? I thought they were platooning his ass. I dunno, maybe he has been playing, I havn't followed the playoffs at all really, but I thought that A-rod or jeter or sabathia or someone who was actually like playing awesome would get the award.
Matsui winning the award isn't what really bothers me. I think this just makes me sad because, in the last few years, I've taken some enormous leaps in my understanding of how the game of baseball works. I look at a slew of different statistics when trying to evaluate players, and I read constantly about statistical analysis of the game from other sabermetric inovators in hopes of further expanding my understanding. And yet this stupid award pretty much tells me the rest of the country is still in love with rbi's. I get that most baseball fans are ignorant of sabermetrics or just dont care. I really don't care if they believe in more advanced statistical analysis or not. But the rbi bugs me for some reason, in the same way the W-L record bugs me, in that it is so obviously useless when evaluationg player talent, yet it is still used like the fucking bible.
W-L record is starting to crack, you can see even traditionalits admitting it is a team statistic, not a pitcher stat. rbi not so much though. The thing about these two stats, as a 10 year old who fell in love with the daily boxscore in the sporting green, I could see how fucking stupid they were. I used them to evaluate palyers, I didn't know any other way (well not really true, I thought ERA was the perfect pitching stat and I loved batting average, homers, and runs scored. Don't know why I liked runs scored, I think maybe because its called a fucking "run" it sounds super valuable.), but I could see that they were more circumstance then skill. And I was 10! How can full grown adults, hell how can "baseball people" who have been working in the game all their life not see what I saw as a pre-adolescent?
I hate to go this direction with this post, but heres the bomb I've been waiting to drop: RBI's are the reason I have no fucking hope for humanity. Hyperbole, maybe, but think about it for one second. There is no way a rational person could accept that rbi's are an accurate indicator of one's offensive skill. Real quick: Kurt Suzuki had 88 rbi this season. That is a nice number. I love kurt to death, but he is not a good hitter, I don't think he is even league average. Lets find someone with a lower total...say Justin Upton. Upton had 86. Not that big a difference, but my point is that in no sane world are Justin Upton and Kurt Suzuki's offensive production comparable. A baby could tell you that, everyone in the fucking world knows that Justin Upton is fucking awesome and that Kurt Suzuki is merely awesome by catcher standards(also he's Japanese, no wait for it, Hawaiian Japanese).
Why would such a stupid stat hold such a place in our hearts then? Groupthink? People are retards? Both? It's mind boggling. How the hell did rbi's become so popular? Who invented this dreadful statistic, and how did he market it so damn effectively? It's on par with Hitler brainwashing Germany into thinking they needed to off everyone without blonde hair. Completely and utterly nonsensical, yet people believe it! OK not that bad, rbi's arnt Hitler (yet), but what I'm trying to say here is, "wake the fuck up, people." It doesn't take a genius to figure out someone is bullshitting you, and the mainstream media bullshits us a billion times a day when it comes to baseball.
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Awesome baseball commentary/rant! :-) I, too, was like... "Huh? Matsui?" (In the end it seems to me like one of those Oscar awards given for lifetime work, to those who never won it. ::chuckle::)
Anyway, this response isn't about baseball and the Yankees per se, but about... the Chron!
I haven't lived full-time in the Bay Area for a decade now, but even when I return to Berkeley in the summer, and pick up old habits like reading the SF Chronicle daily, a deep pang of regret (and, often, disgust) sweeps me when I pick up the paper.
The so-called newspaper, that is. Is the Sporting Green still even green? A while back I think they changed it to black and white, like any other part of the paper (other than the Sunday pink pages!). And then, perhaps because of the outcry, they changed it back to green again? (But in a peculiar, light minty green that was truly heinous.)
I can't remember clearly. Because I stopped caring. From the early 2000s on, the SF Chronicle was in steep and precipitous decline, such that these days I no longer recognize it. For one thing, they've been hemorrhaging editorial and writerly talent, of course (it's now owned by former arch-nemesis Hearst of Examiner infamy!).
For another, they've been instituting a slew of terrible design changes -- resizing the format, color (to make the increasingly large ads sparkle, of course!). It's now a total lightweight of a 'newspaper.' Honestly, it no longer deserves the term, to my mind. Herb Caen is surely be turning over in his grave, to see the changes in the Chron.
And of course the best sports columnists have long since fled the sports pages, to be replaced by (lowly paid) hacks.
I can go on and on. I used to love our hometown paper, too. And would pore over the stats and box scores for minutes on end, before flipping over to read Scott Ostler or whomever. (He still writing his column for the Chron? Hope so.)
Anyway, your post brought me back in time.
If you have time you should maybe cover college baseball for the Bruin paper. Walk-on to their editorial team; you might be pleasantly surprised. :-)
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