ESPN "analysts": room temp IQs all around?

JD, it's not just ESPN... most mainstream pubs I read for any baseball content have regularly featured snide asides about Beane, Moneyball, SABR, etc -- Selena Roberts in the NY Times, a dick named Jon Heyman in Newsday, lots more. It's classic "don't confuse me with evidence" shit, always caricaturing or totally misrepresenting the New Thinking.

Excellent BP (non-premium) article on The Backlash:

http://www.baseball-analysis.com/article.php?articleid=2740

And you're right, Milo; if we are just taking this silly MLB shit seriously (even for fun)... it IS HOLY WAR! Mount up, and ride toward the sound of the guns!!!

David R, I can even understand having Kruk speak on certain players' perspective stuff... he was actually funny last week on getting abused for forgetting the number of outs. ("They notice in Philly. In Seattle, they're too busy drinkin' champagne and eatin' caviar.") But having these guys bloviate on the nuts and bolts of run production shows why they were paid to play, and others were paid to think.... As a guy on the Rob Neyer board posted today, getting on base is almost always a good thing.

See the article linked above: "We're back in the schoolyard."

Dave Campbell brought this up during the Red Sox-Rangers radio broadcast last night. The stats he quoted showed that when a leadoff batter reaches 1st base, his chances of scoring are 40%. When he reaches on a walk: 40%. When he reaches on an error: 43%.

Ted Williams had a .482 LIFETIME on-base pct, but I guess to H. Reynolds he'd just be "clogging up the bases."

This line out of the article on MSN about last nights RedSox/Indians game jumped out at me and made me think of this thread.

Off-topic: HR's suits are swank.

Who would you rather pitch to?

http://tinyurl.com/2e64r

Flat Earth things that you build teams around: chemistry, "productive outs," 5-tool players (like Billy Beane)...

It's NOT MAKING OUTS that's the key skill.

I find it awfully silly for Elias to bother w/ concocting this Productive Outs stuff w/out associating it with the thing that maatters in moving runners over, i.e. whether the guy actually scores! Of the 3 criteria used to define a Productive Out:

1) a baserunner advancing with the first out of an inning
2) a pitcher sacrificing with one out
3) a baserunner driven home with the second out of an inning

only the third has anything to do w/ productivity - lord knows how many times I've seen someone bunted over to second just to watch him dawdle around 2nd for the rest of the inning as hitters flail away. If there's a way to track whether #1 and #2 lead to scoring, THEN there'd be something for Elias & HR & the YES posse to crow about. Who gives a fig if Jay Bell was a great bunter or can ground out to the right side with alarming regularity? A sac bunt's only worth a damn if Van Slyke or Bonilla drives the guy in.

Also - why the hell are Yankee announcers bitching about moneyball tactics when it's the philosophy the Yankees used to dominate the past decade?!?!

ie, making Neifi Perez sound like Tejada.

I actually used to really enjoy his work in the earliest years of his tenure, back before the stat culture wars started.

I read Kaufman's summary on Salon and was just flabbergasted.

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=2528809

Kaufman and I both came up with VOR re Kruk, hence KK is a genius.

lol@them!

RIP

Well, HR's butterknife insight is made for ppl who don't care about baseball.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Wf1Vg9YwBqA

Kruk's Oliver Hardy take at the mention of "WHIP" and "advanced metrics" last night was priceless.

I wonder if Steve Philips will answer my chat question?

he did NOT!

"Steve, how are the D-Backs holding onto first place without any Veteran Presence in the lineup?"

i don't know anything about baseball, but these guys make me want to bang my head on an immobile object

this is kindof a fantastic sequence all around w/ the fattey mets fan pointing out the ball being fair

i mean if i didnt have to listen to joe morgan blubbering repeat himself 7times

i like the "<player> batting .290 in 3-0 counts" thing up above the score...

"the big city" is like the political version of "big guy"

"the Mets may need to start bunting b/c Wang is ON today" lolz

when the ball is down, you actually see just as much of it as when it's up in the zone

@jazayerli
Hey @gehrig38, I'd be happy to answer any questions you have about Muslims, given that you appear grossly ignorant.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CNRfWYcUwAAX46b.png

in a bold move by espn, schilling has been suspended . . . from little league ws coverage

I do agree with him that we should've murdered every German regardless of their beliefs.

this guy

http://awfulannouncing.com/2015/curt-schilling-is-now-sending-e-mails-to-writers-to-question-our-integrity.html

kruk/schilling out, jessica mendoza/aaron 'fucking' boone in on sunday nights

Aaron Boone is appearing at the SABR Analytics conference, for some reason

schilling fired

@JonHeyman
schilling is unique. i used to get letters from a relative of his about how he'd routinely ruin thanksgiving #notkidding

im so pumped right now

https://media.giphy.com/media/FVNoYaJTVY0Ja/giphy.gif

NYTimes with some great shade:

“This latest brew ha ha is beyond hilarious,” he wrote of the brouhaha.

This got me a chuckle.

"Curt Schilling Quietly Relieved He No Longer Needs To Censor Self For 3 Hours Once A Week"

http://www.theonion.com/article/curt-schilling-quietly-relieved-he-no-longer-needs-52790

https://twitter.com/PFTCommenter/status/725063488977166337

good canadian kid dan shulman will not do sunday night baseball next year

unfortunate, imo

alex rodriguez . . . welcome

now with matt vasgergian

Why?

As noted by @WayTooCrisp, this is A-Rod saying one of the dumbest things ever stated by a baseball analyst—and it's on the marquee national baseball broadcast pic.twitter.com/b7dKQU9NZX

— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) September 2, 2019

LOL

i'm not sure even Harold Reynolds could've come up with that

Hate to lead by 13

Drew Magary's profile of Stephen A Smith is really good

https://www.gq.com/story/stephen-a-smith-espn-profile

I reached out to Lamar Odom’s people for this story but did not get a response. I also ask Bomani Jones if the joke—which was definitely funny—was fair to Odom. “I could make the argument that if I were Lamar Odom, it is not something that I would want to hear,” says Jones. “But it is not unfair to Lamar Odom as it appears that he was, in fact, on crack.”

mendoza (likely) out on sunday night

https://nypost.com/2020/01/27/espn-moving-jessica-mendoza-out-of-sunday-night-booth-with-more-changes-possible

they should dump a-rod too, but it doesn't sound like that will happen. cone would be good

Sciambi and Mendoza were great on radio last October, that'd be ideal

but i don't watch SNB

Jessica Mendoza has resigned as a Met advisor and will no longer be on Sunday Night Baseball. She will remain on ESPN, doing weekday games, among other things.

— Andrew Marchand (@AndrewMarchand) February 7, 2020

Five-time World Series champion and Cy Young Award winner David Cone is joining the announcing booth for ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball, which will also feature a secondary broadcast led by Alex Rodriguez, the network announced Friday.

Cone will serve as an analyst alongside Karl Ravech, who will become the fourth-ever play-by-play announcer for Sunday Night Baseball. Eduardo Perez will also serve as an analyst for the ESPN broadcasts.

For eight games on ESPN2, Rodriguez will join veteran commentator Michael Kay for Sunday Night Baseball with Kay-Rod -- a broadcast similar to the ManningCasts that featured former quarterbacks Peyton and Eli Manning during Monday Night Football this season. The show will feature special guests as well as fantasy baseball and predictive elements.

Rodriguez and Kay will also serve as the primary broadcast team for two games during the 2022 season.

one of the classic Morbs thread titles

hah otm.

that's an incredible press release btw, we are recreating the manningcast with two of the most disliked people in baseball and just wanted to let everyone know

which manning is kay supposed to be, the former sports star or the other former sports star

that's not a "manningcast" it's just a pbp/color commentary booth

i have no idea how this is supposed to work but cone is Good

I think we can all agree that Ravech and Cone (or any other combination of verbal lifeforms) is an improvement over Vasgersian and A-Rod.

i still don't know how kay is allowed to speak in public he has a horrible voice

Thoughts on ESPN's top 100 players of all time list? No real surprises in the top ten, but it's cool to see so many recent players (80's, 90's 00's) in the top 25.

Didn't know about it till your post. The full list:

https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/33145121/top-100-mlb-players-all

Not sure how much overlap with Posnanski's list...I like Mays at #1 better, though.

NTBT you cut ESPN a lot more slack than everyone else on the internet - i've seen nothing but complaints about recency bias and typical papi/jeets/mo worship

i sort of mentally threw out the list when ripken was ranked below ortiz and reduced to 2131 and "consistency" - i'm not a hardcore ripken fan (don't even really like the guy!) but it told me what i needed to know about the list

The one active player that seems like a stretch to me is Harper. Three or four more solid years, maybe, probably. But you still don't know what you'll get next year.

I haven't read the whole list yet. But I don't have a problem with recency bias. Baseball tends to exaggerate its history, and a newcomer gets the impression that the best games and players were around 50 or 100 years ago. I have no problem with people claiming that Mays or Aaron were the best ever -- but their primes were over 60 years ago. Compare that with the NBA or NFL, where there's more of a sense that today's players are the best there's ever been.

What I'm saying is that baseball's anti-recency bias is one reason for its image problem compared with other major sports and helps explain why its fanbase skews older.

https://awfulannouncing.com/mlb/major-league-baseball-saved-face-what-cost.html

turns out espn had the upper hand all along

this is crazy. The beginning of the end for MLB.tv probably