Comments on Basement Dwellers: Hamilton, Duran, and a few other links

Forgot to mention this Greg, but I thought you did...

2008-03-14T16:06:00.000-04:00

Forgot to mention this Greg, but I thought you did a great job with Daugherty.

It'd be interesting to peer into his mind for a second and find out just how much of what comes out of his mouth he actually believes. -j

I thought it was going to be much more hostile tha...

2008-03-11T22:20:00.000-04:00

I thought it was going to be much more hostile than it was, and by sticking the article he really didn't give me a chance to address the larger issues of his column. Of course, once I dropped off, the same rant from the column returned. Erardi told me the writers really hate being buried under emails, and I guess that was the case. Like Joel, I hate being characterized as a sabermetrician (much less a seamhead, stat geek, numbers guy, etc.). I am going to send him email and ask him if Bill James ran over his dog. As far as I can tell, what Bill believes and what Doc believes that Bill believes are two very different things.

And if Jerry Narron was a sabermetric manager, I'm an astronaut.

Regards,

Greg

I agree with you on "Sabermetricians". It wasn't ...

2008-03-11T13:16:00.000-04:00

I agree with you on "Sabermetricians". It wasn't in the early copies of the article that I saw, so I have a feeling it was a decision that the editors made in order to differentiate who was saying what. Greg and I were both pushing to emphasize that we were just fans who look at the game a different way, and John wrote it that way for the most part. But I think they still wanted an air of "expertise" to the article in order to justify using two guys with non-baseball related jobs.

As Red Menace said on RR, It doesn't help if we are just trying to replace one authority (old school insiders) with another (Sabermetricians). I think eventually the word or concept will go away, but since the whole idea is fairly new to the MSM, it will take some time to stop having to differentiate that way.

I frankly see Daugherty and FJM as operating under...

2008-03-11T13:08:00.000-04:00

I frankly see Daugherty and FJM as operating under the same general M.O.--be outrageous and controversial so that people will read/listen to you. Neither is particularly constructive or helpful.

Anyway, I completely agree about the tone of your article being extremely constructive and fact-based. It is a shame that the editors chose to set the issue up as Doc vs. you guys, because you're right that it kind of distracts from the issue.

The only thing about your article that can came across as being a bit hauty-tauty is the use of the word "sabermetrician," which I have never liked. It's always sounded both pompous and over-stated to me. Hell, even professional scientists usually just call each other workers or, at best, researchers, in our writing. But that's a beef I have with the whole field of baseball research in general, so obviously it's not something that many agree with me on. :D
-j

Daugherty was nice to me while I was on his show, ...

2008-03-11T10:11:00.000-04:00

Daugherty was nice to me while I was on his show, but there is definitely much more hostility in the air this time. I think he's received a lot of backlash over the last couple of months from readers for multiple columns like the one he wrote on Sunday. The question is whether or not he takes it personally, or perhaps he sees it as an opportunity to draw in more listeners and readers.

And while FJM was mean-spirited, I felt like Doc's column was just as mean-spirited, but only with cleaner language. Maybe I took it a little personal because the stuff I helped on was in the same issue, but it seemed like Doc's column was really just a chance for him to call people names and to make fun of Bill James, which really has gotten cliche at this point.

What's most disappointing about it is that Erardi, Gajus, and I really tried to not be "know-it-alls" in the spread. Erardi's goal was just to offer a different perspective on how things can be done. We were hoping that it would be an example of the sort of things you can do to "think outside the box" with baseball research. But since Doc's column gets lumped into the same issue, it just turns the subject back into a divisive topic again.