Thursday, September 13, 2007
Unintentional Comedy Break
Who's in the mood for some laughs? I know I am. Apparently former Yankee and Padre third baseman Mike Pagliarulo runs a website with some cohorts called The Baseline Report, which purports to be the paragon of qualitative baseball analysis. Apparently Pagliarulo and his crew act as actual consultants to major league teams (most notably the Yankees), but let's just say that if front offices are actually taking their advice into serious consideration, then God help us all.
I had never heard of Pags's site until the peerless Fire Joe Morgan website did one of their patented teardowns on an article Pagliarulo wrote the other day, in which he attacked Billy Beane's methods of statistical analysis and blamed the A's down 2007 season on Beane's failed strategy, ignoring like the bazillion injuries the A's have suffered this year.
The FJM piece is hilarious, so go check it out. However, for some real fun, I encourage everybody to actually go to the Baseline Report site here and read the whole article. It may be one of the worst pieces of writing, on any topic, that I have ever seen. It'd be painful if it weren't so damn funny.
Like many other critics of Beane and statistical analysis, Pags simply has no understanding of the subject and yet still feels he can criticize because, you know, he played baseball and baseball is played by real men and not computers. It's your typical anti-"moneyball" piece of garbage (it's even titled "Money-Haul"...ho ho), only like ten times more ignorant and self-important than usual, and that's saying something. Also, if you were in a sixth-grade classroom and used the same levels of poor grammar and syntax employed by Pags in this article to write an essay about sharks or something, it would be spit on and set ablaze.
After reading the article, don't go away, because the real joy is yet to come. In the comments section, hordes of stat geeks reign down upon the site and nicely take Pags and co. to task. To their credit, Pags and the site's other authors valiantly try to defend their position in the face of an overwhelming army of people who actually know what they're talking about. Unfortunately, it's a bit like watching a soldier storm the beaches of Normandy with a butter knife.
So click on the link above and have a few laughs at Pags' expense. If I'm not mistaken, he's the guy who broke up Trevor Wilson's no-hit bid way back in 1990. So he deserves your derision.
I had never heard of Pags's site until the peerless Fire Joe Morgan website did one of their patented teardowns on an article Pagliarulo wrote the other day, in which he attacked Billy Beane's methods of statistical analysis and blamed the A's down 2007 season on Beane's failed strategy, ignoring like the bazillion injuries the A's have suffered this year.
The FJM piece is hilarious, so go check it out. However, for some real fun, I encourage everybody to actually go to the Baseline Report site here and read the whole article. It may be one of the worst pieces of writing, on any topic, that I have ever seen. It'd be painful if it weren't so damn funny.
Like many other critics of Beane and statistical analysis, Pags simply has no understanding of the subject and yet still feels he can criticize because, you know, he played baseball and baseball is played by real men and not computers. It's your typical anti-"moneyball" piece of garbage (it's even titled "Money-Haul"...ho ho), only like ten times more ignorant and self-important than usual, and that's saying something. Also, if you were in a sixth-grade classroom and used the same levels of poor grammar and syntax employed by Pags in this article to write an essay about sharks or something, it would be spit on and set ablaze.
After reading the article, don't go away, because the real joy is yet to come. In the comments section, hordes of stat geeks reign down upon the site and nicely take Pags and co. to task. To their credit, Pags and the site's other authors valiantly try to defend their position in the face of an overwhelming army of people who actually know what they're talking about. Unfortunately, it's a bit like watching a soldier storm the beaches of Normandy with a butter knife.
So click on the link above and have a few laughs at Pags' expense. If I'm not mistaken, he's the guy who broke up Trevor Wilson's no-hit bid way back in 1990. So he deserves your derision.
Labels: awful sportswriting
