Why can’t Billy Hamilton hit a triple?

On May 2 of last year, Reds centerfielder Billy Hamilton strolled to the plate for the second time that day. Facing Johnny Cueto, Hamilton laced a sharp liner to left center—a batted ball, in most common circumstance, results in a routine single. Denard Span, the center fielder, understood immediately it would not be a routine single. He hurried a few steps to his right, scooped the ball from the ground, twirled, and fired a quick throw to the second baseman. Of course, it was too late. Billy Hamilton was sliding into second with a leadoff double.

The Reds’ announcers were impressed. “He can turn a single into a double and a double into a triple better than anyone in the game,” one remarked.

The first part is almost certainly true. (I will show you, later, with videos, and statistics.) But the second part is where things get tricky.

Last year, Billy Hamilton hit three triples. Other players who hit three triples in 2016: John Jaso, Freddy Galvis, Carlos Santana. 60 players hit more triples than Billy Hamilton last year. In 2012, Billy Hamilton stole 155 bases in a single minor league season. What gives? Why isn’t Billy Hamilton hitting any triples?

Obviously, Hamilton’s lack of power is well-trod territory. In August, August Fagerstrom wrote on the delightful results of his weakest contact. He noted in his piece that Hamilton sat at the lowest exit velocity of any single qualified batter in the league. (Hamilton finished the year just above other noted slap hitters Dee Gordon and Billy Burns.)

But just three triples? Hamilton’s contemporaries, Burns and Gordon, had 4 and 6, respectively, in a smaller amount of plate appearances. But after watching all of Hamilton’s 25 extra-base hits from last year, it’s clear looking at exit velocity leaderboards doesn’t totally get the job done. I have done the hard work here, and I return with this astounding explanation: Billy Hamilton didn’t hit a ball in the gap for the entire season!

For the purposes of this exercise, “hitting a ball in the gap” will be defined as a batted ball that splits two outfielders and reaches the wall. A ground balls or line drive in the alley is not a gapper.

Now, as promised, is some video. Behold, the closest Hamilton came to hitting a ball in the gap in 2016:

So, this one comes down to a technicality. Is a lofted fly ball, misjudged by both outfielders, but still landing between them (though not rolling all the way to the wall) a gapper? Some may say yes. Some may say no. (I say no.) You can choose to get hung up here, or you can choose to accept the statistical improbability that this is the only ball that could even be debatably determined as a batted ball in the gap by Hamilton in 2016.

His other closest instances of a ball in the gap:

On August 14th, Keon Broxton drops a line drive hit to his left. The scorer gives Hamilton a double.

Back on May 5th, Hamilton lofts a fly ball to center. Kirk Nieuwenhuis tracks back and lets the ball hit his glove as it falls to the grass.

That’s it. Every other Hamilton extra base hit last year was either a routine single stretched into a double, a grounder down the line, or a line drive into the alley. Some illustrative examples:

Grichuk got to the ball in time, but his arm just didn’t have enough juice to peg Hamilton.

This is Hamilton’s first double of the year, on April 9. We can chalk this one up to an early season blunder.

This is from June 1. Not sure how you’re still sleeping on Billy Hamilton at this point. Don’t fall asleep on Billy Hamilton!

So, to circle back to the original premise, this is how Hamilton—despite his prodigious speed—ends up with an pedestrian quantity of triples. Of his 19 doubles, I counted ten that I interpreted as regular old singles stretched into doubles by sheer willpower.

The underlying exit velocity and launch angle numbers back this up, too. Hamilton tied for the league lead last year in doubles with a launch angle of less than 0 degrees (essentially, ground ball doubles.) This likely undersells (oversells?) Hamilton, as Statcast strangely didn’t pick up four of his doubles. (Three of the missing doubles were grounders.)

Why does this matter? Well, it’s fun. Watching Billy Hamilton run is very fun. And extremes are fun. But what’s interesting here for Hamilton, specifically, and also for baseball players, generally, is the idea of attempting to calculate baserunning value from batted ball outcomes. Fangraphs’ baserunning statistic, BsR, is largely composed of UBR, which uses linear weights in various base-out states to calculate the expected baserunning value. This is strong and good methodology, but it leaves out a large component of baserunning skill (stretching extra bases), which is exactly what Hamilton is demonstrating in those clips.

Based on my own rudimentary analysis, it looks like Hamilton turned ten should-be singles into doubles. In a perfect world, we’d count those extra bases in his BsR, and subtract them from his ISO. (Poor Billy Hamilton’s ISO).

But as we gain more access to information, we can perhaps start to develop a way to include this in the BsR methodology. Already, we know that Hamilton’s grounder to center against the Rockies—hit at 95 MPH, with a -5 degree launch angle—results in a double just 3% of the time. With this information, why couldn’t a similar expected runs value be implemented to batted balls, with the goal of separating hitting performance from baserunning performance?

In this theoretical world, Hamilton’s adjusted slugging percentage drops to .289, and his adjusted ISO drops to .029. This would put him at second-worst in the modern era. Just another way for Billy Hamilton to look like one of the weirder players in baseball.

Haiku Fridays: Gunnin’ for the Playoffs

A week ago yesterday, the Seahawks unveiled a banner to commemorate the team’s victory in Super Bowl XLVII. It feels like it’s been XLVII years since the Mariners were able to hang a new banner of their own, but, as you can see in the picture, it’s actually “only” been thirteen. The drought could be over soon, though! There’s less than a month of baseball left to play, and as of this writing, the M’s hold on to that second Wild Card spot. We can thank some Paxton dominance and Fernando record-making for that. We cannot do so for Yoervis Medina.

Paxton be nimble,
Paxton be quick; Paxton gives
the AL West fits

Last Mariner with
45 saves: Kaz. Respect
to that man’s Fang, mang.

No love for Yoervis, though.
He ruined Roenis’s
day. He ruined mine.

Email Exchange: College Football Is BACK

Today’s article: “Just Give Todd Gurley the Damn Ball: Your Weekly College Football Wrap,” Matt Hinton, Grantland

Michael Rosen:

Hey, welcome back! It’s been a little touch-and-go with school starting for me, but we’re going to try and establish a routine going forward, so you all can stop sending me emails asking when we’re coming back. Anyways, we’re just going to jump right into it, with some college football talk.

Cam, football! Just the sight of it on my television screen — even an unwatchable Arizona-UNLV faceoff — brings joy to my heart. On Saturday I woke up with butterflies in my stomach I was so excited for the day.

Cameron Seib:

Senior year of high school, as I was deciding which schools to apply to, I looked for two things. One, a good academic reputation, and two, big-time sports programs. When my aunts or uncles or old family friends would ask where I wanted to go, I told them exactly that: anywhere I could feel good about the education I was getting, and that prioritized tailgating on Saturdays.

Once they realized I wasn’t actually hoping to play DI football, they’d kinda laugh at my search criteria. Like, ha, stupid Cameron, making a big life decision based on silly old sports.

Four years later, I’m going to say that was the one time in my life I showed any wisdom. College football is the best, and I really can’t imagine what my undergraduate experience would’ve been like without Pac-12 games to attend each fall weekend. Oh wait, I can: it would’ve been miserable. Thanks to all those worried elders that tried steering me in another direction, but I’ll save Saturday poetry reading sessions for my geriatric years.

But yeah, let’s talk Pac-12, Mike. My Dawgs barely squeaked out a victory in an absolutely atrocious beginning to the Chris Petersen era. Meanwhile, and as painful as this is to admit, your Bears might’ve had the best showing of any team in the conference. How was the trip to Northwestern and the subsequent upset?

MR:

I’ve also gone to a Pac-12 school for four years, and although I haven’t personally been able to participate in the tailgate scene outside of California Memorial Stadium, it’s safe to say it’s not a particularly rollicking one. I have the pleasure of walking through frat row on the way to every Cal home game, and I’ll let you know it’s pretty casual — some terrible music playing, but not too loudly, and usually a beer pong game or two on any given frat lawn.

So I’d say it’s not necessarily that you chose a big conference school, but you chose one, thankfully, with a great football/tailgating culture. Cal is, uh, not that. At the game, I sat next to a Northwestern student in the press box, and at one point we started to debate over which fan base is worse. For my money, Stanford takes home the gold medal in that department, but in terms of big school fanbases, Cal’s gotta be among the lamest.

I wrote something like 1400 words Saturday on the game so I’m all talked out of Cal football, but I’d be glad to talk about everything surrounding the experience. The upset was welcome, because it definitely lifted the mood and spirit of everyone working for the team, which made the horrible and miserable traveling experience a little less terrible. Being in Chicago was really cool, although the humidity was fucking impossible, but the experience of watching football in person is always a special one. The eighteen total hours on buses and planes on Thursday and Saturday wasn’t the most fun, though.

In terms of Pac-12 football, I didn’t really expect my perception of most teams to change much. Usually, teams are facing cupcakes, and take care of business pretty convincingly. I pegged your squad as a dark horse North contender, but a one-point win over Hawaii…that’s ugly. I think I texted you last week saying I expected it to be over by halftime. If I remember correctly, Hawaii was actually ahead at half. I didn’t get a chance to watch the game — was the poor showing just a product of Jeff Lindquist, or were there other foreboding signs? I’ve seen people on Cal Twitter saying they see the Dawgs game as a winnable one now — you think that’s a classic Week 1 overreaction, or a realistic assessment of the state of the conference?

Anyway, in other Pac-12 matters, I said that I didn’t expect my perception of teams to change much, but that didn’t turn out to be the case. Maybe it’s just my myopia but the Pac-12 seems to be the wackiest conference in the country, with UCLA struggling against UVA, Oregon State doing so against Norfolk State, and Colorado losing to Colorado State. These are all results that point to another season full of upsets. I can’t wait.

CS:

Yeah, maybe “Power 5 Conference” and “fun sports scene” aren’t always synonymous. I visited you in Berkeley last September, with a few of our other friends, and we happened to be there for the Cal-Ohio St. game. You had to cover the game, so the four of us indeed traveled to frat row, thinking that’s where the action would be. It wasn’t. One house was playing “I Love It” on repeat — and I mean repeat — but, yeah, not so loud that they couldn’t hear us making fun of them. At another place, some of the guys had invited their dads over to tailgate, in what I can only assume was a desperate attempt to feign a happening pregame.

So I guess I can’t be too unhappy with your guys’ win. I wouldn’t wish a lacking college football culture on the worst of my enemies (save 75% of our graduating class at Capital), and shitty fans and shitty team and all — that was your first win against an FBS opponent since October 2012 — even Cal deserves a big upset every now and then.

On to Dawg talk. You actually are remembering incorrectly, as UW went scoreless after halftime, but I don’t blame you for assuming Hawaii led after the first two quarters. The Warriors outgained the Huskies on offense by nearly 100 yards during the game, and considering the expectations leading into the contest, it really felt as if the Dawgs were behind all along. I was at the Mariners game for most of the action and only caught the 4th quarter on TV, but it certainly looked like the flop had a lot to do with Lindquist. At least, I really, really hope it did. He started off pretty well, going 7-10 for 131 yards and a TD in the first half, and his team entered the locker room with a not-pathetic 17-10 lead. But after that, man. He just couldn’t complete anything. I don’t know if it was the nerves from making his first collegiate start, or the UW offensive line not performing up to expectations, but Lindquist couldn’t complete anything down the stretch. Every pass was either tipped at the line or five yards out of the receiver’s reach.

Of course, no, Cal still has no chance come our October 11 meeting. The Huskies’ defense remains a huge strength, featuring the best defensive lineman (Danny Shelton), linebacker (Shaq Thompson), and defensive back (Marcus Peters) in the conference. Our o-line returns essentially six starters from the 2013 season. And if Kasen Williams recovers to full strength, him and speedster John Ross could form the most dangerous wideout duo in the Pac-12. I’m a homer and a half, but I really think the Dawgs have the talent to compete with anyone on their schedule. We just need Cyler Miles back. Badly. And for him to stop punching people.

UW’s shitting of the bed really couldn’t compare to the diarrhetic mess that was UCLA’s game vs. UVA, though. That Bruin o-line is miserable. I know it’s classic fanboy of me to say my school’s loss didn’t mean anything, while UCLA’s meant everything, but at least we had the excuse of starting our backup QB. The Bruins, on the other hand, kinda just realized that their o-line is more a huge glaring hole than a minor weakness on an otherwise strong squad.

What games did you watch outside the Pac?

MR:

To be fair, “I Love It” is a fucking great song. Outside of a few glances at those trashy Thursday and Friday night games, I didn’t actually get to watch any games in full. Our buses left the hotels right when the 9:00 PST games were starting, so I pretty much got to watch some College Gameday and the last few plays of that Penn State-UCF game in Ireland. Luckily there were some TVs on the plane back so I did get to see portions of the Wisconsin-LSU game, but I was so tired at that point I couldn’t tell football from Fox News. To be honest, non Pac-12 college football just doesn’t do it as much for me anymore. I know so much more about the Pac-12 than any other conference, so watching other conferences just isn’t as riveting.

Haiku Fridays: Jesus Montero Lives in Ice-Creamic Infamy

This week saw the Mariners do awesome things, like sweep the Red Sox at Fenway for the first time in franchise history. This week saw the M’s do terrible things, like let Erasmo Ramirez pitch. This week saw M’s employees do very, very strange things. Let’s recap, in syllabically patterned form!

 

Who’s thirty-seven-

years-old and just swept Boston?

Many janitors.

 

Erasmo pitching

during a postseason run

might be illegal.

 

A Mariners scout

would jeopardize his career

for a Klondike Bar.

State of the Blog Address, Vol. I

With it being broadcasted on every major news station and all, you’d think the annual State of the Union Address might hold something of viewing interest. But it doesn’t, not even occasionally, no matter who’s giving it. The speech begins with the Sergeant at Arms acting like he actually has a purpose, followed by the President rattling off the list of repressive policies he’s enacted since he last took the podium (and ones he promises are soon to come!), all the while his side of Congress does its best cymbal-banging monkey impression. If you’re lucky, a no-name South Carolinian will do something perfectly fitting of that demographic. Otherwise, it’s a fairly useless and very boring hour of programming.

The only thing less useful and more dull I can imagine, in fact, is someone taking the idea and applying it to their blog. Hey, look at all the (not really) awesome posts we wrote! Listen to the even cooler stuff we (definitely don’t) have in store! BE HAPPY ABOUT ALL THE PROGRESS WE’VE MADE IN OUR NARCISSISTIC ENDEAVOR.

But yeah, you guessed it, a State of the Blog Address is exactly what I’m here to give. To all 17 members of the esteemed Why Oh Why? community, I’m hoping you take this as evidence that Mike and I don’t see this blog as merely a space for the occasional rant, but a thing we’re doing our best to make something. That despite our sporadic posting, we take this blog seriously, and hope you can too.

I’m honestly quite surprised we got this shit moving at all. When Mike proposed the daily Email Exchange, he told me we’d have to start at 8:00 a.m. to accommodate his summer class schedule. Sure, sounds great, I thought. Until I remembered 1) that I was starting my summer break, and 2) that I never wake up that early, even during the school year. When my alarm rang at 7:30 the morning of our first exchange, I considered asking Mike if he wouldn’t rather hold off on the idea until sometime later.

Somehow, though, I made myself into a morning person. The two of us started pounding out Email Exchange after Email Exchange, all of them silly, but each progressively less. And on a self-entitled Mariners blog, if you can believe it, Mike and I also found time to write about the team. We even started a couple of semi-regular series, with our Player Primer and Haiku Friday joints, which, rather amazingly, live on. Oh, and Mike once did something about a really shitty band. Idk.

All in all, we’ve posted 36 different pieces, with this now our 37th. Regardless of any questions of quality, I’ve just been happy with our quantity of content — that there is content at all.

Any faithful readers we might have, though, probably aren’t quite so content. We’ve been a bit overly ambitious in our goals, and had we fulfilled any number of promises previously made, there would be a whole lot more than 36 posts. When I took a weekend birthday vacation, the “daily” Email Exchange became something we would at least usually do every day. After that, when Mike’s schedule shifted a bit and I left for Amsterdam, it became something we hoped to do a least a couple times a week. But then we went to Outside Lands and saw even that small commitment was too much.

Recently, the “daily” Email Exchange has been more of a “when convenient” series, and even that’s rather admirable when looking at the sporadicalness of our M’s material. It’s probably pointless for me to apologize to an invisible audience that may not even exist, but, yeah, sorry. Please know, though, that at no point was our failure to deliver a sign of resignation, but rather having gotten ahead of ourselves in the promises made.

And, dear reader(s), brace yourself, because our messy production schedule is likely about to get even more disordered. Mike’s first day of school is today and mine’s just around the corner. We’ll soon both be taking classes, working jobs, and writing for our school newspapers. How often we’ll be able to post on here, and what about, I’m not sure. At this point, I’ve learned to avoid committing to anything to specific. That said, speaking for the both of us, you have our word on two things going forward:

1. Haiku Fridays every Friday

2. Our best effort in providing entertaining, insightful content on a regular basis

We’ll see how that set of promises go. To any Joe Wilsons out there that read either and thought “these guys are lying”: I hope you’re wrong, but really I’m just glad you care enough about Why Oh Why? to get that worked up.

 

Go M’s,

Cameron

Haiku Fridays: HOLY SHIT

I envisioned the return of Haiku Fridays being a bit solemn, recounting this week’s series lost in Philly and tonight’s Felix-gem-turned-Cespedes-showcase. BUT NOPE. Because LoMo! And Endy and Denorfia and Austin Jackson! Dustin fucking Ackley! I only had a couple years under my belt at the time, but my dad tells me tonight was some shit straight outta ’95.

“M’s are gonna lose.” – Dad

Words said at 7:30,

that look stupid now.

 

Endy’s up. Two outs.

“Not looking good.” – Everyone

“Fuck you all.” – Endy

 

SODOMOJOTWO

OUTSSOWHATTRUETOTHEBLUE

PLAYOFFSHEREWECOME

Email Exchange: Pete Rose Had a Gambling Problem, and That’s Not a Problem

Today’s article: “Pete Rose’s Reckless Gamble,” Ryan Rodenberg, The Atlantic

Cameron Seib:

At Garfield Elementary School, where Mike and I spent our fledgling years, we had this thing called the Life Skills Program. It enlisted us to strive after certain qualities, or “life skills,” that our teachers and administrators found important — basic things like honesty, sense of humor, and courage.

Near the end of each month, we’d have a school-wide Life Skills assembly, where certain students were nominated and recognized for exhibiting a Life Skill. In third grade, I was honored in front of the school for showing “common sense.” I don’t remember what I did to earn the praise, but I do remember afterwards asking Mrs. Edwards, my teacher, why common sense was a Life Skill in the first place. As eight-year-old me saw it, a kid who had common sense shouldn’t be lauded for the fact; it should’ve been an expected virtue, and those who lacked it should’ve been condemned. I now see why I won the common sense award.

That specific anecdote has nothing to do with today’s article, but the Life Skills Program, and another personal story about it, actually does!

On one of the first days of fourth grade, Mrs. Reynolds gave each student a small person-shaped cutout and asked us to decorate the figures in a way that somehow represented ourselves. She’d brought in loads of scrap cloths, but the only one I thought fit paper-me was a piece that’d ostensibly come from an old Cincinnati Reds blanket. So I did my best to cut a mini t-shirt from the material (definitely fucked it up), and glued it onto my figure. I finished outfitting the guy with some grey pants, so he’d look like a baseball player. To finalize my masterpiece, though, I had to tattoo the cutout with a Life Skill. Arrogant old me found a slip of paper that said “Integrity,” and I glued it across Small Cameron’s chest.

A peachy-skinned Reds player, my paper figure was visually reminiscent of Pete Rose. Morally, though, it was anything but. As Ryan Rodenberg’s piece in The Atlantic reminds us today, Rose did NOT show integrity on the field.

If you were born yesterday, you can’t read, but here’s a quick primer on the history of Rose’s scandal for when you can. After a record-breaking career as a player for Cincinnati, Rose became the Reds’ manager in the mid-80s. He proceeded to bet on his team to win certain games. The MLB, after learning of this, in turn proceeded to ban Rose for life, because gambling is a big no-no for league employees. Most notably as a result, Rose remains outside the halls of Cooperstown, despite holding the all-time record for hits and generally being considered one of the best players ever.

Whether Rose deserves a plaque in the Hall of Fame has been an ongoing debate for years now, with many proponents specifically using Rose’s transgressions as a defense in his favor. I, at least before this morning, was in that group. Why was Rose ever punished, much less to such a great extent, simply for believing in his team?

As Rodenberg, an assistant professor of sports law at Florida State University, explains, Rose’s gambling really wasn’t so harmless. Aside from betting of any form violating the expressly written bylaws of the MLB, the big thing for Rodenberg is that Rose didn’t bet on every Reds game he managed. And that, Rodenberg argues, could’ve compromised the integrity of each Cincinnati game during Rose’s managerial career. For one, Rose’s decision to not bet on the Reds in certain games may’ve signaled something to his bookies, who then might’ve been inclined to put money on the opposition. Of course, Rose wouldn’t want to piss off his bookies, because they could’ve outed him to the MLB at any time, so he might’ve been weary of managing his team to victory when he knew doing so would cost those guys big bucks.

Second, and really more importantly, it seems certain that Rose would’ve managed in a way that allowed for the Reds to be at full-strength for the games on which he’d wagered. Maybe he burned the bullpen arms when money was on the line, even knowing it could limit Cincy’s ability to win their next game. Or maybe he sat his best players in games he hadn’t bet on, letting them rest up for match-ups that had the potential to bring back money.

Taking anytime at all to consider the implications of a manager betting on his team’s games, it’s hard to say it’s not a pretty damning act. Certainly, and I don’t mean to be hyperbolic, if the MLB allowed coaches to gamble on games, even just on their teams winning, the sport would collapse. No longer, as John Dowd wrote in his investigation of Rose’s betting, would winners “be determined by the best efforts of each player on the field.”

All that sentimental purist shit aside, I still think Rose should be in the Hall of Fame. No question. I don’t care how immoral you convince me his behavior was. Cooperstown is not a place to enshrine good guys that also happened to be able to swing the bat. It’s where we honor the players who were the best on the field, nothing more. Ty Cobb was a proud racist, and as Al Stump claims in his biography on the Tiger, once beat a man to death. Tony La Russa hates immigrants, loves Glenn Beck, and was arrested for driving drunk. Both Cobb and La Russa were no-doubt selections into the Hall.

Maybe you come back and say, “Well, that’s just an argument that Cobb and La Russa shouldn’t be in, either.” Okay, theoretical dude, let’s take out all the guys who screwed up at some point in their life and erase tear down their plaques. Sound like a good idea? Of course it doesn’t, because when you follow that logic to the end, you realize the Hall really isn’t about only accepting real-life saints, or else it’d be near-empty.

Pete Rose fucked up. Big time. As did many of his peers, before and after. They are in Cooperstown. He is not. Change that, I say.

Mike, how bad do you think Rose’s gambling really was? And do you think he should be in the Hall of Fame?

Michael Rosen:

Seems you mostly covered it all, Cam. While we were discussing this topic in our Gchat right after you started writing, I wanted to check in where you fell on this issue to see if my response would be similar in any way. Turns out, your take is pretty much exactly in line with what I planned on writing.

I did once fall in line with the hypothetical student’s line of thought in Rodenberg’s piece. I, too, was guilty of thinking that betting on your team to win games doesn’t seem like a conflict of interest in any way. Obviously, you’re trying to win every game you manage — what’s the big deal here? But Rodenberg’s piece did get me thinking about the counterargument to that sentiment in a more nuanced way than before, and his points do make sense.

I disagree slightly with the counterfactuals proposed by Rodenberg — unless there’s concrete evidence of Rose committing the hypothetical acts he proposes Rose may have committed in the piece, then they remain hypotheticals. It might have been as simple as Rose betting on the days his ace pitched. But that’s an argument I’m not comfortable taking very far, so I’ll leave it alone. Like you said, Pete Rose definitely fucked up.

But I come down pretty strong on “the Hall of Fame is a museum to commemorate the best players” side of things. Again, like you said, Ty Cobb and countless others in the Hall today are gigantic pieces of shit douchebags. It is not the Hall of Morality, nor the Hall of Character Judgment. And that doesn’t even get into the idea that these are baseball writers making these “moral” calls — professional baseball writers, so obviously among the great moral arbiters of our universe, passing down their judgements on these baseball players. Fact of the matter is Pete Rose is one of the best 25 or 30 or 50 players of baseball of all-time, and therefore deserves a shrine in the museum that ostensibly honors, uh, baseball playing.

To be honest, and maybe I’ll come off sounding like a dipshit, but my gut instinct is to think Rose’s gambling didn’t really affect the outcomes of games all that much. I can see the slippery slope argument about allowing one type of gambling and then that leading to more serious types of gambling, etc. And I can see how it potentially could lead to grave consequences for the game in general. But in a vacuum, I don’t think what Rose did was all that bad. /ducks

CS:

They remain hypotheticals, but the conclusions drawn are sound. If you bet on one game but not another, it stands to reason that you’ll care more about winning the game that’ll bring in money. Because people, Americans especially, are selfish and ALWAYS put their own interests before others’. If Thomas Jefferson had to rewrite the Declaration of Independence to reflect the sentiment of today’s citizens, it’d read “We hold this truth to be self-evident: I got mine, and don’t give a fuck about you.” So, even if it would require an explicit confession to prove that Rose managed his team to be at full-strength for the games on which he’d wagered, we can still safely assume he actually did so, because, how could he have not? Even if he didn’t realize it, or denied the idea to himself, Rose was going to be inclined to go all-in when there was a potential reward awaiting. Because humans want to better themselves no matter the cost, Rose is a human, and Rose stood to better himself by tanking in certain games.

I guess that’s all a way of saying that even if you can’t prove what Rodenberg suggests, his arguments don’t lose weight for it. You can never prove a person at fault unless there’s recorded evidence of the act, or the person in question admits guilt, but when all the evidence points in one direction, we don’t let those constraints hold us back. That Rose compromised his team’s ability to win some games isn’t empirical fact, but it’s the sad truth.

Still, who cares? Baseball came down so hard on Rose that his example is not likely to ever be replicated. The lesson was learned, so put him in the Hall of Fame.

Email Exchange: The Advanced Age of Advanced Metrics

Today’s article: “Sabermetrics Gets Soft,” Ben Lindbergh, Grantland

Cameron Seib:

Outside of murder, fraud, and possibly assault, no individual act is more disgraceful than that of going soft (aka becoming a pussy, bitch, boner, etc.). Mike, our friend Jim went soft once, and he’s still struggling to live it down. And that was in high school!

“A bitch ni**a, that’s that shit I don’t like!” – Chief Keef

Mr. Keef’s message is one I’ve been trying to spread for some time now, and so it was with great delight that I saw the headline of Ben Lindbergh’s article on Grantland yesterday. Finally, someone was going to give “smart” baseball fans the truth they needed: sabermetrics is a field rife with pussy-bitch-boners, and it’s time we revert to old school (aka RAW) analytics.

Sadly, Lindbergh’s piece was anything but an assault on baseball nerds. That would’ve been pretty silly, really, as the writer’s a well-known numbers guy himself. In fact, this whole opener’s been silly!

What Lindbergh actually discusses is the recent Saber Seminar, and how, in a world where every MLB front office now uses sabermetrics to some extent, general managers and scouts are having to figure out new ways to gain the advantages that advanced baseball metrics once provided them. Nowadays, as Lindbergh says, “having innovative ideas and doing the research to support them isn’t always enough to differentiate one front office from another.”

To remain ahead amidst the increasing equity in analytical knowledge, teams are focusing on how they can better utilize that information than their competition. For the Houston Astros, GM Jeff Luhnow thinks doing so is a matter of rallying organizational-wide support for sabermetrically-backed strategies. Baseball players themselves are, it’s probably safe to say, more traditionalists in their methods. And, as Luhnow has seen, implementing things like the infield shift into everyday play can be met with resistance from the guys on the field. Of course, having the numbers to show that a shift is advantageous in certain situations is useless unless your infielders are actually willing to put on a shift. With every team now able to identify valuable players/strategies via analytics, Houston thinks it has the most to gain by converting any remaining saber-haters within its ranks.

The other team Lindbergh details, the Boston Red Sox, is also starting to think beyond the numbers alone, though it’s hoping to maximize talent in a different way. As an organization that’s more accepting of sabermetrics, Boston doesn’t have the same concerns as Houston, so it’s trying innovate in relation to what Lindbergh terms “soft factors.” Things like sleep, nutrition, and mental health. Red Sox GM Ben Cherington isn’t exactly planning to micromanage his players, but he’s hoping to gain marginal advantages wherever possible, perhaps by preaching a strict diet while other teams let their players go full Golden Corral at all hours.

Mike, my first thought after reading this piece was, ha, no, Jeff Luhnow, you’re not actually trying to succeed by smartening up all the dumb players. Nope, your big innovation is acting like your peers have the intelligence of a PlayStation! Sure you don’t want Bud Norris for Kevin Gausman, CPU?

Really, though, Lindbergh’s piece was great and got me thinking in a number of different directions. I’ve often wondered what the next inefficiency to be exploited will be, as Billy Beane won’t always be able to see value in a guy considered a backup by the rest of the league — pretty soon (if it hasn’t already happened), every team will know which players are good and which aren’t. Houston’s approach is interesting, though I ultimately don’t think it’ll be that groundbreaking, because there simply aren’t that many sabermetric strategies the players themselves are responsible for putting into action. I think Boston’s route has the potential for higher reward, specifically if they hone in on improving players’ mental well-being. Baseball fans are mystified each year by all-stars turning scrubs, and the reverse happening for others. It’s not as if talent fluctuates so drastically from season to season, and my initial guess is that a lot of streaking and slumping is a product of a player’s mental stability at the time.

Mike, hit me with whatever you’ve got.

Michael Rosen:

I think I’m going to use “going full Golden Corral” as a metaphor for situations in my own life. Like, any time I make a decision in which I’m consciously sabotaging myself for marginal short-term pleasure, I’m “going full Golden Corral.”

Anyway, to baseball and sabermetrics and all that jazz. I think I linked you this piece on Monday afternoon, so we’re breaking our own rules a little bit in talking about this, but whatever, rules are meant to be broken, right? I don’t know why that phrase exists, because the whole point of rules are to maintain order, so that is patently untrue. But, I think that this particular occasion provides a legitimate reason to break said established rules, since you and I are veritable baseball nerds, and the quantity of baseball nerd-fodder in Lindbergh’s piece doesn’t come around all that often.

First, since I don’t think we’ve written on Lindbergh before, I just wanted to pen a quick aside about Lindbergh, the writer. Grantland exposed me to his work last year, I believe, and he’s quickly become one of my favorites. He’s also got a great podcast (Effectively Wild with Baseball Prospectus’s Sam Miller) that publishes every single day, a godsend to a podcast addict like myself. He’s not some great prose stylist like Brian Phillips or Wright Thompson, but the guy is great at finding interesting ways to break down parts of baseball you’ve never even thought about before.

Okay, now, to the piece. The predominant reason I liked the piece (and, by extension, what Luhnow and Cherington had to say) is that it kind of solidified a lot of random thoughts I’d been having about baseball recently into a coherent package. The idea of “soft” sabermetrics — it’s basically a big “fuck you” to the ways people like Dave Cameron and co. wrote maybe three or four years ago, like baseball is some objective scientific pursuit. And I don’t mean to denigrate Dave — I think I’m probably one of his biggest defenders — but there was a presumptuousness in some saber-leaning writing for a really long time, the subtext of which always seemed to be “I could run these teams better than you can.”

I think when I was reading Cameron at age 16, I kind of bought into that mindset, because it’s awesome to think that I am so much smarter than everyone else. But as I’ve grown older, I, personally, have become less narrow-minded, and have come to understand that there’s a reason the people who are running the teams are in the place they are. These are organizations worth hundreds of millions (and sometimes billions) of dollars, and any rational person isn’t going to leave the fate of their billion-dollar investment to a dolt. Instead of assuming everyone in baseball front offices is an idiot that doesn’t know the difference between xFIP and wRC+, I now try to see things from the team’s perspective, and try to rationalize why they may be making any given decision, instead of automatically assuming they’re acting from an uninformed perspective. Admittedly, rooting for a team with Jack Zduriencik in charge has made this difficult.

Which brings me back to the piece. Despite my attempts to view any given decision from the perspective of a team, there was always incongruity in some specific cases between what I saw as the correct, rational decision and what teams generally did. One of the big ones was the implementation of relievers, and the apparent lack of awareness of the concept of leverage. But the Tony LaRussa anecdote spoke to both a particular and general point. Specifically, the story helped me understand the nuances of the manager’s perspective on leverage and relievers. In the general sense, though, it lent a concrete perspective of “the human element,” rather than an abstract one.

That abstract conceptualization of the human element is always present for me when I do try to rationalize decisions of the managers and the front offices. I’m aware of the fact that running a baseball team is more complex than thinking of players as data points to arrange in particular ways, but that’s the extent of it. My perspective is heavily weighted to one side (the sabermetric side) — I read FanGraphs daily and generally think from a sabermetrically-inclined perspective — while my team’s perspective basically only exists as an afterthought — “yeah, but, these players are people too.”

So, yeah, this is just a long-winded way of saying that the LaRussa anecdote and Lindbergh’s piece as a whole lent me a good deal of nuance and concrete perspective from the team’s side of things, which I think I previously lacked. Cam, did any of that make sense?

CS:

“Rules are meant to be broken, right? I don’t know why that phrase exists, because the whole point of rules is to maintain order, so that is patently untrue.”

And that, kids, is Exhibit A in the act of going soft. Yeah, Mike, your words did make sense — they made it plain and clear that you’re due for a course with Professor Keef.

I totally get what you’re saying. As a junior in high school, I too was quite ready to assume my position atop the Mariners’ administrative order. When you look at baseball as nothing but numbers, you assume any potential front office decision would be pretty easy to make. Because data is objective — it lets us determine right from wrong, better from worse. So under this mindset, who to target in free agency isn’t answered by nuanced analysis, but simply seeing who ZiPS projects for a higher WAR.

But, yeah, as I’ve also accepted, I would be a shit GM, because the job requires much more than looking at Fangraphs. I’ll always value numbers-driven analysis over eye-test evaluation, but sabermetrics, at least currently, can’t capture everything important about a player’s value. It reminds me of a discussion we had after the M’s signing of Robinson Cano (god bless it), specifically in regards to a response piece Cameron wrote. He was pretty critical of the move, mostly because he didn’t see any way in which Cano could live up to the value of his $250 million contract, at least when considering the market value of a win. That much, we agreed, was safe to conclude, but Cameron was treating the matter too narrowly. Sure, every team’s goal should be to maximize the value of each dollar spent, which the Cano grab wasn’t doing. But that consideration alone ignored what else Cano might provide, in terms of unquantifiables.

Now, we weren’t talking about things like “leadership” and “clutchness” — buzzword intangibles that Harold Reynolds has tattooed on his forearms. We were thinking in regards to Cano’s ability to ease the free agency process for Seattle. Because the M’s have been so shitty the past decade, Seattle has become a rather undesirable destination for players, and our front office has had to compensate by offering more money to free agents than others will. We saw this with Cano, in fact. Jack Z had to pay him so much money in part because, yeah, he was coming to fucking Seattle. Cameron blasted this, saying the M’s should’ve held out for players that were willing to sign for their true value. That’s all fine and utopic, but it’s not realistic, because Seattle really has been terrible for a long time, and no one’s been inclined to come here when they can get just as much from another team. This problem, of course, isn’t solved by standing pat in free agency and saving money for the “right” moves. What does help solve it, though, is signing a guy like Cano, a superstar who immediately makes your team much better, and has been the biggest reason in the M’s going from terrible to contenders. Next offseason, guys won’t be so hesitant to head northwest, because Cano transformed Seattle into a pretty decent place to play. He’s never going to do good on each of those 250 million dollars, but he revived the organization from its rut, so we won’t have to pay so goddamn much the next time a Cano comes around.

That’s the stuff wRC+ and FIP can’t capture.

Email Exchange: The Definitive Johnny Football Conversation

Today’s article: “Johnny Manziel Is Number One,” Barry Petchesky, Deadspin

MR:

No long, drawn-out intro today, readers, we’re going to get straight into it. Our topic: the ever-controversial Johnny Manziel. In the span of just a couple of years, Manziel’s skyrocketed from an unknown quarterbacking recruit out of a random Texas high school to one of the most famous athletes in America, partially because of his talent but predominantly because of his antics. And his antics seem to split the line between his supporters and his detractors.

Last night brought the latest transgression, or if you’re keen on not viewing Manziel as the symbol for Everything Wrong With This Generation, last night brought his latest amusing action (you can probably guess which side I fall on). On a Monday night preseason game against the Redskins, Manziel flipped a middle finger to the Washington bench, later admitting their incessant shit-talking had gotten under his skin and he’d lost his composure.

One can probably predict how some reacted to this egregious act of disrespect. Joe Theismann tweeted some bullshit, Skip Bayless gleefully rubbed his hands together in excitement, and Manziel’s own coach gave the whole “disappointed” speech.

Aspects of Deadspin’s piece pretty much sums up my reaction: who the fuck cares? The dude threw up a middle finger, unfortunately on national television. Cool. I do that multiple times a day (not on national television). And yet, Theismann, for example, reacted like Manziel had been caught driving under the influence.

There’s a whole conversation here, about how some sports takes themselves too damn seriously. Baseball is obviously the biggest offender with all of its bullshit unwritten rules, but football can be just as bad. We’ve ragged on Roger Goodell often in this space, and this is another arena where his idea of this sanitized image of the NFL permeates every crevice of the league’s output. When one person DARES to challenge the status quo, they freak the fuck out.

And it’s not like Manziel is harmful in any way. He’s just fun as shit, and doing exactly what he wants. He behaves exactly how I’d imagine I’d behave if I was an extremely talented quarterback with a fucking Heisman Trophy to my name. He’s hilarious to watch, and I don’t understand how anyone can see something like this video, for example, and instead of being amused, use it as another talking point to call Manziel “immature.”

That brings me to my other point: I’m not sure how controversial Manziel really is. Cam, do you know anyone our age that doesn’t like Manziel? That finds him irritating and disrespectful? Perhaps the media outrage cycle belies the fact that Manziel actually is a fairly popular character, and ESPN personalities are disproportionally represented in mainstream media. Or maybe it’s just an older generation thing. Either way, I think there’s some sense of unanimity among people our age in our fandom of Manziel. Perhaps it’s just the league that has a vested interest in sanitizing everyone’s image, and journalists like Peter King are eager to blare out the party line to anyone who’s interested.

Cameron Seib:

I know a few people our age who dislike Manziel. Seems like most also dislike things like partying, pot, and rap music. It’s the group of kids who, for whatever reason, look down on popular forms of entertainment — whether that be a football player or drink — and deem it “immature.” Maybe they’re just pretentious. Maybe they’ve always been outcasts of sorts and feel the need to justify their sad lives by hating on everything that brings joy to their more socially affluent peers. Whatever the reason, these guys won’t miss a chance to tell you that Manziel is an attention whore whose behavior is stupid and vulgar, just like your favorite Eminem song.

You’re right, though, almost everyone our age is a Johnny Football fan. I am too, a pretty big one. Not that I ever invested myself in Texas A&M, or will care too much about how Cleveland does this year, but Manziel cracks me up and I like seeing him succeed. The humor in his antics hardly needs explanation. There’s not wit or punchline to floating down a river on an inflatable swan while chugging liquor, but you’re lying if you say you wouldn’t crack the fuck up at the sight of your own friend doing the same. And while sacrificing a day of lessons from Peyton Manning for a night of heavy drinking is admittedly pretty narrow-sighted, it’s hard not to chuckle at the thought of Manziel being so intent on having a good night that he kind of forgot he was supposed to be at football camp the next day. Manziel’s rowdiness is a reminder that life isn’t as serious as all of us non-Johnnys would like to think, and that thought makes me smile.

But I also want Manziel to be more than a source of laughs, I want him to continue dominating football games. For one, it’ll silence clowns like Theismann and Bayless, and hopefully force them to get heated about NFL players whose behavior is actually damaging to the league (like running backs who beat their wives). If Manziel can rise above the “immaturity” that leads to bird-flipping and bottoms-up’ing, and competently lead the Browns, his detractors will have to acknowledge they’ve been focusing on petty shit all along. But more than anything, I just want Manziel throw touchdowns and win games for humanity’s sake. That sounds like an overstatement, and it is, but my point’s merely that seeing him succeed will be at least one break in a stupid notion our culture often advances: that having fun and accomplishing meaningful things are mutually exclusive.

Give me your more detailed take on Manziel. Why do you find him funny, and are you going to be cheering him on this season? What pisses you off most about the people who rag on him?

MR:

I think that narrow-mindedness is why I find Johnny Manziel such a likable character. Sometimes, it feels like these athletes in the brightest of spotlights — Andrew Luck, Russell Wilson, Tom Brady, etc. — are no more than football automatons, robots built specifically for the purpose of throwing footballs accurately. Russell Wilson’s one of my favorite athletes, but there’s nothing relatable about him. He’s boringly perfect. Manziel, on the other hand, makes the same stupid mistakes I make in my own life, and continues to do so despite intense scrutiny from the national media of a country of 300,000,000 people.

And yes, that’s why I am desperately rooting for Manziel to succeed. I don’t have much to add to your point about how his success is a middle finger (ha) to all of the people who think Manziel’s propensity for fun excludes him from contributing meaningfully to a football team. Yeah, it’s hyperbole to say that he’s winning games for humanity’s sake, but I don’t think it’s too strong to say that his success/failure will change the conversation on how we view athletes who have an outsized personality. And that’s kind of a big deal, in terms of how the league wants to market itself going forward.

What pisses me off the most about the people who rag on him…that’s a question that could make me sound like a jerk, so I’ll refrain from answering too extensively. Let’s just say I don’t think they’re having the most fun.

CS:

A successful season from Manziel would also be a kind of confidence boost to all of us out there who lack the diligence of someone like Wilson. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve woken up from a night of drinking, even if it followed a heavy week of reading and writing, only to think, “Russ wouldn’t have done that.” I’m half-joking, but only half, because, again, our people love pushing the narrative of the laser-focused athlete/academic/businessman/etc. On any post-party morning, it’s hard to think that I compromised my chances at success by treating myself to some fun. And so I think Johnny Football, sill as this may sound, really could become a sort of personal inspiration to younger adults. We’ll see a Manziel touchdown pass and think, you know, even if I do get inflatable-swan drunk sometimes, I’ll be okay.

I guess I’ll answer my own question about why I can’t stand the Bayless-esque takes on Manziel. You put it pretty plainly and true in your first email: obnoxious as Manziel might sometimes be, it’s not as if he’s harming anyone. Yeah, middle fingers are a poor way to deal with your anger, acting like you’re so rich you talk on a phone made of money is douchey, and failing to handle your responsibilities because you’re too hungover is regrettable. But why the fuck does the media care what victimless mistakes Manziel’s making on his own time? If he really does become too consumed by the fast life to handle quarterbacking duties, only he and the Browns organization will be worse for it. I have a really hard time believing that Skip Bayless gives even one fuck about either Manziel’s or his team’s well-being, so why’s he getting red in the face over Manziel making the “right” choices?

And let’s not forget about the Colin Cowherd herd, the ones who see their criticism of raucous behavior as a duty done “for the kids.” We better blast Johnny Football’s every off-field action, lest we want to raise a generation whose preferred method of diplomacy is a double bird! Fuck that. Let me tell you, if your kid sees Manziel flip someone off and immediately thinks “hey, that’s cool,” the bad role model is not the athlete, but you, the parent.

Email Exchange: WE’RE BACK (and Talking about the NFL)

Today’s article: “Need for Speed,” Bill Barnwell, Grantland

Michael Rosen:

Woah, hey, we’re back! It’s been a bit of a hiatus, Cam — almost two weeks since we last published anything on the veritably hallowed pixels of Why Oh Why? A (Kinda) Mariners Blog. Outside Lands vacuumed the energy right out of both of us, and this last week’s been a recuperation period of sorts, but now, after a full week to recover, I’d say I’m back to full strength, 100%, ready to kill the game. The people have been clamoring, no doubt, and today, we’re here to channel Jalen and Jacoby (and whoever wrote that song) in GIVING THE PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT.

(With an Email Exchange.)

That intro paragraph up there sounds pretty caffeinated, but I promise you I am still really tired, so I’m going to go make some tea really quick…

Okay, back. So into the exchange. Over these past two weeks, the sports content schedule has shifted from the absolute dog days of summer — i.e, only baseball to write about — to the slow approach of fall, which means…football!!!!!!

Today kicks off our coverage of the football season, which I think we can all agree to be pretty happy about. Baseball is certainly my favorite sport, but it’s nice to have some diversity in the articles up there on the interwebs to “exchange” about, and so this has been a lot of text that hasn’t once mentioned the article we’re going to talk about today, which is Barnwell’s piece on speed in the NFL.

So there are two main sections to this piece, and each respective section poses a different question. The first half of the piece is Barnwell attempting to measure the respective cumulative speeds of each NFL team, albeit with a hilariously flawed method (which he acknowledges). The second half highlights a way that this may be more accurately measurable, via a system reminiscent of the SportVU cameras recently receiving a revolution of their own in the NBA.

Barnwell nods his head to these metrics in the conclusion of the piece, when he quotes Doc Rivers upon hearing that Rajon Rondo runs 10 MPH on the court: “I don’t know the fuck that does.”

So what Barnwell seems to be getting at here is that speed may not be too meaningful, even if it was measurable to an extent. The teams listed at the top of his (somewhat arbitrary) chart aren’t really that great of teams, and the Rivers quote points at the idea that even if we could measure it to an extent, what value would that have analytically?

Personally, I value speed, likely because 1) I’m a pretty amateur NFL fan and 2) I played a lot of Madden growing up. The fastest players on Madden doubled as the most effective, at least from my perspective. Who can forget Michael Vick on Madden 2004, scrambling for 10 yards on every single drop back? Those formative moments of playing Madden likely skewed my perspective of speed — for example, when the Eagles signed (I think) Jeremy Bloom, an Olympic athlete, as a kick returner a few years back, I was sure his speed would make him the best in the game.

Now, I understand better that vision, patience, etc. play a larger role than how fast someone goes when mashing the right trigger button on a controller, but intuitively, it doesn’t make sense that speed makes zero difference in the NFL. And maybe it doesn’t, but the extent to which it does matter is probably greatly overestimated by the common fan.

My question to you: does that even matter? What are the implications of the casual fan overestimating the importance of speed?

Cameron Seib:

Feels good to be back, Mike. Between driving to and from San Francisco, all the hype and delirium that surrounds a Kanye set, and getting sufficiently drunk for a Tom Petty concert (hint: you’re never sufficiently drunk), my mind’s been in recovery mode lately. But after a week of mental hibernation, I, too, am ready to GIVE THE PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT.

Watch out, world, because Why Oh Why? is about to go on a run of production the likes of which the amateur blogosphere has never seen.

Barnwell’s article is pretty silly. Speed in the NFL is a fun topic that has, can, and will be discussed forever, but this piece doesn’t ever amount to saying much. Its conclusion is, like, hey, there’s no correlation between a team’s six fastest offensive players and its overall offensive production. Craaaaazy.

But, yeah, Barnwell acknowledges it’s nothing of much weight, so no use in treating it as such. Let’s just thank Bill for launching today’s discussion and leave it at that.

When Barnwell ranks teams by offense, he uses Football Outsiders’s “offensive DVOA” stat (defensive-adjusted value over average). More interesting to me than the teams that don’t necessarily rate well by this metric (the fast ones), were the ones that do. I headed over to Football Outsiders myself and checked the offensive DVOA numbers for 2013. The top five teams in the NFL last season were the Broncos, Chargers, Eagles, Patriots, and Saints.

After I saw that, I looked at quarterback numbers. The website uses DYAR (defense-adjusted yards above replacement) to assess QB performance. In 2013, each of the top-five overall offensive teams by DVOA had a top-six QB by DYAR (Atlanta’s Matt Ryan snuck in at number four). Maybe the NFL’s best offenses aren’t made via speed, but via great QB play. Craaaaazy.

I did like what Barnwell got to in the second part of his post, at least how he used Doc Rivers’s philosophizing to illuminate his point. Football purists will buzzword you into oblivion about how “intangibles” are the really important measures of a player, not quantifiable things like speed, strength, etc. And while that’s complete bullshit, there is, quite obviously, more to a good football player than raw physical ability. Richard Sherman looks slow as shit compared to some corners, yet he’s better than any in the game. Which brings me back to the Rivers quote. Even if we had perfect speed-capturing statistics, I don’t think they’d be of much use to NFL teams, because a player’s fleetness seems to be such a minor factor in their overall success in the league.

Why some organizations continue to covet speed, then, is a bit of a mystery. Obviously, some of it has to do with owners and general managers who think they’re smarter than the numbers and fuck nerds they don’t know football and speed kills. But I think another possible answer is in what you brought up, about casual fans overvaluing speed. A fast player is fucking fun to watch. When Devin Hester was in his prime, I would tune into Chicago games specifically for his kick returns, to watch him torch other special teams players. A wildly fast player can put the proverbial butts in proverbial seats, and I’m sure NFL front offices are aware of this. So maybe fans’ love of speed is in someway responsible for the employment of guys like Bethel Johnson.

I don’t really know what other questions I have on this matter, so I guess just spit what you please, Mike. As far as other topics are concerned, though, why is tea your caffeinated beverage of choice?

MR:

Yeah, three days of a music festival and the requisite partying are enough to make you swear off drinking for a while. Of course, that doesn’t last more than a couple of days, but oh well. Luckily, we have enough #throwbackthursday material for the next month or so. That’s no Watershed, but it’s pretty significant.

I’ve liked what you’ve teased out of this Barnwell piece, though. That’s something I hadn’t though of: that the employment of these super-fast players may simply be for the enjoyment of their fanbase. It’s a little bit “out there” of a theory, since it seems like every single roster spot on an NFL team (at least according to the kind of insane Seahawks blogosphere) is of the greatest importance of all-time, so it’s hard to see an NFL GM sacrificing one of his precious spots to appease the ownership. Then again, the ownership is the only ultimately calling the shots.

Wow, Bethel Johnson, that is a throwback. That’s probably (hopefully?) the last time I hear that name for the rest of my life.

Yeah, I don’t have much more to say here, so I’ll get to the most important thing to address here today: the tea vs. coffee (vs. caffeine powder?) debate. Part of this is just a personal preference issue. I find myself being pretty sensitive to caffeine, so if I drink even a cup of coffee, I feel like I’m on hard drugs for about an hour and then crash like a popped balloon. It’s certainly interesting, but not sustainable on the day-to-day level. Tea has a low enough caffeine content to not make me trip caffeine balls, but it’s enough to wake me up and get me focused. Objectively, though, the taste of nice earl grey tea is so much better than coffee. I can’t drink coffee without filling half the cup up with milk, and I don’t put a drop of sweetener in my tea. Fuck the people who say coffee is an “acquired taste,” that just means it tastes like shit and people tolerate it because they’re addicts.

CS:

Wait, you drank at Outside Lands? I was sure you’d sworn off alcohol before the festival started.

NFL time was fun, but the matter of caffeine really is today’s most pressing. This will be a two-part rant, which I will begin by arguing for caffeine’s sublime effects, and then finish by selling coffee’s superiority the best I can.

It almost seems like arguing for the benefits of caffeine is an unnecessary endeavor. Americans love coffee, for one. Have you ever played the game “How long will it take me to get from one Starbucks to the next?” If it’s more than five seconds, you live in North Dakota.

That said, I’ve always felt that our society subtly pushes the notion that caffeine is bad for you. When we were growing up, companies had to put the caffeine content on their soda cans. But not anymore, and why would a company try to conceal that information, unless they thought high caffeine content would scare away consumers? That’s just one silly example, but I think it’s representative of a population in which nearly everyone who depends on caffeine laments it as a necessary evil.

Fuck all that. Caffeine is a wonder drug. Proof: this New York Times article. It references on a study in which coffee-drinkers lived longer, and others which reported a link between drinking coffee and lowered risk of Type 2 diabetes, numerous types of cancer, and Alzheimer’s. People contribute millions of dollars each year to cancer research, and it’s like, dudes, just open a few Starbucks in areas that are without.

And don’t listen to those dissenters who warn of caffeine’s hidden horrors. Anything they tell you is bullshit. Let’s go item by item through Wikipedia’s list of caffeine’s “negative effects.” None of them stand up to scrutiny.

 

Caffeine can increase blood pressure in non-habitual consumers.

Solution: become a habitual consumer.

Caffeine may reduce control of fine motor movements (e.g. producing shaky hands).

Again, become a habitual user and develop some fucking tolerance, and this won’t happen.

Caffeine can increase cortisol secretion.

Oh no!!!

Caffeine can contribute to increased insomnia and sleep latency.

Uh oh! Looks like one of the benefits slipped into the negatives list. Stupid Wikipedia, so many errors.

Caffeine is addictive. Caffeine withdrawal can produce headache, fatigue and decreased alertness.

Solution: continue fighting diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s, etc. and don’t let withdrawal happen.

High doses of caffeine (300 mg or higher) can cause anxiety.

Solution: don’t drink coffee like water.

High caffeine consumption accelerates bone loss at the spine in elderly postmenopausal women.

Solution: worry about it when you get to that stage in life.

 

So right there I’ve given a fairly exhaustive argument for why caffeine is a natural wonder and all that’s left now is showing why coffee is the best way to consume said miracle. In the end, it just isn’t burdened by drawbacks like other caffeinated substances are. It’s funny that you make fun of coffee’s taste, Mike, because as much as it is an acquired taste, it still beats tea, which has no taste. It’s essentially just hot water. As far as energy drinks go, you can’t bring a Monster into the office every morning unless you organize monster truck rallies. And as for caffeine pills, good luck telling people you take them without those people assuming you also deal crack.