what, no vereen?

I will save the baseball nonsense for the second half of this post, that way you baseball haters can just read this part and then move on to whatever site suits your microscopic commie hearts.

It was real nice to hear music on the way to work today, and not just any music, my favorite music. I won't lie: I put the Mats on shuffle and surrendered to their brilliance for the 22 minutes each way. I missed them. After listening closely to "I Will Dare" for the 7000th time, I think I might be back in the "bacon and a cigarette's a lousy dinner" camp.

Work is pretty challenging right now, I am doing something I haven't really done before. Good experience, as they say. Long damn hours, as they say.

You know what show is good, and you can just tune in at any part of the show and get caught up in it? Deadliest Catch, that show on Discovery channel about the crab fishermen in the Bering Sea who have like the world's most life-threatening job. Fascinating. Those guys are probably tougher than me. The show also reminds me that crabs are gross.

Good job on muppetdat. What an outpouring of nostalgic glory. I guess I know where we all were every Monday night at 7:30 from 1976-1981. I used to love that damn show, really loved it. I wonder if it holds up today. I was in love with Bernadette Peters back then, and I'm guessing you were too. Here then is the official guest tally, interesting to note that nobody ever hosted twice.

And here is our scoring:
D. Lee: 19 (10 correct, 1 incorrect)
cW: 25 (13 correct, 1 incorrect (alda) and several that had already been said for which he will not receive credit)
finn: 2 (1 correct)
PBdotC: 2 (1 correct)
Joe: -1 (1 incorrect)
dipak: -2 (2 incorrect)
the real bc mi: -3 (2 correct, 7 incorrect)
imposter bc mi: not counting your points because you are penalized for impostering

That shit was fun. Today for ten points, tell me what Paul Shaffer's Blues Brothers nickname was. And don't google. Now on to a leftover baseball post.


There was a time, I suppose, when sportswriters and sportscasters knew way more about baseball than the fans they were writing for and speaking to. This time was known as the 1950's. It's not that the writers and announcers knew all that much; it's just that the fans knew so little and were happy to believe whatever they were told by the "experts" who covered these games for a living.

There wasn't a great need for deep statistical research or analysis. It was just sports, just a game, just fun. If Ernie Harwell told you that Al Kaline was the best right fielder in the American League, then goddammit Al Kaline was the best right fielder in the American League.

But somewhere along the line (late 70's-early 80's?), for some reason (post-Watergate disillusionment?), sports fans started demanding a little more. They wanted facts to back up opinions, and when they didn't get 'em from their trusted sources in the media, they started finding the facts themselves and forming their own opinions based on these facts. In short, sports fans started getting smarter. And geekier. And more obsessed. The internet just gave these people someplace to go.

One thing that these fans discovered is that conventional stats don't often tell the entire story about a player, a team, or a strategy. The geeks wanted new stats, and they went ahead and created them. After much trial and error, many of these new stats became generally accepted in the fan universe. Sure, some fans weren't nearly as smart as they thought they were, but eventually their ideas were weeded out and replaced by smarter ideas. Sort of the way all other fields of knowledge work. An idea is brilliant until it's replaced by a newer and better one.

Despite these statistical advances and the vastly different picture they painted of the game itself, the old media just continued to trot out the same old conventional-wisdom-spouting "experts" who continued to lay down the same old bullshit that they'd been laying down for 100 years. In fact, they continue doing it to this day, as FJM courageously highlights. The time has come when the fans know more than the announcers. John Kruk, Jeff Brantley, Joe Morgan and their ilk insult the intelligence of even the average-IQ'd fan on a nightly basis.

Why do they hire these guys? To me, it's typical corporate decision-making, meaning it's made out of fear. The people with hiring power would rather slot in a big name, an ex-player, than take a risk on somebody who might actually study the game on a level deeper than hit ball, run fast. Surely there are some people out there who fit both requirements, an ex-player who can break down the physical mechanics of the game based on personal experience but is also open-minded enough to accept new philosophies and statistics as they continue to develop. I just haven't seen the guy.

Most ex-jocks have an immediate insecure knee-jerk rejection toward anything that they weren't taught by their little league coach. Closed-mindedness prevails in all levels of sports coverage. For ex-jocks, it's their unique ability to tune out doubt and focus on the pure physical demands of their sport that got them to the pros in the first place. You're not going to find much radical thinking in that universe.

Here's an example of how much dumber the average sportscaster is than the average fan. One time Roger Clemens was pitching for the Yanks, and every time he struck somebody out a clever fan was hanging up a picture of Mark Twain (nee Samuel Langhorne Clemens). The fan was smart and I think most people at home watching the game figured it out and were amused. But the Yankee announcers had no idea what the connection was for like two innings: "I don't get it. What does Einstein have to do with Clemens?" they kept saying, until a fan called in and said, "You idiots, that's not Einstein, it's Mark Twain." The announcers felt pretty stupid. Because they are.