Author: Perich

“We’re Talking Homer … Ozzie and the Straw …”

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Last Friday, NerdsOnSports’ own Willis, RJ and I went to see the Brockton Rox play the Nashua Pride at gorgeous Campanelli Stadium, right outside Brockton High School (home of the Ames Street Soldiers). NerdsOnSports charter members Matt M., Amanda L., Josh P. and my girlfriend Christine were also in attendance.

Campanelli Stadium Watching Brockton play ball was some of the most fun I’ve ever had watching baseball in my life – major league, minor league, little league, you name it. For one thing, Campanelli is, again, gorgeous – modern, clean, spacious and comfortable. Considering the Rox aren’t even affiliated with Major League Baseball, the size and scope of their facilities impressed me.

For another thing, we saw in the first six innings just about everything that can conceivably happen in a game of baseball. And I mean everything:

  • A single, double, triple and a homer all in the same inning;
  • An in-the-park home run;
  • A player stealing home base;
  • A player attempting to steal first (after the catcher dropped the third strike);
  • A balk;
  • The pitcher challenging the runner’s tag at third by throwing the ball back to second; and
  • A ground-rule double overruled into a stadium-rule home run.

All it lacked was an improper substitution under rule 3.05(c) to run the circuit.And another thing: every half inning – and I mean every half inning – was marked by on-field festivities of some sort. K.O. the Brockton Kangaroo runs onto the field and jumps around. A randomly selected fan tries to hit a lobster mascot with a golf ball. An eleventh birthday party. Slingshotting T-shirts into the stands. And so forth.

Bugs Argues The Call The great thing about small-town ball is that it feels like a party. Everyone in the stands knows everyone else, because it’s the same thousand people every weekend. And the players are good, but they’re not so good that the game becomes the monotonous, scoreless routine we’ve come to expect from the MLB. Even those lazy “can of corn” pop flies that you know are going to be an out could still end in a base hit. Who knows?

I’m going back. And you’re coming with me.

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Double Secret Probation

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In order to alter the size of the tagcloud to my left, your right, I’d like to talk about a sport that’s not baseball.

pacman.jpgOn Monday, June 4, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell handed down a series of suspensions for off-field misbehavior:

  • Tank Johnson, DT, Chicago Bears: for violating probation with misdemeanor firearms possession: eight games
  • Chris Henry, WR, Cincinnati Bengals: driving with a suspended license, supplying alcohol to minors: eight games
  • Adam ‘Pacman’ Jones, cornerback, Tennessee Titans: aggravated assault, inciting violence, travelling with gun-toting felons: one season

All three are appealing the suspensions.I don’t feel the least bit of remorse for either of these three. All of them are repeated delinquents: Pacman Jones has been arrested five times in two years, Henry a mere 4 times in fourteen months, and Johnson was already on probation for a firearms charge nine months earlier. Criminal charges clearly haven’t been sufficient, especially since these guys earn enough money to defend themselves out of anything short of assaulting a federal officer with rolled-up stolen missile plans.

sig229ba.jpgI have no sympathy for their plight, but I do understand how they ended up where they did. Each of these young men were earning more money in a month than I earn in a year. Tank Johnson’s suspension, for instance, is estimated to cost him $255,000, which works out to $42,500 per unregistered firearm (and you thought your hobby was expensive). College athletes at universities with strong football programs already live the life of Achilles – and that’s when they’re (technically) not allowed to be paid for their work (ha ha, wink wink). Throw $1,212,000 at me within my first two years out of college and some of it just might end up on a stage in a Vegas stripclub.
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Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me and Joe Morgan

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There’s already a site doing it better, but I’d like to weigh in on something terribly stupid Joe Morgan said during last Sunday’s Red Sox / Yankees game.

He said, and I paraphrase, “guys like Ted Williams didn’t get to be hitting champions by getting walked a lot. People talk all the time about drawing walks, but Ted Williams didn’t get a lot of walks.”

Ted Williams, USMCEven without access to a laptop, the Internet and a century of baseball statistics at the time, I knew in my heart that that was false. First, because Joe Morgan was saying it with authority. And second, because, well, when you’re pitching to a guy who hits .318 on a bad season, you’ll occasionally throw a few outside.

However, I’d be no better than Stumbling Joe himself if I didn’t find the facts to back me up. So here, in an easy to read chart, are the all-time career walk leaders:

Rank Player Years AB BB
1. Barry Bonds 21 9507 2426
2. Rickey Henderson 25 10961  2190
3. Babe Ruth 22 8399 2062
4. Ted Williams 19 7706 2019
5. Joe Morgan 22 9277 1865
6. Carl Yastrzemski 23 11988 1845
etc.

(Edited to clean up HTML and revise figures that suggested Rickey Henderson was one of the “giants in the earth […] mighty men which were of old, men of renown” (Genesis 6:4))

It’s no longer shocking that Joe Morgan has such little respect for statistical analysis that he’d be flat-out, incontrovertibly wrong about whether Teddy Ballgame drew a lot of walks or just a few. That’s par for the course. The man wouldn’t be doing his job if he were right more than half the time.

But you’d think that, given the fact that Ted William’s #4 and Joe Morgan himself is #5, that he’d at least remember that number. That he might have heard his own name brought up in that context before. That Joe Morgan might at least be cognizant of a record he’s really really close to Ted Williams on.

Ted Williams drew 154 more walks than Joe Morgan did, over 1571 fewer at-bats. That tells me that, yeah, better hitters draw more walks, regardless of how counter-intuitive that might strike the dumbest man to talk about baseball since Tim McCarver. It also tells me that Joe Morgan not only knows nothing about statistics – he knows nothing about his own career.

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Cleveland over Detroit in 2OT

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So I watched a basketball game last night.

I was out with a crowd of friends at a bar in Watertown and the last quarter of the Cleveland/Detroit game was on. Between speculation as to which upcoming films based on Marvel properties were going to suck (Transformers, probably; Fantastic Four 2, certainly), we watched some postseason basketball.

Things I Still Don’t Like About Basketball:

  • The inordinate influence held by one or two players. “Name three Cleveland players other than LeBron James,” a friend observed. I’ll bet all the plays in Mike Brown’s playbook have four squiggles for the other players and a gold star for LeBron.
  • The repetitive dynamic of play. The most crucial plays in a game of basketball will alter the score by no more than 3 points for either side; in a 100-point game that’s meaningless. Basketball’s more Mozart than Beethoven – too many notes to follow.Rasheed is charging up his attack
  • Courting fouls. As one girl at the table pointed out, Rasheed Wallace is particularly operatic in his play, clutching at wounds real or imagined and shaking his fist at heaven if a foul isn’t called. He’s an understudy for the Fisher Theatre’s production of Twelve Angry Men this fall.

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Let’s Make A Sport

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User-generated content day at Nerds on Sports. ????? ??????
Calvinball
Today’s game: Let’s Invent A Sport.

The procedure:

(1) You add a rule by posting a comment to this entry.

(2) The rules don’t need to be in any kind of sequential or procedural order. ???? ????? ????? So if everybody else is talking about how to resolve fouls and you want to set the rules for overtime, just write it down.

(3) Don’t contradict anything that anybody else wrote already, unless you want it to be a special exception or a rules loophole. ??? ????? ?????

(4) Don’t waste comments asking, “Hey, what do you mean when you say ‘x’ in comment #202?” Tell me what I meant by adding it to the rules.

I’ll start us off.

Scoring: Players score by either advancing the ball into their opponent’s First Zone and then passing the ball to a teammate in the opponent’s Primary Zone, or by advancing the ball into the opponent’s Primary Zone and then passing it to a teammate in the opponent’s First Zone.

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A Post Yankopalyptic Future

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Given the loss of Darrell Rasner, Phil Hughes, Jeff Karstens and Carl Pavano, and the shaky status of Chien-Ming Wang and Mike Mussina, the New York Yanquis are clearly under a curse of some type.

With the aid of my junior Tarot deck, I’m going to divine the fate of the rest of the Yankees’ roster.

Brian Bruney (#33): Pitches a breaking slider to Mike Lowell. Lowell gets all of it with a fat swing, driving the ball right into Bruney’s chest. A baseball-sized chunk of flesh exits Bruney’s back. ???? ???? ?????? Out for nine weeks.

Most-searched name on Technorati! Tyler Clippard (#19): Texting animatedly to Fox News’s online poll to express his rabid support for maverick Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, he rear-ends a school bus, igniting his car. Out for season.

Matt DeSalvo (#14): Hantavirus. Misses next start.

Kyle Farnsworth (#48): Raises his hand to call over a waiter while “David Cornwell” is being paged at Sapa. Is mistaken for double agent by spies as a result. Kidnapped at gunpoint, interrogated at Westchester County mansion, framed for murder of U.N. delegate, boards train, romances Eve Marie-Saint. Out for four weeks.
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Revising the Passer Rating

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This post may contain recycled content.

I have a mission for you: revise the QB rating.

The QB rating (technically called the “passer rating,” as that’s all it’s meant to evaluate) is an arcane formula devised when the NFL and the AFL merged in order to standardize statistics. Rather than compare quarterbacks to each other – which provided no metric for season-to-season growth, statistician Don Smith devised a way to measure their progress objectively.

The problem is that (A) it’s not very objective and (B) it’s cryptic.

(A) The rating system is great, in theory. Take the four key areas of a passer’s performance: completion percentage, yards gained per pass, number of touchdowns and number of interceptions. ???? ????? ?? ???????? Normalize them against some industry-standard benchmarks (50% pass completion, 55 interceptions per 1000 passes, etc). Total these numbers and voila.

Peyton Manning wishes he had the talent of Drew BreesThe problem is, those benchmarks were set in 1971 and have not been revised since. The “yards per pass” metric, which figures an average of 7, punishes QBs whose coaches use the fire-and-forget “West Coast Offense.” Is a 5.5% interception percentage still average? Look at the numbers yourself and tell me: as of the end of the 2006 season, Dallas’s Tony Romo and the Saints’ Drew Brees led the league in passer rating (89.6, 88.3, respectively), while those jackasses Tom brady and Peyton Manning couldn’t even crack the top 5.

(Cold Hard Football Facts agrees with me, and has some pictures of Pamela Anderson to boot. No, for serious)

(B) In order to normalize against those aforementioned benchmarks, you have to go through some weird hoops. Nothing terribly complicated – just lots of division.

({[(Comp / Att) x 100 – 30]/20 + [(Yards / Att) – 3 x 0.25] + [(TD / Att) x20] + [2.375 – (INT / Att) x 25]} / 6) x 100

Remember your order of operations and show all work.

There has to be a better way – and this wouldn’t be “Harebrained Schemes Tuesday” if I didn’t come up with one.
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