...WHEN DOES IT END

I'm actually going to step off to the side a moment and point something out:

"The AL's voters couldn't even correctly identify the most valuable Twin, never mind wrapping their heads around a whole league...Joe Mauer was more valuable than Justin Morneau this past season. If you don't understand that, you don't understand the first thing about baseball."


Keith Law - Morneau awful choice for AL MVP, ESPN.com

Law was, of course, a former Baseball Prospectus writer and then assistant General Manager of the Toronto Blue Jays. Is his outrage projected at the AL MVP voting by the Baseball Writers Association of America? No. It's directed at all of baseball. It's been building for some time.


Law could just go after the fact that the Baseball Writers Association of America goes by the acronym BBWAA...where is that extra 'B' coming from? That alone should tell everyone that this group, for the most part, of 'newspaper men' and traditional media are not behind the times, they don't even know that an abstract concept like time could exist.


Law is coming into his own as a writer for the gaggle and slack-jawed yokels that makes up the baseball reader. With BP he had a niche audience and a specific group that would appreciate his knowledge and understanding. With ESPN.com. he's coming across people who still think that 'intangibles' and 'clutch' are what make MVP's. That generic little league knowledge must transfer over to professional baseball, just like schoolyard basketball transfers over to professional basketball and driving in traffic on I-80 is real similar to hitting the Brickyard at Indianapolis.


I've been fighting this fight for a few years.


I'm just reminding myself, here, in this post that I need to write more. I've gotten too wrapped up in work. We've come to the point in the project at work where patients die if people aren't trained properly. Worse, people and the health system could be sued. Worse, at least by the health system's way of thinking. It's not an occupation where you can just walk up to the front of a classroom and 'wing it'.


I am not claiming I am anywhere near Law's knowledge and understanding of the game from a business or a statistical level. But I don't think I'm a novice, either. I wish I had the time to submit pieces to Baseball Prospectus or watch enough baseball that I could swing a piece or two to Baseball America. If you read the fine print of names in the Baseball Prospectus annual where the authors thank people, you'll see my name in there. It's an incredible honor and always a cheap gift to family, just buy them a copy and get a 3M sticky pointing to the page where the name is.


Anyway.


Back to Law and his cast forth rage.


Want to feel the gravity of how funny that post and Law's statements are?





That's right. Some of the 'experts' pissed Law off, too.


Some of the experts who work at ESPN.


One a former General Manager and a few others who just aren't very good at writing let alone understanding sports, not just baseball.


ED NOTE: Ryan Wilkins, another former BP'er has an article at PROTRADE on the AL MVP topic.


Rob Neyer has a similar article, but Neyer has become used to the stupidity of BBWAA and the baseball realm as whole, he's also been smacked down by the authorities at ESPN.com a time or two.

"So again, if you're an intuitionist, you have three choices: Jeter, Mauer, Morneau. If you're an empiricist, you have three choices: Jeter, Mauer, Hafner."


Rob Neyer - Two different debates converge with Jeter, ESPN.com

Ah.


I think post-season awards are nice for people to debate if they understand what they are talking about. But not a lot do and this makes a debate into an argument. Frankly, I could do without awards in general. They drive up the cost of free agents by 15-25% by an arbitrary voting system. SEE: JASON GIAMBI, MIGUEL TEJADA, BARRY ZITO, ERIC CHAVEZ. You don't have to sign then, but when you do...boy do you overpay for them.


But I could go on for a few thousand words on bad free agent signings in the Billy Beane era. And I will.


Just a note that I have a few interviews coming and some of them may require you to hold onto your socks, lest they get blown through your shoes.