Should we be concerned about the three point accuracy? Or just write it off as preseason, guys rounding into form, etc? And for the more analytically inclined among us, is having an offense built around high-volume three point attempts a good idea if the team isn’t shooting well from outside the arc?
Jet lag is difficult. Give them a week to recover before worrying about their three point percentage.
I thought the decision making was pretty bad. A lot of 3s were rushed/forced and the poor percentage was in part due to those bad decisions. Between the jetlag and learning a new offense, I’m not too worried about the actual percentage but I’m also not convinced this can be an effective high-volume 3pt team.
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yeah way too early to even begin to worry about 3 pt percentage no one around the league is doing anything great in preseason in that regard
I watched the baseball post season strategy vide and didn’t buy it all. I don’t see why the post season is different in most of the things it talked about.
Because he didn’t want life and society to be just a bunch of atomized individuals with no deeper ties to each other, Joe Morgan *wanted* a baseball team to be more than 25 atomized individuals.
While the cheap data/internet age has shown that aspiration, for the most part, to be unrealized, it beggars belief that it should have drawn forth such obnoxious and mean-spirited vitriol.
Very eye test, but in general I was really in favor of the way that the starters played, it was fast, it wasn’t ball-holding, they seemed to work hard on defense, they just couldn’t hit the ocean with a rock from the surf. I also thought the bench did surprisingly well, most players had at least a moment where they seemed NBA ready (and a few had multiple such moments).
The fact that our scrubs were better than their scrubs (even though our scrubs were very scrubby) was nice, at least from a Let’s Go Knicks perspective.
Overall a nice preseason game, trending the correct way outside of the shooting percent, I presume (hopehopehope) the latter will fix itself as jet lag fades and familiarity increases.
To repeat what I said yesterday before Yankee Group Therapy swallowed up the whole discussion(*), Brown doesn’t need to be a master tactician to significantly raise this group’s ceiling. He just has to be flexible to his guys’ strengths and weaknesses, and to what the opposing team is doing. What Brown talks about in the Edwards article about read-and-react? That’s low-hanging fruit stuff that Thibs almost always refused to do, despite his “the game tells you what to do” mantra.
(*) This isn’t a complaint, btw. It had been a few days since the Knicks played, and there are enough Yankee fans here (me included) to make it a worthy off-day topic.
there is an article on the athletic this morning about the knicks new “read and react” offense i thought id have access to it but i dont has anyone else seen what it says
I’ll read the article when I have time later but I mentioned last night I actually believe Brown’s defensive schemes seemingly gives the players more freedom to use their athleticism by reading and reacting more which should hopefully lead to more forced turnovers and fast break opportunities.
thing is we dont have a lot of our main guys who are considered to be particularly athletic i think we need to work more with our experience and guile for the most part
Who’s the most athletic rotation player, if you’re defining athleticism as speed and explosiveness? (Brunson, for instance, is phenomenally athletic in his strength and body control, but he’s not fast and can’t jump.) OG? A healthy Mitch?
og and mitch are the ones who came to mind for me do we think that deuce has some athleticism
I’m not sure about our main guys not being especially athletic. Mitch and OG definitely athletic. Bridges doesn’t do those great defensive plays against Boston without athleticism. Towns is remarkably limber and mobile for a big guy. Hart and Deuce aren’t slouches athletically either. The only main guy I’ve left out is Brunson. I guess Clarkson and Yabusele will be in the rotation too, but I haven’t seen enough of them to comment.
The Athletic piece didn’t say anything we didn’t already all know. Three point shooting attempts are terrific (55 last night), makes are crazy bad, shouldn’t last, but some question about whether high-efficiency, low-volume players can crank volume up and maintain efficiency. Duh.
Also something about ‘shifting’ defense, which seems to be about playing angles and getting one’s hand in the passing lane more often, which Anonoby does well and the rest don’t, but maybe it’ll be more of a thing for the team going forward rather than just staying completely plugged onto one’s man. Not sure though from the article whether that’s just a thing Edwards noticed or a new wrinkle Brown is instituting.
i guess what makes it a little more difficult is that we dont really have “above the rim” guys like ja or antman thats ok though we do great with what we have
Joe Morgan *wanted* a baseball team to be more than 25 atomized individuals.
Joe Morgan wanted the laws of baseball to be what he believed in, not what they were. He thought a 270ba/390obp hitter was inferior to a 300ba/320obp hitter, despite being a 270ba/390obp hitter himself. That would be like Dr. Salk advocating for ivermectin or John Frusciante thinking guitars should be simple, subtle, and in the background.
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Thanks for doing the Yankees, guys. Now do the Phillies.
I resent that this Phillies team even exists. Their whole core (Harper, Schwarber, Realmuto) is a group of guys who were perfect fits on the Yankees when they hit free agency, and would have been signed by us if we operated like the richest team in baseball instead of treating the luxury tax as a salary cap. But we ceded that role to your Dodgers and now we have to listen to you chirp about how great it is to follow them.
Nice to see their fans suffer, though, especially on the same night the Giants beat the Eagles.
There are no “laws of baseball.” The sport has valued different things and been played and transacted different ways throughout its history, and the analytics era isn’t any more compelling than any previous era.
(Same with basketball, by the way.)
The purpose of sports isn’t to throw off data. Nor do the vast majority of people want to sit around watching apples fall from trees and argue about the pull of gravity.
Joe Morgan was also adamant that Billy Beane wrote “Moneyball”
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Who’s the most athletic rotation player, if you’re defining athleticism as speed and explosiveness?
Josh Hart by quite a bit. It’s a big concern of mine that even our athletic players are pretty slow up and down the court. I will say that against Philly, Mitch seemed to get up and down better than I’ve seen him do in a long time (maybe his lungs work for once).
The announcers kept saying how the Knicks are getting torches in transition and I can’t help but think this is why. Obviously getting Hart healthy would help quite a bit.
Nor do the vast majority of people want to sit around watching apples fall from trees and argue about the pull of gravity.
Joe Morgan also rejected Newton’s law of gravity, and instead believed in Empedocles’ love/strife model.
It might have actually been more fun to watch baseball back when managers thought you should bat your second basemen second because that’s what Leo Durocher did, and that bunting in the first inning was sound strategy, and that you always use your best relief pitcher in the ninth inning and not in the most high leverage situation. It may have been comforting not to know about BABIP and to think that judging the relative hotness of a prospect’s girlfriend was a viable scouting tool.
Unfortunately some nerds figured out that all that shit was fucking stupid if you want to win games, and after decades of pointing it out people started listening to them.
Phillies are bigger playoff chokers than the Yankees!
At the end of the day, Joe Morgan was ridiculed because he, like many others across a variety of fields, failed to grasp the is/ought distinction.
Anyone is free to hold the opinion that baseball is at its most aesthetically pleasing when hitters try to maximize putting balls in play at the expense of walks, home runs, and strikeouts. Ditto for the opinion that basketball as at its best when guys are posting up and taking midrange jumpers. They’re free to feel the games ought to be played this way.
But once you crossover into saying these aesthetic preferences are actually how you maximize success in the respective sports, you’re going to get made fun of for the same reasons people make fun of creationists and flat-earthers and the like–you’re wrong, and it’s extra embarrassing because the information proving you’re wrong is easily accessible and not hard to understand.
But perhaps some creative baseball team will fire their analytics department, hire Bob Neptune as GM, and he’ll use batting average as his main criteria for selecting players and start bunting in the first inning again and bring back the complete game, which will restore the game to its natural state, which is The Way It Was When I Was Twelve Years Old.
you always use your best relief pitcher in the ninth inning
Laughs in Goose Gossage
I wrote a long-ish post a few weeks ago about how the Knicks’ relative lack of athleticism concerned me a bit, and concur the answer to the question is Hart, who for all of his faults is desperately needed on this team.
I was so heartened by the 3PA volume last night I’m hesitant to register any complaints about it, but to the extent their was a quality issue I think it can be traced back to this. It’s very hard (not impossible) to generate good 3PA without players who can consistently breakdown a defense.
Brunson can do this in his own, not-necessarily-athletic-as-the-word-is-commonly-understood, way, but after him the list of guys on the team who can clearly do it requires some squinting, and Hart is higher on it than most.
This is why I’m not going to complain about signing Clarkson for the minimum even though I know he might make me invest in some kind of TV screen protector.
I’m going to highlight an N=1 moment last night regarding athleticism, which is when Dadiet got the ball under the basket, got the ball momentarily knocked out of his hands as he started to go up, got it back, and I then I spent what felt like a solid 60 seconds screaming in my head for him to jump up and dunk the fucking thing while he gathered.
He made the layup just barely as he allowed the defense to come back to him and almost block it again, but jesus was that a slow reaction. I’ll be monitoring whether that was just slow processing (a bad thing in itself), or whether he actually has a really slow second jump.
He’s never struck me as having low athleticism before, but that was alarming.
@chickenlittle
Me: It seems that you almost take [the book] personally.
Joe: I took it personally because they had a personal thing about me saying Durham should’ve stolen second base in the game that they lost — he stayed at first base, and they hit three fly balls, and the A’s lose another fifth game.
Me: And that’s the chief reason you don’t even wanna read the book?
Joe: I don’t read books like that. I didn’t read Bill James’ book, and you said he was complimenting me. Why would I wanna read a book about a computer, that gives computer numbers?
Me: It’s not about a computer.
Joe: Well, I’m not reading the book, so I wouldn’t know.
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last night was a horrible night to be a philly sports fan wasnt it between the phillies getting eliminated (especially *that* way) the eagles losing to the giants and even the flyers losing it was no bueno for them
One of my best friends is a lifelong Dodger fan who adored the Ron Cey, Steve Garvey, LaSorda teams as a kid. For years he complained how the Dodgers would never win the World Series because they didn’t put together teams that could play vaunted October Baseball and were only good in the regular season. Basically said they relied on analytics too much and thus would never win the championship because they don’t like hit behind the runner and stuff.
#Goink
Serious question: did anyone ever tell Joe Morgan that a clear insight from the analytics revolution is that Joe Morgan was even better than he was perceived to be in his day?
It’s odd that a guy with a career 16.5% walk rate and .392 OBP but unspectacular .271 AVG took up this anti-cause.
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There were a lot of sports going on last night so I didn’t watch that much of the preseason game, but what I did see looked pretty good. They got up lots of good 3s (I think they missed almost every one, but whatever) and the ball was moving purposefully. Cautiously optimistic about the new offense
Most likely he knew all that and was just fuckin’ with people. It’s highly doubtful Joe Morgan took a bunch of walks accidentally, or thought they were meaningless when he drew one and instead said to himself when he got to first base, “Wow, what a waste of a plate appearance that was by me; it would have been better if I’d grounded into a double play.”
Seems to have worked.
judging the relative hotness of a prospect’s girlfriend was a viable scouting tool.
I’d still like to see his hypothesis tested bc I actually thought “ugly girlfriend means low confidence” sounded like a reasonable thin slice.
Yeah Joe Morgan was just doing a tongue in cheek bit about analytics because he’s a funny cheeky guy like that and wasn’t at all a sanctimonious prick who left behind a voluminous public record of blitherlingly ignorant statements in which his own incuriosity spawned a cottage industry of people who dunked on him in hilarious fashion.
Oh no. He was doing a bit. Totally got the last laugh.
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So when he got to first base after a walk, his little man was saying to him, “Dude, you just done fucked up again?”
When he was a young man and playing baseball, I don’t know what he thought.
I actually DO know what he thought when he was an old cranky fusspot who didn’t want the game to be different than it was when he played, to the point that he seemed to denigrate his own style of play.
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This might be E’s laziest and dumbest troll ever, and that’s really saying something. Why are we even engaging in this as if it’s a good faith argument or worth debating?
Had an excellent time at last night’s game, and while I could have done without the OT, all’s well that ends well!
Other than Yabu’s enormous bum, these are the things that stood out:
-The Wolves are going to be very good again. They have skill, athleticism, length, and a nice combo of young guys and veterans. They took it to our starting lineup, and if this were the season opener, I am thinking we would have lost.
-some of Brown’s sets seemed to get gummed up, particularly when a big was involved in dribble hand-offs. Minny’s defensive length probably helped them counter all the ball movement, but a lot of that movement didn’t seem to go anywhere.
-The Knicks couldn’t buy a 3, so the efficacy of what they were doing was hard to measure. None of Deuce, Yabu, or Clarkson helped much in that regard. The Knicks didn’t hit the 50-pt mark until halfway through the 3rd. Deuce came around later, but I don’t think it was against front line MIN rotation players.
-Clarkson did some interesting stuff out there offensively. He definitely has a knack for getting deep into the lane and making good things happen. Whereas Yabu did very little that was memorable. It’s not surprising that Clarkson was a +7 and Yabu was -11.
-I’m starting to lean more towards Matthews over Shamet.
-Of the scrubs, Huk looked by far the best, and all of Dadiet, Kolek, and Tosan, and less so Jemison and Diawara, comported themselves well.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure he realized and understood that a walk was a positive baseball event.
I actually DO know what he thought when he was an old cranky fusspot who didn’t want the game to be different than it was when he played, to the point that he seemed to denigrate his own style of play.
I think my explanation of why that likely was is pretty solid. Few people really like selfishness and atomized individualism, and it’s far less virtuous and positive by any serious measurement than teamwork and esprit de corps and sacrificing for others. It would be a better thing if giving yourself up to get the runner over to third with one out actually *was* a positive baseball event. Alas, it almost always isn’t — but so what?
But perhaps some creative baseball team will fire their analytics department, hire Bob Neptune as GM, and he’ll use batting average as his main criteria for selecting players and start bunting in the first inning again and bring back the complete game, which will restore the game to its natural state, which is The Way It Was When I Was Twelve Years Old.
Your hatred and biases are self evident. My only response is RIP John Lodge.
Unless you’re a fan of those teams, why would anyone care if the Arizona Diamondbacks or Colorado Rockies have “good analytical front offices”? (That’s fundamentally the laughable part of the FJM craze.)
I know there are some people who will say that when they turn a baseball game on, they want to see all teams playing their “smartest,” but that’s little more than a pose. The game would be just as good between teams we’re not fans of — even better, really — if the run-of-the-mill Reds/Rockies game you happen to turn on was played 1990-style.
When I watch a baseball game, I don’t want my team to win, I want them to display virtuousness and esprit de corps by giving away outs to the opposition.
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Joe Morgan was announcing and reporting on baseball games; he wasn’t watching his team try to win.
And the baseball state that gives the Mets the best chance of winning would be if all the other teams were chasing 1982-style players.(*) So then why would you care if the Diamondbacks have shitty analytics?
(*) Presumably.
-I’m starting to lean more towards Matthews over Shamet.
Was thinking this too. He’s decidedly a one-trick pony, but the trick is pretty damn good, especially when you consider his fast release. Shamet does have a bit more diversity to his game but ultimately I’m not sure it’s enough to balance out the shooting delta. At the end of the day that’s primarily what Shamet is there to do anyway and Mathews is better at it.
Oh sure, it would be amazing if every other team besides the Mets did dumb shit all the time and used Girlfriend Hotness as a scouting tool. In the actual world the Mets were one of the last teams to embrace analytics and the sparkling results speak for themselves. Omar Minaya pretty clearly didn’t know what BABIP was in like 2008. In the real world the Mets were the last Joe Morgans standing.
Well expect maybe for the Colorado Rockies, who are still at it.
Oh sure, it would be amazing if every other team besides the Mets did dumb shit all the time and used Girlfriend Hotness as a scouting tool.
Exactly. So then why did something like FJM grow up and make it a point to purport to care (oh, so much) about the random front office scouting on the 20-80 Girlfriend Hotness scale?
(Answer: Because there was quite a bit more going on with the whole enterprise than just Joe Morgan and baseball. But in baseball terms, it makes little sense. While there’s no accounting for pose affectation, no one besides D’Back fans *really* gives a shit whether the D’Backs make smart or stupid baseball decisions, just as no one gave a shit about the 1993 Padres or 1963 Colt .45’s doing so.)
I liked old fashioned baseball more than whatever is being played today, including pitchers hitting, bunting, hitting behind runners, etc. Much like I like music from the 60’s and 70’s more than whatever has been produced since. I liked post-up basketball where 3’s were fewer and farther between and the midrange jumper was in vogue.
Obviously there’s no turning back to those days, and it is amazing to see guys like Judge hit the cover off of 100mph pitches, and Curry shoot 3’s as if they were layups. But at times it does feel like a hollow shell to me. Intuitively, I’d prefer watching the .320 hitter who rarely walks than the .260 hitter with a higher OBP. I’d rather watch MVP SGA play old-school ball and hit 52% of his shots from the field than MVP James Harden play analytics ball and hit 45%.
FJM existed because lazy mediocre sports pundits said very dumb fucking things in public all the time, things that intelligent people enjoyed pointing and laughing at because honestly it’s fun to make fun of sanctimonious intellectually lazy turds. It wasn’t just Joe himself, there was a whole legion of now extinct lazy sports pundits who found it convenient and profitable to fill column inches with testimonials to David Eckstein’s grit and to make the astute observation that computers don’t play baseball.
It’s okay to laugh at lazy ignorant people who say dumb things in public for a living.
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The best criticism of analytics in sports is that it tends to make all teams play the same way. You see this across all the major sports. Every team plays the West Coast Offense now and short passes their opponents to death. All NBA teams shoot tons of threes. All MLB teams teach launch angle and want pitchers with high velo and spin rate.
Sports has always been this way though, and there have always been fans lamenting change. In 1905 there were people complaining about pitching rotations and pining for the days when Old Hoss Radbourn would just pitch every inning of every game. Lots of people rabidly hated how the game changed after Ruth. People hated the dunk and the three pointer and the forward pass and night baseball and the shot clock and the NHL helmet rule and on and on.
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I’d go further, JK, and say it is a moral imperative to do so these days.
I do wonder, however (as I do love me some Bud Harrelson) if bits of old baseball will come back into vogue at some point, even without radical rule changes being instituted (which I’m certainly not expecting). This past week I saw a runner break from second and the hitter pull the ball through the first-second base hole to put runners on first and third and it kind of made my heart sing. I think it was a lucky accident, however.
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It’s okay to laugh at lazy ignorant people who say dumb things in public for a living.
Fine, I’m not sure I necessarily even disagree with the principle. Nor do I disagree with the idea that, all else equal, we should prefer smart to stupid.
But as noted upthread, that doesn’t really have anything to do with baseball. Baseball front office-ing has really never seemed “worth it,” but I guess that one’s in the eye of the beholder. Much of it relies on pose.
Intuitively, I’d prefer watching the .320 hitter who rarely walks than the .260 hitter with a higher OBP.
Root for Aaron Judge, you can have it all!
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I mean, the fact that for decades multibillion dollar organizations were employing front offices that performed worse than bloggers in their stead would have was a very compelling human interest story.
It was first and foremost a story about baseball, but it touched on the wisdom of markets, the power of inertia and conventional wisdom, plain ol’ stubbornness even when it works against one’s interests, and any number of other things people have been interested in since time immemorial. It’s not hard to see why FJM et al. had success.
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They weren’t multibillion-dollar enterprises until very recently. They were for the most part mom-and-pop operations. Corporations didn’t really even dirty their fingers with them beyond a few ads in the yearbook and program until like the late 80s. The biggest sports “brand” was probably the Dallas Cowboys, and Jerry Jones bought them for under $200 million in 1989.
Baseball games at Tiger Stadium and Comiskey Park (and I’d wager Yankee and Shea) in the early-80s were almost entirely patronized by working dudes getting wasted. Whether the Red Sox had had a smart or stupid 1985 offseason was of essentially zero cultural moment (outside New England, obviously).
Other than Yabu’s enormous bum, these are the things that stood out:
Hysterical
I was watching the game last night and my girlfriend asked me how they looked. I told her the only think that sticks out so far is Yabu’s gigangtic butt.
“Root for Aaron Judge, you can have it all!”
Aaron Judge is objectively one of the most rootable immortal players in any sport in my lifetime.
Alas he plays for the Yankees, my second most hated team in all of sports. (Fuck the Celtics.)
So I very much appreciate his greatness, and truly admired the majesty of that HR he hit in game 3. Only a handful of players who ever lived could have hit that ball that far and that fair. That it rung the bell of the foul pole and tied a critical game was pixie-dust stuff, and any fan of the game should appreciate it, even more so because Aaron Judge the person. So the objective baseball fan in me appreciated that moment, as one should appreciate a fine bourbon. But I personally hate bourbon, and although I do my best to appreciate “the best” bourbon it when offered to me, I still wish I had a run-of-the-mill single malt scotch like Laphroiaig 10 instead…or even a Bud Light!
For lots of reasons, I got far more enjoyment watching Aaron Judge & co. skulk off their home field in humiliating fashion and subsequently listening to their fan base whine and howl about who is responsible for the latest bust in a never-ending run of championship-or-bust seasons. Now THAT’S some Lagavulin 16 to me!
I hope folks understand that it’s nothing personal against the Yankees fans on this site, and all teams have obnoxious fans so it’s all in good fun. It’s just sports, and I actually enjoy the banter, just like I enjoy perusing the Celtics blogs when they fall short. I try not to take it too far, though. When someone gave it to ras for all of his bluster, I thought that was poetic justice, in that he asked for it.
Clearly, the chances that the Mets will match or even overtake the Yankees in the coming years has improved with Steve Cohen taking over. But for now, it is still coming up on 40 years of the Mets sniffing the Yankee’s farts. Same with the Knicks and Celts…Leon has given some hope, but until we hang another banner, it’s just the same ol’ same ol’.
“I was watching the game last night and my girlfriend asked me how they looked. I told her the only think that sticks out so far is Yabu’s gigangtic butt.”
Honestly, like one of the Seven Wonders, it has to be seen in person to appreciate it. Same with Mikal Bridges’ arms.
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There was one shot of Yabu running down the court from behind, and all I could think of was “Behind.”
They were enormous haunches, swimming around in his trunks.
Z-Man, you hate the Yankees more than the Cowboys?
“Z-Man, you hate the Yankees more than the Cowboys?”
Apples to oranges. I don’t care as much about football. I also am a Jets fan and there is no historic Jets-Cowboys animosity. However, during the ’70’s most fans sort of drifted towards the dynastic teams…Steelers, Cowboys, Raiders, 49ers…I was a Steelers fan and definitely hated the Cowboys then.
I’ve gone through periods of loathing the Marino Dolphins, the Brady Patriots, the Jordan Bulls, the Reggie Pacers, the LeBron Heat, the 80’s Cardinals, the 90’s Braves, the 00’s Phillies, and some others. But only the Celts and Yanks have been constants, with one very brief exception…I rooted heavily for the ’96 Yanks against the Braves because a) I absolutely hated those Chipper Jones assholes and b) there were a few of my fave former Mets on that Yankees team. It wasn’t long before I took a long, hot virtual shower to wash off that stench, Mr. Clemens singlehandedly stoked all that hatred again.
For years he complained how the Dodgers would never win the World Series because they didn’t put together teams that could play vaunted October Baseball and were only good in the regular season. Basically said they relied on analytics too much and thus would never win the championship because they don’t like hit behind the runner and stuff.
Your friend was right, though. The Dodgers were a joke, a postseason stepping stone much like the Yankees currently are.
Surely you are not suggesting that variance got them over the hump, or that it was just a matter of time until they started to win in October, are you?
Because I’d bet my house it was because they did exactly what I’m mad the Yankees won’t do: they gave up trying to win with their TTO darlings like Yasiel Puig, Justin Turner, and Yasmani Grandal and switched to paying premium prices for Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, and Shohei Ohtani.
I’m pretty confident the Yankees will have less variance next year, too, if they replace guys like Grisham and Volpe with Kyle Tucker and Corey Seager (as they should, because they’re the fucking Yankees).
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“the fact that for decades multibillion dollar organizations were employing front offices that performed worse than bloggers”
I’m sorry, but exactly what record of success and failure do “bloggers” have to be judged on?
And what are the Top 10 examples from history of the less talented/more analytical team defeating the more talented/less analytical team in baseball? Have the last 15 World Series champs been more analytics-focused than the average? Are analytics the reason why, for example, the Yankees are 16-2 against the Twins in the post-season? We can all see the impact analytics have had on how the game is played. What is the evidence analytics have actually had an effect on winning?
The people who dismiss analytics are no less stupid and ridiculous that the folks who treat analytics like it’s a cheat code.
The Dodgers did the same shit they always did, you’re just retroactively applying the “they got smart” tag to them after they started winning the World Series. Same leadership since 2014, same guy who my friend insisted was trying to “win the World Series with a computer” then that runs the team now.
What happened is that they started getting into the playoffs every year, mainly by spending more money than everybody else, and eventually rolled a couple of 7’s. They didn’t somewhere like stop bringing in “TTO darlings” like you’re suggesting. Shohei Ohtani is somehow not a “TTO” player? The guy sure does generate a lot of Three True Outcome results last time I checked. He’s maybe the most TTO hitter in the entire sport. He either walks, strikes out, or hits home runs an absurdly high percentage of the time.
What is the evidence analytics have actually had an effect on winning?
The evidence is that every single team in the league relies heavily on analytics except probably the shittiest team in MLB, the Colorado Rockies. It’s standard practice now.
Sorry y’all, but the nerds won. This is just how baseball is played now. There is no “more” analytics based team than any other now, because pretty much every front office has fully embraced the practice.
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The Dodgers did the same shit they always did, you’re just retroactively applying the “they got smart” tag to them after they started winning the World Series. Same leadership since 2014, same guy who my friend insisted was trying to “win the World Series with a computer” then that runs the team now.
100% this. Gavin Lux, Andy Pages and Enrique Hernandez had the 6th, 7th and 8th most PAs in their title team last year.
The difference between Dodgers and Yankees is not in approach, it’s that the Dodgers have more good players than the Yankees (and have spent more money for it). They also have better redundancies when their plan A fails.
As someone who departed baseball in 2009 only to return as a lifelong Dodgers fan in October of 2024, it is very confusing to me why Ohtani isn’t a Yankee. Seems like the player George would have happily given $1B to. Did the apples fall that far from the tree?
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Because I’d bet my house it was because they did exactly what I’m mad the Yankees won’t do: they gave up trying to win with their TTO darlings like Yasiel Puig, Justin Turner, and Yasmani Grandal
The 2017 team had all three of those players on it. They got to Game 7 of the World Series, which they lost to a team that was literally cheating by banging on garbage can lids to signal when a fastball was coming because they were stealing the signs from a camera.
To me, Cashman’s biggest failure all these years was not getting a truly elite left handed hitter to slot between Judge and Stanton. So many of them hit the market, and they never pulled the trigger. The only time they had that – last year – they made it to the World Series, which could have had a different outcome if Aaron Boone was not the manager.
2025 Ben Rice had the best non-Soto offensive season by a NYY left handed hitter since 2017. 2019 Mike Tauchman – Mike Tauchman! – is in the top 5. 2018 Didi Gregorious and 2019 Brett Gardner are in the top 10. There are literally only 14 above average player-seasons by LHHs (by wRC+) since 2017. This is crazy for a team that plays in Yankee Stadium.
2
The Dodgers did the same shit they always did,
They sure as fuck did not. There’s no Betts, Freeman, and Ohtani on the 2017 Dodgers. There is a bunch of high variance analytical darlings on pre-arb deals, though.
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They made it to game 7 of the World Series and lost to a team that blatantly cheated in 2017. This is not one of your better arguments.
They made it to game 7 of the World Series and lost to a team that blatantly cheated in 2017. This is not one of your better arguments.
They also had Corey freaking Seager and RoY Cody Bellinger in their lineup.
My argument is not that they couldn’t have won a World Series.
My argument is that they’re doing things different now and are much better for it.
The old Dodger way was “we don’t need a 1B, we have Max Muncy on Arb-2 deal and we can bring back old Justin Turner to play 3B even though he’s going to be a major hole in the bottom of our lineup when we get to the postseason.” (And that’s exactly what the Yankees do every year.)
The current Dodger way is “fuck that, we can get Freddie Freeman, move Muncy down the lineup, and kick that hole in our lineup to the curb.”
That is how they mitigated variance in October. (Note I said mitigated because I know you can’t eliminate it, so you can save the keystrokes about ’23 D’Backs NLDS.)
g-d i hope the beginning of the knicks regular season arrives soon
You probably don’t want to know what Justin Turner’s postseason statistics are.
They’re .271/.370/.461.
Add that up and it’s an .831 OPS. In the playoffs. In 370 ABs.
In 2020 when they won the World Series he was 35 and had a 1.066 OPS.
Just stop.
Turner was 38 years old.
Paul Goldschmidt is 38 and has a .990 postseason OPS. How wise do you think it would be to count on him next October?
You’re kind of making two different arguments here:
1. Justin Turner was a “TTO darling” and the kind of player you shouldn’t rely on in the playoffs.
That’s wrong. He hit very well in the postseason over his career.
2. You shouldn’t rely on hitters in their late 30’s as they tend to decline rapidly.
That’s correct and nobody would really dispute that.
I’m making one argument: they broke through in October because they changed their approach and acquired the best players in baseball.
What exactly is the analytical argument that Ohtani isn’t good at baseball and the Dodgers shouldn’t have tried to sign him?
I don’t know but I think it’s the same one Brian Cashman used when he didn’t sign Manny Machado or Corey Seager.
Call me crazy but I think the Yankees would have experienced less postseason variance if they hadn’t used it.
“Sign all the best players” isn’t really a strategy, it’s an aspiration. This seems like blaming analytics when the real complaint is simply that they’re not spending $400M on payroll.
1
g-d i hope the beginning of the knicks regular season arrives soon
12 days. Is that soon? Perhaps we can argue about that
definitely not soon enough if its going to be all baseball between now and then baseball is fine but sheeeesssshhhh
This seems like blaming analytics when the real complaint is simply that they’re not spending $400M on payroll.
That’s been my real complaint this whole time. Did you not know that? We’ve been arguing for days! I must have said I’m not anti analytics or anti TTO a dozen times.
(I don’t actually want a $400M payroll… I’d settle for a $300M payroll that doesn’t include $100M set on fire… but if you do fuck up and light $100M on fire like BC has then I think you should man up and pay the tax instead of making us suffer Anthony Volpe.)
Bob’s argument was there was less variance when we had a .280 batting average.
My argument (this whole time) has been there was less variance when we didn’t carry 4 bums in the lineup every year, and that some bums don’t look like bums because bad pitching inflates their OPS.
The Dodgers, yesterday, started mediocre journeyman Alex Call, non-hitting Tommy Edman, and non-hitting Enrique Hernandez.
I’m sorry, I’m just angry at Alan for not stopping me from watching A Working Man.
I also must say I don’t understand the “bad pitching inflates OPS” argument.
There are certain hitters who benefit from this, and some who don’t? So, some players have a “real” wRC+ and some are inflated? That doesn’t make sense. Am I not understanding that correctly? Don’t the “real” wRC+ guys face the same blend of good and bad pitching as the “fugazy” wRC+ guys?
The Dodgers, yesterday, started mediocre journeyman Alex Call, non-hitting Tommy Edman, and non-hitting Enrique Hernandez.
Those are just random statements that don’t have the profound meaning you think they do. As impactful as saying it smells like rosemary in your kitchen.
Those are just random statements that don’t have the profound meaning you think they do. As impactful as saying it smells like rosemary in your kitchen.
If those three guys were in the Yankees lineup you’d call them free outs and bums.
Bob’s argument was there was less variance when we had a .280 batting average.
Not exactly. My main point is their farm system seems to teach everyone to pull the ball with an uppercut swing to hit the ball in the air with back spin. That’s a fair approach for Spencer Jones, but not so much for 5’10” Anthony Volpe.
When you use that approach with a guy like Volpe, you get a guy who hits a handfull more dingers and strikes out 160 times (12 times less than Judge).
I quake thinking what would have happened if Cashman’s theories were taught to Bernie Williams, Derek Jeter and Jorge Posada to swing from their heels when they were 18-22. Maybe they would have been better, but I doubt it.
I also must say I don’t understand the “bad pitching inflates OPS” argument.
Well you did just rearrange the words to make it a slightly different statement.
The actual argument was:
a) not every batter who sucks in the postseason sucks because of variance.
b) there are some guys who can’t hit in the postseason because they’re not very good hitters and very good pitchers can get them out easily.
c) those guys can still show good OPS and wRC+ because 70% or more of their regular season ABs are not against the best starters and best relievers of the best teams.
and lastly, d) Cashman accumulates tons of these guys because they’re cheaper than the actual very good hitters.
Case in point: Gary Sanchez struck out 44 times in 110 postseason ABs. That’s a 40% K rate. And it wasn’t random. He was a bad hitter who got exposed. He could crush a hanging slider or a four seam fastball in his wheelhouse. And he got enough of them in the regular season to put up numbers that looked really good. But he got none of those pitches in the postseason. That’s why he sucked. And a larger postseason sample size wouldn’t have changed that.
This a well Cashman goes to a lot bc he’s got $100M in dead payroll every year and he has to cut corners to make up for his mistakes. It’s an approach that can get you into the playoffs, but it will kill you when you’re there. And if you’re lucky, people won’t notice that you keep doing it and call it bad luck even though it happens all the time.
95 replies on “2025-10-10 Daily Post”
Lots of things to like so far, particularly in the scheming at both ends, which Edwards has a good breakdown of:
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6705582/2025/10/10/knicks-timberwolves-nba-preseason-game-observations/
Should we be concerned about the three point accuracy? Or just write it off as preseason, guys rounding into form, etc? And for the more analytically inclined among us, is having an offense built around high-volume three point attempts a good idea if the team isn’t shooting well from outside the arc?
I thought this was interesting about post-season baseball from a statistical perspective:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGd0h-IPt8Q
Jet lag is difficult. Give them a week to recover before worrying about their three point percentage.
I thought the decision making was pretty bad. A lot of 3s were rushed/forced and the poor percentage was in part due to those bad decisions. Between the jetlag and learning a new offense, I’m not too worried about the actual percentage but I’m also not convinced this can be an effective high-volume 3pt team.
yeah way too early to even begin to worry about 3 pt percentage no one around the league is doing anything great in preseason in that regard
I watched the baseball post season strategy vide and didn’t buy it all. I don’t see why the post season is different in most of the things it talked about.
Because he didn’t want life and society to be just a bunch of atomized individuals with no deeper ties to each other, Joe Morgan *wanted* a baseball team to be more than 25 atomized individuals.
While the cheap data/internet age has shown that aspiration, for the most part, to be unrealized, it beggars belief that it should have drawn forth such obnoxious and mean-spirited vitriol.
Very eye test, but in general I was really in favor of the way that the starters played, it was fast, it wasn’t ball-holding, they seemed to work hard on defense, they just couldn’t hit the ocean with a rock from the surf. I also thought the bench did surprisingly well, most players had at least a moment where they seemed NBA ready (and a few had multiple such moments).
The fact that our scrubs were better than their scrubs (even though our scrubs were very scrubby) was nice, at least from a Let’s Go Knicks perspective.
Overall a nice preseason game, trending the correct way outside of the shooting percent, I presume (hopehopehope) the latter will fix itself as jet lag fades and familiarity increases.
To repeat what I said yesterday before Yankee Group Therapy swallowed up the whole discussion(*), Brown doesn’t need to be a master tactician to significantly raise this group’s ceiling. He just has to be flexible to his guys’ strengths and weaknesses, and to what the opposing team is doing. What Brown talks about in the Edwards article about read-and-react? That’s low-hanging fruit stuff that Thibs almost always refused to do, despite his “the game tells you what to do” mantra.
(*) This isn’t a complaint, btw. It had been a few days since the Knicks played, and there are enough Yankee fans here (me included) to make it a worthy off-day topic.
there is an article on the athletic this morning about the knicks new “read and react” offense i thought id have access to it but i dont has anyone else seen what it says
I’ll read the article when I have time later but I mentioned last night I actually believe Brown’s defensive schemes seemingly gives the players more freedom to use their athleticism by reading and reacting more which should hopefully lead to more forced turnovers and fast break opportunities.
thing is we dont have a lot of our main guys who are considered to be particularly athletic i think we need to work more with our experience and guile for the most part
Who’s the most athletic rotation player, if you’re defining athleticism as speed and explosiveness? (Brunson, for instance, is phenomenally athletic in his strength and body control, but he’s not fast and can’t jump.) OG? A healthy Mitch?
og and mitch are the ones who came to mind for me do we think that deuce has some athleticism
I’m not sure about our main guys not being especially athletic. Mitch and OG definitely athletic. Bridges doesn’t do those great defensive plays against Boston without athleticism. Towns is remarkably limber and mobile for a big guy. Hart and Deuce aren’t slouches athletically either. The only main guy I’ve left out is Brunson. I guess Clarkson and Yabusele will be in the rotation too, but I haven’t seen enough of them to comment.
The Athletic piece didn’t say anything we didn’t already all know. Three point shooting attempts are terrific (55 last night), makes are crazy bad, shouldn’t last, but some question about whether high-efficiency, low-volume players can crank volume up and maintain efficiency. Duh.
Also something about ‘shifting’ defense, which seems to be about playing angles and getting one’s hand in the passing lane more often, which Anonoby does well and the rest don’t, but maybe it’ll be more of a thing for the team going forward rather than just staying completely plugged onto one’s man. Not sure though from the article whether that’s just a thing Edwards noticed or a new wrinkle Brown is instituting.
i guess what makes it a little more difficult is that we dont really have “above the rim” guys like ja or antman thats ok though we do great with what we have
Joe Morgan wanted the laws of baseball to be what he believed in, not what they were. He thought a 270ba/390obp hitter was inferior to a 300ba/320obp hitter, despite being a 270ba/390obp hitter himself. That would be like Dr. Salk advocating for ivermectin or John Frusciante thinking guitars should be simple, subtle, and in the background.
I resent that this Phillies team even exists. Their whole core (Harper, Schwarber, Realmuto) is a group of guys who were perfect fits on the Yankees when they hit free agency, and would have been signed by us if we operated like the richest team in baseball instead of treating the luxury tax as a salary cap. But we ceded that role to your Dodgers and now we have to listen to you chirp about how great it is to follow them.
Nice to see their fans suffer, though, especially on the same night the Giants beat the Eagles.
There are no “laws of baseball.” The sport has valued different things and been played and transacted different ways throughout its history, and the analytics era isn’t any more compelling than any previous era.
(Same with basketball, by the way.)
The purpose of sports isn’t to throw off data. Nor do the vast majority of people want to sit around watching apples fall from trees and argue about the pull of gravity.
Joe Morgan was also adamant that Billy Beane wrote “Moneyball”
Josh Hart by quite a bit. It’s a big concern of mine that even our athletic players are pretty slow up and down the court. I will say that against Philly, Mitch seemed to get up and down better than I’ve seen him do in a long time (maybe his lungs work for once).
The announcers kept saying how the Knicks are getting torches in transition and I can’t help but think this is why. Obviously getting Hart healthy would help quite a bit.
Joe Morgan also rejected Newton’s law of gravity, and instead believed in Empedocles’ love/strife model.
It might have actually been more fun to watch baseball back when managers thought you should bat your second basemen second because that’s what Leo Durocher did, and that bunting in the first inning was sound strategy, and that you always use your best relief pitcher in the ninth inning and not in the most high leverage situation. It may have been comforting not to know about BABIP and to think that judging the relative hotness of a prospect’s girlfriend was a viable scouting tool.
Unfortunately some nerds figured out that all that shit was fucking stupid if you want to win games, and after decades of pointing it out people started listening to them.
Phillies are bigger playoff chokers than the Yankees!
At the end of the day, Joe Morgan was ridiculed because he, like many others across a variety of fields, failed to grasp the is/ought distinction.
Anyone is free to hold the opinion that baseball is at its most aesthetically pleasing when hitters try to maximize putting balls in play at the expense of walks, home runs, and strikeouts. Ditto for the opinion that basketball as at its best when guys are posting up and taking midrange jumpers. They’re free to feel the games ought to be played this way.
But once you crossover into saying these aesthetic preferences are actually how you maximize success in the respective sports, you’re going to get made fun of for the same reasons people make fun of creationists and flat-earthers and the like–you’re wrong, and it’s extra embarrassing because the information proving you’re wrong is easily accessible and not hard to understand.
But perhaps some creative baseball team will fire their analytics department, hire Bob Neptune as GM, and he’ll use batting average as his main criteria for selecting players and start bunting in the first inning again and bring back the complete game, which will restore the game to its natural state, which is The Way It Was When I Was Twelve Years Old.
Laughs in Goose Gossage
I wrote a long-ish post a few weeks ago about how the Knicks’ relative lack of athleticism concerned me a bit, and concur the answer to the question is Hart, who for all of his faults is desperately needed on this team.
I was so heartened by the 3PA volume last night I’m hesitant to register any complaints about it, but to the extent their was a quality issue I think it can be traced back to this. It’s very hard (not impossible) to generate good 3PA without players who can consistently breakdown a defense.
Brunson can do this in his own, not-necessarily-athletic-as-the-word-is-commonly-understood, way, but after him the list of guys on the team who can clearly do it requires some squinting, and Hart is higher on it than most.
This is why I’m not going to complain about signing Clarkson for the minimum even though I know he might make me invest in some kind of TV screen protector.
I’m going to highlight an N=1 moment last night regarding athleticism, which is when Dadiet got the ball under the basket, got the ball momentarily knocked out of his hands as he started to go up, got it back, and I then I spent what felt like a solid 60 seconds screaming in my head for him to jump up and dunk the fucking thing while he gathered.
He made the layup just barely as he allowed the defense to come back to him and almost block it again, but jesus was that a slow reaction. I’ll be monitoring whether that was just slow processing (a bad thing in itself), or whether he actually has a really slow second jump.
He’s never struck me as having low athleticism before, but that was alarming.
@chickenlittle
Me: It seems that you almost take [the book] personally.
Joe: I took it personally because they had a personal thing about me saying Durham should’ve stolen second base in the game that they lost — he stayed at first base, and they hit three fly balls, and the A’s lose another fifth game.
Me: And that’s the chief reason you don’t even wanna read the book?
Joe: I don’t read books like that. I didn’t read Bill James’ book, and you said he was complimenting me. Why would I wanna read a book about a computer, that gives computer numbers?
Me: It’s not about a computer.
Joe: Well, I’m not reading the book, so I wouldn’t know.
last night was a horrible night to be a philly sports fan wasnt it between the phillies getting eliminated (especially *that* way) the eagles losing to the giants and even the flyers losing it was no bueno for them
One of my best friends is a lifelong Dodger fan who adored the Ron Cey, Steve Garvey, LaSorda teams as a kid. For years he complained how the Dodgers would never win the World Series because they didn’t put together teams that could play vaunted October Baseball and were only good in the regular season. Basically said they relied on analytics too much and thus would never win the championship because they don’t like hit behind the runner and stuff.
#Goink
Serious question: did anyone ever tell Joe Morgan that a clear insight from the analytics revolution is that Joe Morgan was even better than he was perceived to be in his day?
It’s odd that a guy with a career 16.5% walk rate and .392 OBP but unspectacular .271 AVG took up this anti-cause.
There were a lot of sports going on last night so I didn’t watch that much of the preseason game, but what I did see looked pretty good. They got up lots of good 3s (I think they missed almost every one, but whatever) and the ball was moving purposefully. Cautiously optimistic about the new offense
Most likely he knew all that and was just fuckin’ with people. It’s highly doubtful Joe Morgan took a bunch of walks accidentally, or thought they were meaningless when he drew one and instead said to himself when he got to first base, “Wow, what a waste of a plate appearance that was by me; it would have been better if I’d grounded into a double play.”
Seems to have worked.
I’d still like to see his hypothesis tested bc I actually thought “ugly girlfriend means low confidence” sounded like a reasonable thin slice.
Yeah Joe Morgan was just doing a tongue in cheek bit about analytics because he’s a funny cheeky guy like that and wasn’t at all a sanctimonious prick who left behind a voluminous public record of blitherlingly ignorant statements in which his own incuriosity spawned a cottage industry of people who dunked on him in hilarious fashion.
Oh no. He was doing a bit. Totally got the last laugh.
So when he got to first base after a walk, his little man was saying to him, “Dude, you just done fucked up again?”
When he was a young man and playing baseball, I don’t know what he thought.
I actually DO know what he thought when he was an old cranky fusspot who didn’t want the game to be different than it was when he played, to the point that he seemed to denigrate his own style of play.
This might be E’s laziest and dumbest troll ever, and that’s really saying something. Why are we even engaging in this as if it’s a good faith argument or worth debating?
Had an excellent time at last night’s game, and while I could have done without the OT, all’s well that ends well!
Other than Yabu’s enormous bum, these are the things that stood out:
-The Wolves are going to be very good again. They have skill, athleticism, length, and a nice combo of young guys and veterans. They took it to our starting lineup, and if this were the season opener, I am thinking we would have lost.
-some of Brown’s sets seemed to get gummed up, particularly when a big was involved in dribble hand-offs. Minny’s defensive length probably helped them counter all the ball movement, but a lot of that movement didn’t seem to go anywhere.
-The Knicks couldn’t buy a 3, so the efficacy of what they were doing was hard to measure. None of Deuce, Yabu, or Clarkson helped much in that regard. The Knicks didn’t hit the 50-pt mark until halfway through the 3rd. Deuce came around later, but I don’t think it was against front line MIN rotation players.
-Clarkson did some interesting stuff out there offensively. He definitely has a knack for getting deep into the lane and making good things happen. Whereas Yabu did very little that was memorable. It’s not surprising that Clarkson was a +7 and Yabu was -11.
-I’m starting to lean more towards Matthews over Shamet.
-Of the scrubs, Huk looked by far the best, and all of Dadiet, Kolek, and Tosan, and less so Jemison and Diawara, comported themselves well.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure he realized and understood that a walk was a positive baseball event.
I think my explanation of why that likely was is pretty solid. Few people really like selfishness and atomized individualism, and it’s far less virtuous and positive by any serious measurement than teamwork and esprit de corps and sacrificing for others. It would be a better thing if giving yourself up to get the runner over to third with one out actually *was* a positive baseball event. Alas, it almost always isn’t — but so what?
Your hatred and biases are self evident. My only response is RIP John Lodge.
Unless you’re a fan of those teams, why would anyone care if the Arizona Diamondbacks or Colorado Rockies have “good analytical front offices”? (That’s fundamentally the laughable part of the FJM craze.)
I know there are some people who will say that when they turn a baseball game on, they want to see all teams playing their “smartest,” but that’s little more than a pose. The game would be just as good between teams we’re not fans of — even better, really — if the run-of-the-mill Reds/Rockies game you happen to turn on was played 1990-style.
When I watch a baseball game, I don’t want my team to win, I want them to display virtuousness and esprit de corps by giving away outs to the opposition.
Joe Morgan was announcing and reporting on baseball games; he wasn’t watching his team try to win.
And the baseball state that gives the Mets the best chance of winning would be if all the other teams were chasing 1982-style players.(*) So then why would you care if the Diamondbacks have shitty analytics?
(*) Presumably.
Was thinking this too. He’s decidedly a one-trick pony, but the trick is pretty damn good, especially when you consider his fast release. Shamet does have a bit more diversity to his game but ultimately I’m not sure it’s enough to balance out the shooting delta. At the end of the day that’s primarily what Shamet is there to do anyway and Mathews is better at it.
Oh sure, it would be amazing if every other team besides the Mets did dumb shit all the time and used Girlfriend Hotness as a scouting tool. In the actual world the Mets were one of the last teams to embrace analytics and the sparkling results speak for themselves. Omar Minaya pretty clearly didn’t know what BABIP was in like 2008. In the real world the Mets were the last Joe Morgans standing.
Well expect maybe for the Colorado Rockies, who are still at it.
Exactly. So then why did something like FJM grow up and make it a point to purport to care (oh, so much) about the random front office scouting on the 20-80 Girlfriend Hotness scale?
(Answer: Because there was quite a bit more going on with the whole enterprise than just Joe Morgan and baseball. But in baseball terms, it makes little sense. While there’s no accounting for pose affectation, no one besides D’Back fans *really* gives a shit whether the D’Backs make smart or stupid baseball decisions, just as no one gave a shit about the 1993 Padres or 1963 Colt .45’s doing so.)
I liked old fashioned baseball more than whatever is being played today, including pitchers hitting, bunting, hitting behind runners, etc. Much like I like music from the 60’s and 70’s more than whatever has been produced since. I liked post-up basketball where 3’s were fewer and farther between and the midrange jumper was in vogue.
Obviously there’s no turning back to those days, and it is amazing to see guys like Judge hit the cover off of 100mph pitches, and Curry shoot 3’s as if they were layups. But at times it does feel like a hollow shell to me. Intuitively, I’d prefer watching the .320 hitter who rarely walks than the .260 hitter with a higher OBP. I’d rather watch MVP SGA play old-school ball and hit 52% of his shots from the field than MVP James Harden play analytics ball and hit 45%.
FJM existed because lazy mediocre sports pundits said very dumb fucking things in public all the time, things that intelligent people enjoyed pointing and laughing at because honestly it’s fun to make fun of sanctimonious intellectually lazy turds. It wasn’t just Joe himself, there was a whole legion of now extinct lazy sports pundits who found it convenient and profitable to fill column inches with testimonials to David Eckstein’s grit and to make the astute observation that computers don’t play baseball.
It’s okay to laugh at lazy ignorant people who say dumb things in public for a living.
The best criticism of analytics in sports is that it tends to make all teams play the same way. You see this across all the major sports. Every team plays the West Coast Offense now and short passes their opponents to death. All NBA teams shoot tons of threes. All MLB teams teach launch angle and want pitchers with high velo and spin rate.
Sports has always been this way though, and there have always been fans lamenting change. In 1905 there were people complaining about pitching rotations and pining for the days when Old Hoss Radbourn would just pitch every inning of every game. Lots of people rabidly hated how the game changed after Ruth. People hated the dunk and the three pointer and the forward pass and night baseball and the shot clock and the NHL helmet rule and on and on.
I’d go further, JK, and say it is a moral imperative to do so these days.
I do wonder, however (as I do love me some Bud Harrelson) if bits of old baseball will come back into vogue at some point, even without radical rule changes being instituted (which I’m certainly not expecting). This past week I saw a runner break from second and the hitter pull the ball through the first-second base hole to put runners on first and third and it kind of made my heart sing. I think it was a lucky accident, however.
Fine, I’m not sure I necessarily even disagree with the principle. Nor do I disagree with the idea that, all else equal, we should prefer smart to stupid.
But as noted upthread, that doesn’t really have anything to do with baseball. Baseball front office-ing has really never seemed “worth it,” but I guess that one’s in the eye of the beholder. Much of it relies on pose.
Root for Aaron Judge, you can have it all!
I mean, the fact that for decades multibillion dollar organizations were employing front offices that performed worse than bloggers in their stead would have was a very compelling human interest story.
It was first and foremost a story about baseball, but it touched on the wisdom of markets, the power of inertia and conventional wisdom, plain ol’ stubbornness even when it works against one’s interests, and any number of other things people have been interested in since time immemorial. It’s not hard to see why FJM et al. had success.
They weren’t multibillion-dollar enterprises until very recently. They were for the most part mom-and-pop operations. Corporations didn’t really even dirty their fingers with them beyond a few ads in the yearbook and program until like the late 80s. The biggest sports “brand” was probably the Dallas Cowboys, and Jerry Jones bought them for under $200 million in 1989.
Baseball games at Tiger Stadium and Comiskey Park (and I’d wager Yankee and Shea) in the early-80s were almost entirely patronized by working dudes getting wasted. Whether the Red Sox had had a smart or stupid 1985 offseason was of essentially zero cultural moment (outside New England, obviously).
Hysterical
I was watching the game last night and my girlfriend asked me how they looked. I told her the only think that sticks out so far is Yabu’s gigangtic butt.
“Root for Aaron Judge, you can have it all!”
Aaron Judge is objectively one of the most rootable immortal players in any sport in my lifetime.
Alas he plays for the Yankees, my second most hated team in all of sports. (Fuck the Celtics.)
So I very much appreciate his greatness, and truly admired the majesty of that HR he hit in game 3. Only a handful of players who ever lived could have hit that ball that far and that fair. That it rung the bell of the foul pole and tied a critical game was pixie-dust stuff, and any fan of the game should appreciate it, even more so because Aaron Judge the person. So the objective baseball fan in me appreciated that moment, as one should appreciate a fine bourbon. But I personally hate bourbon, and although I do my best to appreciate “the best” bourbon it when offered to me, I still wish I had a run-of-the-mill single malt scotch like Laphroiaig 10 instead…or even a Bud Light!
For lots of reasons, I got far more enjoyment watching Aaron Judge & co. skulk off their home field in humiliating fashion and subsequently listening to their fan base whine and howl about who is responsible for the latest bust in a never-ending run of championship-or-bust seasons. Now THAT’S some Lagavulin 16 to me!
I hope folks understand that it’s nothing personal against the Yankees fans on this site, and all teams have obnoxious fans so it’s all in good fun. It’s just sports, and I actually enjoy the banter, just like I enjoy perusing the Celtics blogs when they fall short. I try not to take it too far, though. When someone gave it to ras for all of his bluster, I thought that was poetic justice, in that he asked for it.
Clearly, the chances that the Mets will match or even overtake the Yankees in the coming years has improved with Steve Cohen taking over. But for now, it is still coming up on 40 years of the Mets sniffing the Yankee’s farts. Same with the Knicks and Celts…Leon has given some hope, but until we hang another banner, it’s just the same ol’ same ol’.
“I was watching the game last night and my girlfriend asked me how they looked. I told her the only think that sticks out so far is Yabu’s gigangtic butt.”
Honestly, like one of the Seven Wonders, it has to be seen in person to appreciate it. Same with Mikal Bridges’ arms.
There was one shot of Yabu running down the court from behind, and all I could think of was “Behind.”
They were enormous haunches, swimming around in his trunks.
Z-Man, you hate the Yankees more than the Cowboys?
“Z-Man, you hate the Yankees more than the Cowboys?”
Apples to oranges. I don’t care as much about football. I also am a Jets fan and there is no historic Jets-Cowboys animosity. However, during the ’70’s most fans sort of drifted towards the dynastic teams…Steelers, Cowboys, Raiders, 49ers…I was a Steelers fan and definitely hated the Cowboys then.
I’ve gone through periods of loathing the Marino Dolphins, the Brady Patriots, the Jordan Bulls, the Reggie Pacers, the LeBron Heat, the 80’s Cardinals, the 90’s Braves, the 00’s Phillies, and some others. But only the Celts and Yanks have been constants, with one very brief exception…I rooted heavily for the ’96 Yanks against the Braves because a) I absolutely hated those Chipper Jones assholes and b) there were a few of my fave former Mets on that Yankees team. It wasn’t long before I took a long, hot virtual shower to wash off that stench, Mr. Clemens singlehandedly stoked all that hatred again.
Your friend was right, though. The Dodgers were a joke, a postseason stepping stone much like the Yankees currently are.
Surely you are not suggesting that variance got them over the hump, or that it was just a matter of time until they started to win in October, are you?
Because I’d bet my house it was because they did exactly what I’m mad the Yankees won’t do: they gave up trying to win with their TTO darlings like Yasiel Puig, Justin Turner, and Yasmani Grandal and switched to paying premium prices for Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, and Shohei Ohtani.
I’m pretty confident the Yankees will have less variance next year, too, if they replace guys like Grisham and Volpe with Kyle Tucker and Corey Seager (as they should, because they’re the fucking Yankees).
“the fact that for decades multibillion dollar organizations were employing front offices that performed worse than bloggers”
I’m sorry, but exactly what record of success and failure do “bloggers” have to be judged on?
And what are the Top 10 examples from history of the less talented/more analytical team defeating the more talented/less analytical team in baseball? Have the last 15 World Series champs been more analytics-focused than the average? Are analytics the reason why, for example, the Yankees are 16-2 against the Twins in the post-season? We can all see the impact analytics have had on how the game is played. What is the evidence analytics have actually had an effect on winning?
The people who dismiss analytics are no less stupid and ridiculous that the folks who treat analytics like it’s a cheat code.
The Dodgers did the same shit they always did, you’re just retroactively applying the “they got smart” tag to them after they started winning the World Series. Same leadership since 2014, same guy who my friend insisted was trying to “win the World Series with a computer” then that runs the team now.
What happened is that they started getting into the playoffs every year, mainly by spending more money than everybody else, and eventually rolled a couple of 7’s. They didn’t somewhere like stop bringing in “TTO darlings” like you’re suggesting. Shohei Ohtani is somehow not a “TTO” player? The guy sure does generate a lot of Three True Outcome results last time I checked. He’s maybe the most TTO hitter in the entire sport. He either walks, strikes out, or hits home runs an absurdly high percentage of the time.
The evidence is that every single team in the league relies heavily on analytics except probably the shittiest team in MLB, the Colorado Rockies. It’s standard practice now.
Sorry y’all, but the nerds won. This is just how baseball is played now. There is no “more” analytics based team than any other now, because pretty much every front office has fully embraced the practice.
100% this. Gavin Lux, Andy Pages and Enrique Hernandez had the 6th, 7th and 8th most PAs in their title team last year.
The difference between Dodgers and Yankees is not in approach, it’s that the Dodgers have more good players than the Yankees (and have spent more money for it). They also have better redundancies when their plan A fails.
As someone who departed baseball in 2009 only to return as a lifelong Dodgers fan in October of 2024, it is very confusing to me why Ohtani isn’t a Yankee. Seems like the player George would have happily given $1B to. Did the apples fall that far from the tree?
The 2017 team had all three of those players on it. They got to Game 7 of the World Series, which they lost to a team that was literally cheating by banging on garbage can lids to signal when a fastball was coming because they were stealing the signs from a camera.
To me, Cashman’s biggest failure all these years was not getting a truly elite left handed hitter to slot between Judge and Stanton. So many of them hit the market, and they never pulled the trigger. The only time they had that – last year – they made it to the World Series, which could have had a different outcome if Aaron Boone was not the manager.
2025 Ben Rice had the best non-Soto offensive season by a NYY left handed hitter since 2017. 2019 Mike Tauchman – Mike Tauchman! – is in the top 5. 2018 Didi Gregorious and 2019 Brett Gardner are in the top 10. There are literally only 14 above average player-seasons by LHHs (by wRC+) since 2017. This is crazy for a team that plays in Yankee Stadium.
They sure as fuck did not. There’s no Betts, Freeman, and Ohtani on the 2017 Dodgers. There is a bunch of high variance analytical darlings on pre-arb deals, though.
They made it to game 7 of the World Series and lost to a team that blatantly cheated in 2017. This is not one of your better arguments.
They also had Corey freaking Seager and RoY Cody Bellinger in their lineup.
My argument is not that they couldn’t have won a World Series.
My argument is that they’re doing things different now and are much better for it.
The old Dodger way was “we don’t need a 1B, we have Max Muncy on Arb-2 deal and we can bring back old Justin Turner to play 3B even though he’s going to be a major hole in the bottom of our lineup when we get to the postseason.” (And that’s exactly what the Yankees do every year.)
The current Dodger way is “fuck that, we can get Freddie Freeman, move Muncy down the lineup, and kick that hole in our lineup to the curb.”
That is how they mitigated variance in October. (Note I said mitigated because I know you can’t eliminate it, so you can save the keystrokes about ’23 D’Backs NLDS.)
g-d i hope the beginning of the knicks regular season arrives soon
You probably don’t want to know what Justin Turner’s postseason statistics are.
They’re .271/.370/.461.
Add that up and it’s an .831 OPS. In the playoffs. In 370 ABs.
In 2020 when they won the World Series he was 35 and had a 1.066 OPS.
Just stop.
Turner was 38 years old.
Paul Goldschmidt is 38 and has a .990 postseason OPS. How wise do you think it would be to count on him next October?
You’re kind of making two different arguments here:
1. Justin Turner was a “TTO darling” and the kind of player you shouldn’t rely on in the playoffs.
That’s wrong. He hit very well in the postseason over his career.
2. You shouldn’t rely on hitters in their late 30’s as they tend to decline rapidly.
That’s correct and nobody would really dispute that.
I’m making one argument: they broke through in October because they changed their approach and acquired the best players in baseball.
What exactly is the analytical argument that Ohtani isn’t good at baseball and the Dodgers shouldn’t have tried to sign him?
I don’t know but I think it’s the same one Brian Cashman used when he didn’t sign Manny Machado or Corey Seager.
Call me crazy but I think the Yankees would have experienced less postseason variance if they hadn’t used it.
“Sign all the best players” isn’t really a strategy, it’s an aspiration. This seems like blaming analytics when the real complaint is simply that they’re not spending $400M on payroll.
12 days. Is that soon? Perhaps we can argue about that
definitely not soon enough if its going to be all baseball between now and then baseball is fine but sheeeesssshhhh
That’s been my real complaint this whole time. Did you not know that? We’ve been arguing for days! I must have said I’m not anti analytics or anti TTO a dozen times.
(I don’t actually want a $400M payroll… I’d settle for a $300M payroll that doesn’t include $100M set on fire… but if you do fuck up and light $100M on fire like BC has then I think you should man up and pay the tax instead of making us suffer Anthony Volpe.)
Bob’s argument was there was less variance when we had a .280 batting average.
My argument (this whole time) has been there was less variance when we didn’t carry 4 bums in the lineup every year, and that some bums don’t look like bums because bad pitching inflates their OPS.
The Dodgers, yesterday, started mediocre journeyman Alex Call, non-hitting Tommy Edman, and non-hitting Enrique Hernandez.
I’m sorry, I’m just angry at Alan for not stopping me from watching A Working Man.
I also must say I don’t understand the “bad pitching inflates OPS” argument.
There are certain hitters who benefit from this, and some who don’t? So, some players have a “real” wRC+ and some are inflated? That doesn’t make sense. Am I not understanding that correctly? Don’t the “real” wRC+ guys face the same blend of good and bad pitching as the “fugazy” wRC+ guys?
Those are just random statements that don’t have the profound meaning you think they do. As impactful as saying it smells like rosemary in your kitchen.
If those three guys were in the Yankees lineup you’d call them free outs and bums.
Not exactly. My main point is their farm system seems to teach everyone to pull the ball with an uppercut swing to hit the ball in the air with back spin. That’s a fair approach for Spencer Jones, but not so much for 5’10” Anthony Volpe.
When you use that approach with a guy like Volpe, you get a guy who hits a handfull more dingers and strikes out 160 times (12 times less than Judge).
I quake thinking what would have happened if Cashman’s theories were taught to Bernie Williams, Derek Jeter and Jorge Posada to swing from their heels when they were 18-22. Maybe they would have been better, but I doubt it.
Well you did just rearrange the words to make it a slightly different statement.
The actual argument was:
a) not every batter who sucks in the postseason sucks because of variance.
b) there are some guys who can’t hit in the postseason because they’re not very good hitters and very good pitchers can get them out easily.
c) those guys can still show good OPS and wRC+ because 70% or more of their regular season ABs are not against the best starters and best relievers of the best teams.
and lastly, d) Cashman accumulates tons of these guys because they’re cheaper than the actual very good hitters.
Case in point: Gary Sanchez struck out 44 times in 110 postseason ABs. That’s a 40% K rate. And it wasn’t random. He was a bad hitter who got exposed. He could crush a hanging slider or a four seam fastball in his wheelhouse. And he got enough of them in the regular season to put up numbers that looked really good. But he got none of those pitches in the postseason. That’s why he sucked. And a larger postseason sample size wouldn’t have changed that.
This a well Cashman goes to a lot bc he’s got $100M in dead payroll every year and he has to cut corners to make up for his mistakes. It’s an approach that can get you into the playoffs, but it will kill you when you’re there. And if you’re lucky, people won’t notice that you keep doing it and call it bad luck even though it happens all the time.
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