Chapter 1: 

…and in February of 2020, delegates to the provisional government of the SABRland Autonomous Region voted unanimously to establish an independent nation. By opening day, a full constitution had been drafted to delineate new borders, institute a permanent system of government, and lay out clearly the foundational principles of the fledgling country. The most notable principle was of course the 3-to-1 Law, which required every citizen to spend a total of one week every month doing whatever work was deemed necessary by local labor councils and the remaining three weeks watching, thinking about, discussing, and writing about baseball (and doing whatever else made them happy, within reason).

In the new capital city of Jamestown — named for the revered sabermetric forefather, Bill James — the constitution was ratified as the season’s first pitch was thrown. And thus the Republic of SABRland was born without so much as a drop of blood being spilled.

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This is Octavius V. Catto and he is something of a forgotten titan of American history — if not American history, then certainly Philadelphia history. Born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1839, Catto’s father — a slave — was granted his freedom when Octavius was a child and the family moved North, finally settling in Philadelphia. Catto took advantage of the educational opportunities available to blacks in the North as he attended the prestigious Institute for Colored Youth (now Cheney University). He was later hired by the ICY to teach math and English.

In the midst of the political ferment of mid-19th century America, Catto became involved in the movements for abolition and equal rights. He was a contemporary and colleague of Frederick Douglass, and joined the effort to enlist black soldiers to fight for the Union in the Civil War. Following the war, Catto was instrumental in the passage of a bill barring the segregation of streetcars in Pennsylvania.

I first discovered Catto when I was working as a research assistant on a project that retraced W.E.B. Du Bois’s groundbreaking sociological study of fin de siécle black Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Negro. Given my backgrounds in African American and Philadelphia history, I was interested in learning more about this apparently influential figure who I had never heard of before. There is one particular facet of his biography that was quite intriguing to me (and, likewise, should be intriguing to NotGraphers).

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Part I of an infinity part series dedicated to dissecting the bad ideas of SABR-bashers.

We’ve all reached that point in the discussion. The point when, say, you are debating the merits of a given player and you have just cited xFIP, or wOBA, or WAR.

“What!??” your opponent replies incredulously. “What the hell is xFIP/wOBA/WAR?”

“Well, it’s an advanced metric that measures such and such,” you explain.

Your opponent scoffs. “I don’t have time for these made-up stats. They take all the fun out of the game for me.”

It is at this moment that the discussion has usually reached the point of no return. It’s like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books; you can either escalate things by snarking the living shit out of your opponent or you can extricate yourself from the discussion and risk looking weak. Either way, there can be no “winner”.

Not too long ago, the release of the book The Beauty of Short Hops: How Chance and Circumstance Confound the Moneyball Approach to Baseball by Alan and Sheldon Hirsch touched off a minor controversy in the world of baseball commentary. Among other things, their book takes up the “sabermetrics takes all the fun out of the game” position:

[T]he saber-obsession with numbers occludes a major aspect of baseball’s beauty – its narrative richness and relentless capacity to surprise. Baseball, thank goodness, transcends and often defies quantitative analysis. Games are decided by bad hops and bad calls, broken bats, sun and wind, pigeons in the outfield, and fans who obstruct players, among other unforeseeable contingencies. That may seem obvious (apart from the pigeons), but not to the folks who increasingly run the show. Rather than celebrating baseball’s delightfully spontaneous quality, sabermetricians deny it or rebel against it.

Let us leave aside for a moment that this sentiment is commonly expressed by people who are unable or unwilling to grapple with new statistics with which they are unfamiliar. Of course these people too use statistics to make sense of what happens on the baseball field, just less insightful statistics. In fact, a large portion of the Hirsches’ book is devoted to a feeble attempt at debunking specific advanced stats. Others have already done a fine job of critiquing the Hirsch brothers’ book and I do not wish to retread too much old ground. Rather, here I want to engage on its own terms the all too common argument that advanced statistics obscure the game’s beauty.

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The above footage from Tuesday’s Giants-Dodgers broadcast has been making its way around the internet. As you will see in the video, a young man, having missed a shot at a foul ball proceeds to pout, get noticed by the gentlemen in the broadcast booth, and have a ball hand-delivered to his seat. The video has been celebrated by some as an example of the great things humans are capable of if we are just nicer to each other.

I see something far more insidious at work.

The message here is, apparently, that pouting pays. This boy went home with far more than just a baseball on Tuesday — he went home confirmed in the belief that no pout goes unrewarded. The Giants’ broadcasters have set a very dangerous precedent not just for this boy’s parents, but for this boy himself, and the future of our society as a whole.

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Carlos Marmol’s line from last night: 0.0 IP, 1 H, 4 BB, 0 K, 5 ER, BS, L.

My fantasy team (and Cubs fans) aches.

But that wasn’t Carlos Marmol out there last night. It couldn’t have been. And indeed, a closer look at the game footage reveals it wasn’t. It was this guy:

Who happens to look a heck of a lot like this guy:

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Greetings from the afterlife!

It’s me, Alexander Cartwright. Today marks the 119th year since I passed on from the physical realm into Benny “The Jet” Rodriguez’s closet (no, it wasn’t a dream, Benny). Every once in a while when I am called upon or when I feel there is a pressing need, I’ll make a return on the anniversary of my death. So as my mere presence today indicates, there are some scores that need asettlin’. To hell with Ouija boards, we’ve finally moved into the 21st century, which is more than we can say for Mr. Selig.

Back in October it was brought to my attention by Bart (Giamatti) that that nitwit snake oil used car salesman was once again promulgating lies about the origins of the game for which he serves as steward. This time, when prompted by an autograph expert about his stance on that roaming band of drunken hacks, The Mills Commission, he gave this response:

As a student of history, I know there is a great debate whether Abner Doubleday or Alexander Cartwright really founded the game of baseball. From all of the historians which I have spoken with, I really believe that Abner Doubleday is the “father of baseball.” I know there are some historians who would dispute this though.

Thank you for taking the time to write to me. I hope that this has been helpful. I appreciate your interest in this most interesting historical subject.

Sincerely
Allan H. Selig

Do you hear that? That’s the sound of me dying of laughter.

What tommyrot! What bunkum! What flapdoodle! What codswallop!

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Fangraphers are of course familiar with the work of Keith Law (or Klaw as he is known affectionately). Since 2006, Klaw has been doing a bang-up job as the scouting writer at ESPN.com where his annual “Top 100 Prospects” column is highly anticipated by prospect nerds the world over. Before moving to ESPN, he was employed in the Toronto Blue Jays front office. And before that, he worked at Baseball Prospectus. Again, these are things the average Fangrapher knows very well.

What is perhaps less well-known (though likely still well-known by Fangraphers) is that Klaw maintains a personal blog that is home to his ruminations on food, books, and other cultural topics. One of those “other cultural topics” is music. Today it was revealed (to the moderate surprise of some) that one of the kinds of music Klaw enjoys is pre-1996 hip hop. Given, also, his fondness for Top-100 lists, it was only natural that he combine the two into a comprehensive “Top 100 old-school hip-hop songs” blog post. It’s a fun read if you are a fan of hip hop feeling a tinge of nostalgia for “the good old days.”

To me, the mere thought of Keith Law rocking out to some old-school hip hop is endlessly amusing. “Can you imagine early 90s KLaw with his walkman (or a boombox) bumping Poor Righteous Teachers?” I asked on twitter. “Someone needs to photoshop him into a picture of Radio Raheem ASAP,” I added.

And indeed, my internet friend and talented photoshopper @Phylan did just that:

Keep fighting the power, Klaw, fighting the powers that be.

UPDATE: Now accepting stage name suggestions in the comments!

Congratulations Mr. Bryce Harper!

You have just been fast-tracked to Double-A and now only one step separates you from Major League glory. I know you have plans to rule MLB with a ruthlessness unseen since the days of Genghis Khan, but before you can do that, you must first conquer Harrisburg.

Yes, Harrisburg. Over the years, this deceptively small Gomorrah that lies between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia has claimed many a promising young soul. You must resist the pull of the Harrisburg fast life. The nightclubs. The beautiful women. The drugs. The celebrity culture.

Avoid it all, lest you end up like Jacobo Sequea. Remember Jacobo Sequea? Of course you don’t. The Harrisburg spotlight proved too much for him. As the story goes: after being thrown out of Harrisburg’s last bar when it closed at 9 pm, the depressed Jacobo made the 20 minute drive on 322 to nearby Hershey, PA where he embarked on a “Leaving Las Vegas” style chocolate binge that saw him consume a commercial shipment of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. He was declared missing by his teammates after failing to report for two games in a row and was found in a roadside Econolodge face-down in a pool of melted Kisses. Luckily, paramedics arrived just in time to revive Sequea, but he entered rehab for chocolate addiction shortly afterward and has not pitched since.

Don’t be like Jacobo Sequea, Mr. Bryce Harper.

Always keep in mind that on a media stage as big as Harrisburg, your every move will be carefully scrutinized. The best advice I can give you is to never go outside unless you absolutely have to. The notorious Harrisburg paparazzi are just waiting for you to slip up. And in a city with as much temptation as Harrisburg, you are bound to slip up if you go outside. Learning to live as a recluse is a valuable skill that will pay dividends when every baseball writer in America hates you for failing to feed their egos by giving them the quotes they want.

Finally, stay focused on the future. Realizing your potential as the biggest douche in the Major Leagues in two years is far more important (and lucrative, of course) than becoming the biggest douche in Harrisburg tomorrow.

The good news is that after Harrisburg, it will only get easier.

I wish you the best of luck and will continue to follow your career closely.

Sincerely,

A Concerned Pennsylvanian

Ever since Bill Simmons finally decided to stop being a dummy and watch The Wire and subsequently became one of those annoying people who doesn’t shut up about The Wire (I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t one of those people at times), I have a newfound sense of self-consciousness whenever I think of making a The Wire reference. On the one hand, it is a fantastic show that deserves to be quoted and discussed ad infinitum. On the other hand, over the years I have noticed that just about all of the things Bill Simmons holds dear tend to produce a metallic taste in my mouth. Now, in some cases, I don’t know whether I disliked the things Simmons likes before he made clear he likes them or if his liking them is a precondition for me disliking them — it is probably some dialectical interaction of the two.

Then, of course, there are the truly perverse lengths to which Jason Whitlock takes his fetishization of the show. With him, things have reached reached the point where someone needs to douse him in cold water and remind him that The Wire is, indeed, a work of fiction (albeit one with a strong social realist aesthetic) and that he is not Stringer Bell.

Making The Wire references used to be the way the city-dwelling, Chomsky-reading intellectual flaunted his cultural literacy. It was a way of signaling one’s membership in a certain “in-crowd”. But now that Bill “Teen Wolf” Simmons has watched the show and has given it his typical “the world began when I was born” Bill Simmons treatment, The Wire references feel as if they have been reduced to the level of mindless Anchorman one-liners. Any-goddamn-one can quote Omar Little out of the blue with no context, that’s no fun. What is fun for me is having a three hour conversation about how the socio-economic forces at work in West Baltimore parallel those that are at work more slowly on the docks, as shown in Season Two. What is fun for me (and kinda disturbing, actually) is reading about a drop in crime in the paper and cynically assuming that the numbers were fudged on orders from the Mayor. What is fun for me is noting that an unnamed city or state politician is “just like Clay Davis” and having people know exactly which politician you are talking about and agree with you. And on the occasion I did drop a stray quote here and there, at least I could do so without having to worry about sounding like Bill Simmons.

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If you are at all like me, you haven’t really been following the Dodgers’ messy ownership situation over the last few years. Because if there is anything less interesting than when the rich and famous get married, it’s when they get divorced. So mainly for my own edification (and for that of those in a similar position) I have attempted to construct a basic summary of this whole fercockt mess.

It seems to me like this is just your typical case of boy (who has the same name as a famous dead author) meets girl; boy falls in love with girl; boy and girl get married; boy and girl become middle-aged man and woman; like so many marriages, theirs begins to grow stale as it enters its third decade; man and women attempt to revitalize their marriage by adopting a Major League Baseball team from Los Angeles (that they might not have even been able to afford to support in the first place); man hires the nerdy guy who is played by Jonah Hill in that new movie that’s coming out to be GM; man fires the nerdy guy who is played by Jonah Hill in that new movie after just two seasons; man and woman soon learn that adopting a Major League Baseball team could not do very much to repair the fact that man and woman just kinda don’t like each other anymore; a day before the start of their team’s second straight NLCS appearance, man and woman announce their separation; a day after their team loses its second straight NLCS, man fires woman from her position as CEO of their team; woman (as any self-respecting woman would) files for divorce; man says nasty things about woman and changes the locks on her office; man attempts to obtain sole custody of the team; woman challenges man’s claim to sole custody; time passes; man and woman begin to work towards a settlement; strapped for cash, man takes out loan and promises to repay it with money that he might never have; man and woman are investigated by the IRS for allegedly skimming millions of dollars from the team without paying taxes; Child Protective Services steps in and takes custody of the team; the younger brother of that old guy from Face the Nation is appointed as the team’s foster parent; Child Protective Services rejects the deal man and woman have in place to settle their custody battle; and we all wait for what happens next.

That’s all there is to it, really.

As they say: it’s always the children who are hurt the most in divorces.