Welcome to CHOOSE YOUR OWN RACE FOR THE PLAYOFFS ADVENTURE! Where anything can happen, provided I thought of this thing! See if you can find the track that leads to your team winning the WORLD SERIES! [Note: No tracks lead to your team winning the World Series] Start by choosing your favorite team from this comprehensive list of playoff contenders. Note that the linked-to headings will appear at the tip top of your browsin’ page.
Ever find yourself in an antique store in Essex, MA wondering why everything is so expensive*, judging advertisements on old baseball literature, and waiting for your girlfriend to find a mermaid-themed birthday present? No? Isn’t that how everyone spends their Saturdays? Well poopsticks. At least I, a person who was in that situation, found a book: The Little Red Book of Baseball 1949. On the back was this ad, minus my finger shadow:
As I read the names (Ken Keltner, Al Dark, Bob Elliott, Del Ennis, Larry Doby, Vic Wertz, Gil Hodges, and Ray Boone) I wondered if these shmoes were indeed “STARS ON THE RISE” in 1949. This post is my investigation of that claim.
Read the rest of this entry »
I am not a dishonest person, in general. I am a curious person. When I want to know how much interest a Kenneth Branagh signed Red Sox jersey would garner on Craigslist, I’m not dissuaded by simple facts like: I don’t have one, and: It doesn’t exist. I am far more curious than dishonest, especially if I might find a person who is both an avid Red Sox fan and admirer of Kenneth Branagh. So I did a bad thing. I lied and said I possess something I don’t. I did it just to know.
Read the rest of this entry »
Today I present to you something that isn’t sabermetrics. It isn’t even really anything. But I do have a great name for it: PSEUDOMETRICS. Pseudometrics* is the red-headed stepchild of sabermetrics, if said stepchild were a pile of moldy socks woven from backhair. Pseudometrics, like sabermetrics, answers questions about baseball. Where it differs is in the kinds of questions it asks. Whereas [real statistic] might try to answer [real question], pseudometrics attempts to answer questions like, “Which baseball player is most like a grape?” and “What would happen if we made Kyle Farnsworth the next Dalai Lama?” In other words, pseudometrics asks the unanswerable and then answers it, gauchely. In doing so, it employs methods that are less than precise. It’s like bombing a field of rocks in Utah and then looking for fossils in the crater. You might find a dinosaur, but probably you’ll also be at the bottom of a crater with no way up and no friends and no hope and planes flying overhead dropping bombs.
One might say pseudometrics is “useless,” but I’ve already thoroughly abused this website with a truly useless statistic. Instead I prefer to think of it as “ineffable,” in the same way the word propels the plotline of Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. That is, in a possibly meaningful, possibly irrelevant way. It’s an umbrella under which unquantifiable inquiries are crudely quantified and dispensed to readers (you) who starve for numbers that tell you what’s really going on. Except these numbers don’t. But they feel like they do, and that’s what counts. Even us stolid empiricists require a little good feelin’ every now and then.
To celebrate the introduction of Pseudometrics and its overflowing banks of ineffability, I want to begin by considering who the most and least ineffable ballplayers are. Sound dumb? Grape!
Today my mind’s butterfly briefly lighted on years prior. Strange, since I really don’t have any reason to acknowledge the past. I’m a millennial, apparently, and us millennials are always looking toward the next millennium. We are the voices of the year 3000! If I do look into the past, or even the present, really–if I ever engage my immediate reality for even one damn second–I do so with precise questions herding me forward like the mutant weasel and/or turtle that I am. Questions like: What can I destroy with words? Also, if possible, can I maim and sully the work of someone long dead? Can I misinterpret sociolinguistic context to defame and dog someone who probably worked hard to earn their living? Can I unduly amend someone’s creative property without reasonable justification? Can I make unusual and amusing if somewhat nonsensical lists? If yes to any of these then I will consider the past, albeit briefly and while drinking Svedka, the official vodka of 2033.
Baseball is a pointless, aimless, unfair, repetitive, and endless display of unpredictable failure. But if there’s any readership that snuggles up to the teats of defeat and feeds on its malevolent draught, it’s this one. Even separate from baseball, awareness of our ultimate irrelevance and propensity to fail miraculously and fantastically at whatever we do brings this readership pleasure, right? Maybe it’s just me. I love a good failure. I brim with glee when I heckle Cubs fans about what they’ve been up to since 1908 (and love, perhaps more, when they heckle back), or when I see an Olympic runner crying on the track as she falls on the final lap. It is pleasure I’m feeling, distinctly, and for me there’s nothing more like a guilty pleasure than the pleasure I experience at witnessing a complete disaster. Guilty or not, I love it.
Which is why it brings me immense pleasure to present to you COOL Game Scores. This endeavor is perhaps the clearest example of failure any of you will ever witness. It is a paragon of dumb joy in the face of catastrophe. It’s a number that is horrendously constructed, and whose purpose itself is pointless. Not only does it miss the point, the point it misses doesn’t exist. It’s like having Tofurkey that neither looks like turkey nor is it constituted of tofu. COOL is a total sham. It is literally nothing but space on a server. But like so many human pursuits, we grunt forwards, hoping somehow that something means anything. COOL, though, definitely means nothing.
Without delving too deeply into what it means to be a fan, I think we can recognize that one develops something analogous to a romantic relationship with players and teams. As delusional as it is to believe people on the ballfield can return any of the affection you direct them, it still hurts to be cheated on. It doesn’t feel like Braun cheated, it feels like he cheated on me. A certain part of my heart wants nothing more than to clutch a sequin-framed 3×5 portrait of Braunie and rock back and forth, mascara running, as “Love Hurts” by Nazareth blasts from my laptop speakers. An autographed University of Miami Braun jersey smoulders in the fireplace. Scribbled sharpie covers my caricatured Braun tramp stamp. My children Ryan and Joseph bang on the front door begging to be let in and fed. My wife, Braunhilda, rots in six separate garbage bags in dumpsters distributed randomly across Dane County. I want to have, you know, a typical breakup reaction to this whole situation.
For some dumb reason I’m writing another post about COOL scores, a metric that has the exact opposite intentions as NERD. A metric that holds almost no merit, and would hold no merit had I not figured out how to calculate z-scores in Excel. And yet, this vacuous metric so resonated with a certain Carson Cistulli that he bought me two beers and offered me the chance to write more dumb things for this dumb website. Dumb dumb dumb.
By way of introducing myself I’ll include a relevant and thoroughly disgusting self-portrait that I snapped in the Verona Public Library, just now.
My jungle de bouche is a bit unkempt, but I believe in leaving room for improvement, especially in terms of kemptness. I’ve previously appeared in the commenting section at NotGraphs, albeit rarely, as user Johnny Hummusbeard; I successfully suggested Iago’s Balls in the Nickname Seeks Player series. I own a Pontiac.
On to COOL scores for pitchers! COOL, or the Coefficient Of On-field Lustre, is a useless number shittily designed to approximate how enjoyable a baseball game might be to someone with no interest in baseball. Do you prefer calling your bff’s “chica” and texting solely with emojis? You might be the target audience for COOL. Are you an orthodox nun? COOL’s for you, babe. Are you an undead wight emerging from the depths of a Hopi burial mound? Feast on some COOL. You’re an avocado? Nice, let’s make guaCOOLmole. Etc.
COOL for pitchers (or pCOOL) is another step toward developing a COOL game score. This way you and I can say, “Hey, come view this spectacle!” and actually deliver said spectacle. Remember that pCOOL has no bearing on a pitcher’s actual skill. In fact, some factors that benefit a pitcher’s pCOOL score are harmful to a pitcher’s career. This makes pitchers with high COOL scores something fleeting and disastrous, yet transfixing, like, say, Alexander the Great’s invasion of India. There are more notes on COOL for pitchers, but I’ll cover those below. Let’s just dive in, like kids in a horror movie skinny dipping, and see how gruesome it gets.
