Country Sad Ballad Man

Country Sad Ballad Man, originally uploaded by bmichaelpayne.

Over at Blastings! Thrilledge, our former ex-bff observes that

A lot of calculations and projections are necessary to prove anything,

which is as useless a thing as you're likely to read in the Internets these days. It's like saying, "Everyone agrees that the best way to convince someone of something is to make them agree with you," a double x double quadruple whammy if there ever were one. (There's not.)

This statement, which starts off a generally un-statty post (which we like over here) is the calling card of the whole troubled modern statistical movement in baseball. If the sports writers would just look at Burt Blyleven's numbers, man, then it would be clear to them that... Well it's not clear. And no matter how much data you sling, you're never going to convince anyone. Or, as Ben said to Jack back in season two, I don't want you to do the surgery. I want you to want to do the surgery. You have to change the whole worldview, not merely change a few data points. You have to make them want to want the data.

Thinking men from Plato to Kant to Wittgenstein (and even that baseball Nietzsche Yogi Bera saw this one) have seen through the sham simplicity of the naive worldview, a myth. If you're a Platonist, the formal world that is the real source of real meaning (wtf!?, right? What is that even like?) is the operative thing-like thing that most people miss out on when they're looking at the world. Or, the imaginative faculty that unifies the manifold of apperception (if you're Kant), is what makes the world make sense. Or the grammatical hinge propositions that structure your form of life, say Wittgenstein, are the things that give it meaning. The source of meaning, though, not to be an irrealist, is not the world itself, but rather the unique and capricious interplay of other peoples' worlds (i.e., intersubjective validities) with your own meaning-structure. And the Sabremetrician virgins living in their moms's basements eating the Doritos etc., etc. always fail to grasp (well not that FJM, master of irony) that most people remain impervious to the convincifying powers of numbers. Numbers numb us.

It's like saying that America spends X dollars per minute, which dollars could stretch to the moon and back five times. That doesn't mean anything to most people. And saying someone is worth x wins above replacement (it's a simple concept, but so is not smoking drain cleaner and pseudofed) fails to mean anything to most people. But watching Derek Jeter make one scraptastic, jumping-all-over-the-fucking-place, limited-ranged catch and putaway sticks in the mind. That's why analysts are fond of saying that seeing a guy play every day is an advantage w/r/t analyzing the game. It's not, if you're statistically inclined; but to the observer, the way he makes sense of it all is to remember certain special moments, and file the rest away (in the circular file). It's the same reason why ex-players sort of suck as coaches or general managers or whatever. They tend to universalize the few particular events that happened to them, and take this specific-universal knowledge as their starting point for analysis and decision making. Which, to the egghead stat doofus, is a poor way to go.

But while the pocket-protector-wearing, slide-rule-using populace fails to outnumber the red-blooded, girl-fucking majority, that's just how it will be.

Lastings Milledge, the National Pastime, and Finding Relief in Solitude

IDFNBGAW is ostensibly a sports blog:  That is, we're inspired by the inimitable Weezy F. Baby, who is, we're told, quite the sports fan.  We're also inspired by the concept of Swag, which, again, is quite sports-related.   So, it brings us GREAT JOY to comment on the latest greatest news of the Internets.  Lastings Milledge is going to be a National!

(Courtesy of Gothamist, but the captions are ours.)

So what does this mean for IDFNBGAW?  Well, allow us to explain.  Back in 2005, we were just starting to think about getting out of college.  Impermanence was the rule.  We wanted to latch on to something lasting, traditional, Great and Beautiful.  So we thought, hey, what about that baseball thing?  That's pretty tradition-laden.  And aren't baseball games the places where fat cat businessmen casually negotiate over $million deals?  Over footlongs and plastic bottles of Bud??  

The only thing left was to pick a team.  Growing up, we used to like the Yankees.  But then they had to go and win so much that, by 2005, they were a highly unfashionable choice.  What other teams were there?  The Mets?  But they were a poor man's Yankees.  The Red Sox seemed popular, but all their fans are assholes.  Oh, what's that?  There's a new baseball team?  Yes there is.  The Washington Nationals were just coming back to being, rising from the chrysalis that was Expos.  They seemed fresh and old school.  There was no bandwagon, therefore no bandwagon fans.  They were a northeast team, so we could go to games.  The stars had aligned.  Perfect!  So we went off to Zappos or Footlocker or something and got a Nationals hat.

And we read all about them on the Internets.  And everything seemed primed for a bigtime baseball resurgence over in IDFNBGAW Land.  Except for two things:  1) The Nationals sucked.  Maybe they traded for Soriano or something?  They had one guy, like, a 3b or Cf that was pretty good?  Maybe El Duque's brother?  They were horrible.  And then with the RFK-is-actually-a-lot-bigger-than-we-thought-it-was Washington Post article, which totally demoralized the team.  But, the bigger problem was 2)

Baseball is suuuuuuuper boring to watch unless it's a deciding playoff game.  And, as per 1), the Nationals were not getting anywhere near the playoffs.  Therefore, the whole let's root for the Nationals plan fell through.

But maybe this Milledge trade is what we need.  There's going to be a new ballpark.  And the Mets' epic collapse last year may be an emotional speedbump that they're just not gritty enough to overcome.  The Braves are all card carrying members of the AARP.  And, who else is in the NL East?  We have no clue because we don't watch baseball.  But, rest assured.  Come April, we will definitely be reading about it on Deadspin.  And we cannot wait to read about Milledge's latest rap/baseball endeavors.  We wish him the best:  To fly with the fishes and swim with the pigeons; to live in a different world like Dwyane Wayne.