guy got his balls out, and showed them. They were big, and they were brass. That’s one of my all time favorite football plays

Funny thing is, it worked except the bobble. Wasn’t like it got stuff like a Barry Sanders playoff run.

/earlier

Grantland, Bill Simmons’s vanity project, has taken some space since its launch to discuss sabermetrics. My takeaway so far is that nobody involved with Grantland knows a thing about the subject.

Who are these teams that leave their fans with sore bottoms? Lehrer doesn’t say. Literally. He does not name a single team or executive or player that illustrates this overreliance on statistics. At least Joe Morgan knew enough to blame Billy Beane for ruining baseball.

Huh?

Look, Craggs is a good writer, but when did he become the arbiter of uneven writing?

OOHHH, TOMMY CRAGGS!!!

/cowers in fear
//wanking motion

Basically, yes.

Scocca is a good writer too, but I’m not entirely sure where he’s coming from. You can’t just be anti-. That might be because I haven’t read enough of his work, of course, but it also might be because he’s a talented sophist. Or a computer program.

/fixed

Someone disagrees with me on the Internet! Shoot him!

Exactly.

I heard a rumor a week ago there was some trepidation (read: fear) among a few writers at Grantland about having their work dissected by the likes of Scocca and Tommy Craggs, and what Scocca did to Lehrer’s piece will only add to the rumor.

Huh?

Look, Craggs is a good writer, but when did he become the arbiter of uneven writing?

OOHHH, TOMMY CRAGGS!!!

/cowers in fear
//wanking motion

And Scocca wrote for Slate, which automatically makes me not take him seriously.

This paragraph should be enough to end all the fussin’ and the feudin’ about the subject

That paragraph is wonderful and should be a standard handout for sports fans on the internet.

This all takes us back to the age-old stats vs. scouting argument, which is actually one big misstatement. As many before me have noted, stats are not in conflict with scouting. They’re two different tools that teams can use in evaluating players. Stats are merely a record of what happened on the field. They’re sometimes put in greater context, but they’re the results of the game nonetheless. Scouting is a more subjective, closer look at those same events, and it does include other aspects such as a player’s makeup. Taken together they can provide a team with a reliable player evaluation. Either part without the other, though, can miss important factors.

This paragraph should be enough to end all the fussin’ and the feudin’ about the subject

Flagrantly racist

To whoever asked why people are so quick to rip apart Grantland pieces (maybe not for this piece in particular since it was rather odd), I think it’s pretty obvious. Many of them are hoping for the eyes of Bill Simmons to light up and force him to promptly fire off an email with an offer letter to come join the Grantland team.

Dear Tyler…

They pumped up that ESPN book like it might bring the company down.

Sponsored posts never deliver on the hype.

except for chicken legs.

LeBatard’s one of the few people in sports journalism that I believe has a brain and uses it well. I just wish he would stop being so naive about athletes and their behavior sometimes.

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/beating-up-the-sabermetric-strawman/

I used to go to that site everyday. Now I barely pop in twice a week. None of the stuff on there is good anymore. They pumped up that ESPN book like it might bring the company down. (It didn’t) Deadspin hookup Failure? As a weekly feature? To the surprise of nobody here, I’ve had plenty of my own hookup failures. I don’t want to read about someone else’s that may or may not be embellished because they want to get it published on the site.

Grantland hasn’t made my website rotation yet. I’m still trying to figure out what I want to get out of it.

//adds Karate Kid reference

The metrics all said Johnny Lawrence was a lock, Daniel LaRusso didn’t fucking care (although at the time they didn’t know how to account for the crane kick)