Fame in the Hall of Fame

Well, the attempts to meet the Tango challenge -- which, you might recall, meant coming up with a consistent framework that shows Jack Morris to be a better pitcher than Rick Reuschel (or, if not better, than at least more Hall of Fame worthy) -- has taken us in some pretty fascinating directions.

I want to discuss one in particular -- the Bill James Hall of Fame Monitor -- but before that, one point worth discussing is raised by brilliant reader W. Blake Gray and, also, by many, many others through the years. The point is that, you will notice, the word “Fame” is rather prominent in the title in “Hall of Fame.”* Well, fame, as we all know, means “fame” -- you know, widespread reputation, renown, the condition of being known, that whole bit.

*Fame is 33 percent of the words and is hitting .400 when it comes to the available letters.

An iPad Review

I left my iPad on a plane the other day. The crazy thing about it -- as if there needs to be an extra layer of crazy about leaving a hugely expensive and personal and professionally vital device on an airplane -- was that I thought about it five minutes before I did it. Not after. BEFORE. I put the iPad in the front seat pocket just as the plane was in its final descent, and I thought: “You know, I better remember this. I’ve got all my numbers and notes and work ideas and unfinished novels and secrets of the golf swing on this. It would be incredibly stupid to leave this iPad on the plane.”

Then, five or ten minutes later, I did exactly that. The phone rang, the guy next to me was in a hurry, the guy behind me … stop making excuses, I completely lost my mind, that’s what happened. I flat forgot it. I walked off the plane and forgot the thing in the seat pocket. And then I checked my messages and made a couple of calls and didn’t think about it until I got home. The second I got home, I DID think about it, and not for the first time, and not for the last, a single thought crashed down as if spoken in deep tones by a movie narrator: “This is the dumbest person on the face of the earth.”

Morris vs. Reuschel

Well,we’ve got Sports on Earth up and running. That should be a lot of fun. This blog will continue to be a part of SOE. It will take some time, I imagine, to figure out what appears here and what appears there. I suspect this blog will become more personal and more focused on goofy and eccentric interests. For instance, the National League breakdown by WAR is up at SOE now. And here, I’m writing about Jack Morris and Rick Reuschel.

Well, this one is more like a challenge … issued by the brilliant Tom Tango.

Tango on WAR

The brilliant Tom Tango sent an explanation about WAR and how it connects with team performance. I thought I would pass it along:

Fangraphs and Baseball Reference each have their own “implementation” of that WAR framework (which I call for shorthand fWAR and rWAR, respectively). Even Bill James' Win Shares can be considered an implementation of WAR (it shares many of the characteristics).

In any case, with Win Shares, Bill FORCES the individual player Win Shares and Loss Shares so that it exactly matches to a team's Won/Loss record (times 3 anyway). If you were to redo your exercise, that's what you'd find.

With rWAR, the original creator (Sean Smith) and subsequently continued with Sean Forman, they force it so that it matches a team Runs Scored and Runs Allowed (times some Runs per Win multiplier). So, if you were to list the team RS and RA, or even better, the pythagorean W/L record that represents, you'd almost surely (rounding errors aside) see that the sum of the players matches the team Pythag's record.

With fWAR, it's a bit more complicated, but essentially on the hitter side, fWAR would match a team's OBP and SLG numbers. So, if you were to translate OBP and SLG into Runs Scored and Runs Allowed, and then convert that into Wins/Losses, you'd again see that the sum of the players matches the team's translated W/L record. (Not as exact in the fWAR case.)

Fun with WAR

By WAR standards, Hiroki Kuroda is having a Cy Young type season. (Getty Images)

OK, so there has been a lot of discussion in baseball circles about the statistic WAR -- Wins Above Replacement -- and how people feel about it. There are WAR hawks, who believe it’s a giant leap forward in baseball analysis. There are WAR protesters, who think it’s an utterly unintelligible statistic that works at dehumanizing the game. And there are WAR agnostics, who think that it’s a stat in progress, that there are good and bad things about it, and that it’s hardly one-stop stat-shopping, but that it adds to the picture.

Here’s a simple review of WAR. You undoubtedly know all this. In broad terms, WAR attempts to measure a player’s worth against something called a replacement player. The replacement player -- whose WAR is obviously 0.0 -- is (at least in theory) a player whom you can always find, either in Class AAA or on the waiver wire, or someone you can generally get in a player-to-be-named-later deal. It’s an AVAILABLE player, one that a shrewd GM should always be able to find in case of emergency.

Following Hornby

Mariners pitcher Felix Hernandez recorded the third perfect game of the season on Wednesday.

So, this is the year that I really try to follow the Premier League ... and the NHL. I’ve been talking about doing those two things forever now, but this is the year. I’m ordering the television packages. I’m buying the preseason magazines. I’m telling you: This is the year.

Today’s focus is the Premier League (and baseball) because I just read Nick Hornby’s wonderful and too-short e-book “Pray: Notes on the 2011/2012 Football Season.” It is Hornby, with his unparalleled book about being a sports fan, “Fever Pitch*,” -- who got me infatuated with the idea of being a fan of a Premier League team in the first place.

*Well, Frederick Exley’s “A Fan’s Notes” is as amazing in a different way.

Pesky

Former Red Sox great Johnny Pesky died
Monday at age 92. (Getty Images)

For years, I’ve thought about why baseball’s spring training is so much more joyous than NFL training camps or basketball or hockey workouts or any other kind of practice setup. The weather, of course, is a big part of it. You get on a plane, perhaps trudging through slush in the airport parking lot, and you land in Arizona or Florida, where the sun is out, and everything smells like freshly cut grass, and you hear the popping of baseballs hitting the webbing of mitts, and you hear the rough insults of men who can say anything to each other, and it’s just so warm again. NFL training camps are spectacularly hot, this in the middle of summer, same is true for college football. The other sports get ready for their seasons indoors. Spring training feels like the end of winter; it’s no wonder people like it so much.

There’s also something about baseball practice that looks fun. You want to be out there, joining in. Everything about football practices suggest sweat and pain and exhaustion -- two-a-days, full-pads, coaches screaming at players nonstop. And while there are happy moments in it all, while there are whoops and hollers when someone makes a great play, it is not designed to make people wish they could run on the field themselves. Baseball feels like fun more than work. They play catch, outfielders shag fly balls, pitchers practice covering first, hitters take some swings in the cage … it’s no wonder people pay huge sums of money to do all this in what is called a “fantasy camp.”