Monday, October 25, 2004
Out of Sight
For a number of reasons, I did not watch much of this weekend's games. As a result, my desire to buy the Arrested Development Season 1 DVD has dropped dramatically, as has my need to see My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss and The Rebel Billionaire. Thankfully, I've also almost repressed the twitches I get whenever I see that wife in the Dodge truck ad nearly call her husband a... you know. Out of sight, out of mind.
The downside of that is that I did not see, well, much baseball. I would check in periodically, especially Saturday night, amused to hear the rapidly expanding score, but didn't get much of a sense of either game. And the last innings of last night's games, with the rain coming down it seemed to temper the crowd. It just wasn't as wild as the last four games of either LCS.
So I don't really have much to add. (Some might say that's true even when I write 750 words on a subject.) It is funny to see the "defensively-improved" Red Sox commit 8 errors in two games and have the only effect be to keep Red Sox pitchers' ERA really low. But when you whack the ball all over the place, hitting out of their minds, it doesn't matter, now does it?
And Curt Schilling. The upshot of last night's solid performance is now that the Hall of Fame talk is heating up. His stats (thanks to the fine folks at Baseball-Reference) don't strike me as incredible -- at 37, he has just 184 wins, but the metrics used to track whether or not Schilling might make the Hall of Fame seem to be pretty good (see near the bottom of the page). It seems to me that 250 wins (or 66 more) would pretty much assure him of getting in, anything less, who knows? The only question will be whether Hall of Fame voters (many of whom probably have a grasp of the Keltner Test that's even more tenuous than mine) will be more swayed by his "big-game clutch pitching" or by his "big ego."
The downside of that is that I did not see, well, much baseball. I would check in periodically, especially Saturday night, amused to hear the rapidly expanding score, but didn't get much of a sense of either game. And the last innings of last night's games, with the rain coming down it seemed to temper the crowd. It just wasn't as wild as the last four games of either LCS.
So I don't really have much to add. (Some might say that's true even when I write 750 words on a subject.) It is funny to see the "defensively-improved" Red Sox commit 8 errors in two games and have the only effect be to keep Red Sox pitchers' ERA really low. But when you whack the ball all over the place, hitting out of their minds, it doesn't matter, now does it?
And Curt Schilling. The upshot of last night's solid performance is now that the Hall of Fame talk is heating up. His stats (thanks to the fine folks at Baseball-Reference) don't strike me as incredible -- at 37, he has just 184 wins, but the metrics used to track whether or not Schilling might make the Hall of Fame seem to be pretty good (see near the bottom of the page). It seems to me that 250 wins (or 66 more) would pretty much assure him of getting in, anything less, who knows? The only question will be whether Hall of Fame voters (many of whom probably have a grasp of the Keltner Test that's even more tenuous than mine) will be more swayed by his "big-game clutch pitching" or by his "big ego."
Comments:
Schilling already has 145 points on the Jamesian HoF Monitor. I think he's a lock for the Hall, especially if the Sox win the World Series. At that point, he is also a lock for MVP, and I, for one, would have no problems giving it to him on either cardiac or sabermetric grounds.
Yeah, I was surprised when I looked at his stats, then looked at the HOF metrics, how strong his HOF metrics were.
I'm going to assume he has another very good 2-3 seasons, getting his stats good enough to merit inclusion on sabermetric grounds alone.
But the audible groaning from the press room when Schilling talked about his faith after his ALCS performance (the good one, not the bad one) makes me think that the non-statistical vote for Schill isn't as much of a done deal as I would expect.
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I'm going to assume he has another very good 2-3 seasons, getting his stats good enough to merit inclusion on sabermetric grounds alone.
But the audible groaning from the press room when Schilling talked about his faith after his ALCS performance (the good one, not the bad one) makes me think that the non-statistical vote for Schill isn't as much of a done deal as I would expect.
