I kept telling myself to not do this. But I have become overcome with such frustration that I now find myself typing away my thoughts on this particular matter.
As a blogger, we are not officially a part of the mainstream news media, and therefore at times are seen as a less than professional medium of news and insights. Anybody can get on their computer, go to blogger.com and start typing away anything they desire. I get it. But there are some of us who take it seriously and try to put out as much detail as we can that are based on fact, and of course opinion, which is what helps to drive blogging.
But when I go to a sports columnist for news and insights, are they not typically held up to a much higher standard of reporting?
This morning when perusing through my Google Reader list of yesterday’s postings (notice I say postings and not news – because how much of what we read anymore is truly just news) from around the web, I came across an article by a sports writer from the Akron-Beacon Journal.
The article was a detail of the questions that surround the Indians offense this season. That is perfectly fine and well. I’ll read this, because even though this may be the team’s strength, there are questions. OK so far.
But as I get into it, the author raises some questions that seem like questions you could ask of any team in the league. Can so and so rebound, will the prospects continue to develop, and so on. Then he says that the only answer to these is “Time will tell” and that people always point to the second half of last season as a reference point to when the Indians offense performed at a high level without Victor Martinez or Travis Hafner.
I become less interested in this article, but I go on. I want to see what his argument is against the second half of last season.
Well, I’ll just show you and then comment:
Yet it’s possible that the attack will continue to perform at a high level once the regular season begins. After all, as much as club officials like to point out how explosive the Tribe lineup was in the second half of 2008, it hardly set any records. The nine batsmen who played the most (minus Franklin Gutierrez, who was traded to Seattle in December) had an aggregate batting average of .291 with 64 home runs and 285 RBI.
To put the production numbers in perspective, that’s one home run every 27 at-bats and one RBI every 6.1 at-bats. For a hitter who plays a full season (550 at-bats), these numbers project to 20 homers and 90 RBI.
The team scored an average of 5.6 runs over the last 68 games, which projects to 807 runs for the season. That’s not much better than average. Last year, that run total would have ranked sixth in the American League.
This is how the players who most often appeared in the lineup fared after the All-Star break:
Choo (.343, 11 HR, 48 RBI), Ryan Garko (.319, 7 HR, 45 RBI), Jhonny Peralta (.295, 7 HR, 41 RBI), Asdrubal Cabrera (.320, 5 HR, 33 RBI), Grady Sizemore (.261, 10 HR, 36 RBI), Kelly Shoppach (.273, 14 HR, 35 RBI), Gutierrez (.288, 10 HR, 37 RBI), and Jamey Carroll (.291, 1 HR, 14 RBI).
In addition to Gutierrez, gone from last year’s team is Blake, traded to the Dodgers in July. The primary addition to this season’s lineup will be DeRosa, who for the record batted .288 with 10 homers and 37 RBI with the Cubs after the All-Star Game.
OK. Let’s point out a few things here. He is certainly attacking the notion of the second half continuing into 2009. I don’t mind him doing that, as that is what he gets paid to do, but how he backs it up is what is odd to me.
None of this even makes sense if you are a knowledgeable baseball fan let alone of the Indians.
First, if I had a team with nine batters who hit .291 with 20HR and 90RBI, I’D BE ECSTATIC. Right there is 810 runs scored based on the RBI total alone. That’s not even counting bench players and other miscellaneous runs scored without RBI’s.
Next he says that the Indians averaged 5.6 runs per game after the All-Star break. That is correct, but his math is way off on his projection. 807 runs – that is lower than what your mythical nine-batter lineup would produce. Plus, the Indians scored 805 runs during the season by my recollection and did finish sixth in the AL in runs scored, and in fact 7th in all of MLB. If he had double-checked his math, then he’d have seen a projection of 903 runs, which would have placed the Indians number one in MLB, not 6th in the AL as we said they already were!
Then he totally misleads the reader into thinking that Franklin Gutierrez hit .288 with 10HR and 37RBI after the break. In actuality he only hit .285 with 5HR and 23 RBI. What the author gave is not even Gutierrez’ 2007 season either. I’m not sure where that number came from.
And finally, the last sentence seems like a jab at management for only bringing in one player, which is ok to argue, but he tries to make it sound like DeRosa’s numbers were bad. Stretch those 198 at-bats out over 550 at-bats during a season, and he would have hit .288 with 27 home runs and 100 RBI. I’ll take that any day too.
I do not want to just question this writer, but it just so happens that his piece sent me over the top. I have seen so many typos and mistakes in stats in articles recently that it makes me double take what I have even read when getting my news. It is hard to know what is true anymore.
Another example from today was from the Cleveland Plain Dealer saying Trevor Crowe has played 46 games at Triple-A when in fact every statistic I can find says he played 35. But I can handle this kind of error. That can be an honest mistake that an editor would not catch. But for an individual to twist an argument against something and include false data makes me really have to question everything that I read.
The problem is, not everybody will.
Topics: Journalism
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These days major media sportswriters are being inveighed against by sports commentators almost daily. Terry Pluto usually gets a pass, but all the rest in Cleveland and Akron are getting ripped for their grammatical shortcomings as well as statistical miscarriage, as revealed in your blog. The criticisms are often quite valid. Meanwhile many bloggers, your peers, are somehow finding time to deeply analyze what I would call the physics of baseball. It’s quite amazing, belying the much lamented low state of American education.
I don’t imagine this trend is only going on in the Cleveland area, but it’s pretty cool, and should warn purveyors of sports information in Cleveland sports media that their days may be numbered. That said, however, as a big fan of novelist Comac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men), let me say that sports writing should be regarded as a ‘creative’ enterprise, not always requiring grammatically perfect sentences with subjects, verbs, objects and quotation marks.
Peter
Thanks for the comments Peter. It is an interesting trend that we are witnessing. And it is not just in Cleveland, there are numerous sites all over the web for any team that go into greater detail about the sport than any beat writer could. People are creating careers out of it, but I do believe that each medium has its own purpose to the reader. So I’m not sure if their jobs would be on the line, but they at least have to step up a little bit and not base an argument on faulty math and statistics that makes them look bad. I guess that was it more than any typos, I for one am obviously no expert in my styling, so it was unfair for me to say anything about that.
Why was I not surprised to see the name OCKER when I clicked the link?
I barely even visit ABJ anymore.. It just doesn’t offer up anything I can’t get anywhere else on a consistent basis. Ocker is partially to blame for that.