Thanks Vito for the link. I'll listen to it later.
As for P/S knowing more than a Cy Young Award winner. I can assure you, they wouldn't know more than a guy who played Single A. Anyone who's actually played the game on any professional level will know 1000x more than some writer/radio person. Doesn't need to be a Cy Young winner.
Ya this sabermetrics has ruined baseball. I'm talking from attracting new fans. It's like some foreign language they're speaking, WAR, BWAR, etc.... I don't mind if they kept it to themselves but these sabermetric guys have some insecure need to tell everyone how smart they are and if you're not on board they think of you as a ignorant fan.
Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
I imagine the arrogance of two guys who work in radio thinking they understand more about how the game is played than a Cy Young winner. It's sort of like a bunch of guys on a message board thinking they understand more about doing a radio show than Laurence Holmes.
Seriously, McDowell makes a lot of good points that the fan who has been immersed in statistics/analytics and thinks he is the equal of a big league GM because he has won his fantasy league three years in a row just doesn't want to acknowledge.
For example, Parkins obviously believes that the pitchers today are "better" and capable of striking out more batters than Jack McDowell. He doesn't seem to grasp that modern batters strike themselves out. In McDowell's era no batter wanted to strike out. Today's batters don't care about that. If you sent Parkins himself out to pitch a big league inning and made him stay out there until he recorded three outs, it's almost a certainty that at least one of those outs would be a strikeout. Of course there would be multiple hits and runs scored between the outs, but I guess he could say he was great because he struck some goof out.
Parkins also doesn't seem to understand that if you take a bunch of pitchers and train them to understand that they are supposed to be weaker the third time through the order, most of them will be. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's like when they first started with the pitch counts. The first generation of pitchers that was raised with pitch counts started looking toward the dugout when they got near 100. They expected that they were finished.
But I do think there are actual scientific causes for the inability of pitchers to go deep into games and their propensity for injury. And it isn't because they throw harder or are "better." I suspect that the problem is specialization. The arms never get a chance to heal. Warren Spahn pitched his high school baseball season then put down his glove and played football and basketball for the rest of the year and didn't throw a baseball for months. Today's top pitchers NEVER let down. They throw 12 months a year.
Damn - best baseball post I've read anywhere in quite some time. I really like the self-fulfilling prophecy theory.