Those are two awful, awful words.
Well, there’s always next year, right? Another year where we’ve had a mediocre draft pick and a mediocre end to the season. A late-season rally for a playoff spot ends in a skid … when are we going to make having Jarome Iginla worth it?
First, for the 2011 Texas Rangers, full of pitching gaffes and managerial woes, but also full of crazy, great baseball moments — like Nelson Cruz’s walk-off grand slam, for example. Or Josh Hamilton’s two-run homer in Game 6, or Mike Napoli’s two-run double in the bottom of the 8th in Game 5, giving the Rangers a 3-2 stranglehold in the series. Or Adrian Beltre’s home run to tie Game 5 in the sixth inning. Or everything else Mike Napoli did.
The St. Louis Cardinals came out strong, and after the absolute madness of Game 6, they outplayed the Rangers to win the World Series fair and square. I do love a good narrative, and the Cardinals’ is among the best – 10.5 games back of the wild card behind the Atlanta Braves, sneaking into the postseason after the greatest baseball day ever (sorry, it was totally still better than Game 6), winning the World Series after being a strike away from losing so many times … it’s a great story, and I’m glad it finished so well.
But I’d love to see the Rangers win one day soon. Two losses in a row isn’t easy, and they’re a fun team to watch when they’re not walking six batters, two with the bases loaded, in Game 7 of the World Series. It was a tough way to go, falling apart at the seams like that – they were dominated by the Cardinals for a large part of the series – but when they win their first championship, it will have been well-earned and long overdue. Shape up and come back swinging, guys — and here’s to a good run.
And second, in a total 180, to Steve Jobs from his sister, Mona. After the amazing outpouring of grief from around the globe, from everyone who had ever used an Apple product and who had been inspired by them, and by him, it was hard not to be a little desensitized. Flowers at a computer store seemed like overkill after a few days, something entirely too first world. This piece is beautiful and human, and I dare you not to tear up when you hit the end. It reminds me of why we need people like Jobs, whether he was a tyrant or not. We need to remember how to imagine all the time, and how to make everything we do count.
[...]He explained that he worked in computers.
I didn’t know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter.
I told Steve I’d recently considered my first purchase of a computer: something called the Cromemco.
Steve told me it was a good thing I’d waited. He said he was making something that was going to be insanely beautiful.
I want to tell you a few things I learned from Steve, during three distinct periods, over the 27 years I knew him. They’re not periods of years, but of states of being. His full life. His illness. His dying.
[...] We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
Game 6 was like Baltimore vs. Jonathan Papelbon twice. The Rangers found themselves one strike away from winning the franchise’s first World Series ever TWO TIMES, and both times gave up some runs instead. You’d think after getting a second chance they’d be able to do it, but the Cards just could not let it go. I have to hand it to them, even though I was yelling in total disbelief for most of the last three innings.
Also in “WTF”, the Winnipeg Jets beat the Philadelphia Flyers earlier yesterday in another insane display of screw-uppery. The Jets led 5-1 and then 6-2 — until they imploded, with the Flyers tying the game at 6. Then everybody just kept scoring, and Winnipeg’s game-winner came with a whopping 1:20 left in the third. Flyers goalie Ilya Bryzgalov was quoted as saying he was terrible and had no confidence in himself; I’m sure Ondrej Pavelec is only feeling marginally better about life.
Per that article, it was the first time the Flyers have given up 9 goals at home since 1993, when they played … the Winnipeg Jets.
What happened last night?!
Tonight: awesome and terrifying Game 7, manager vs. manager. Nobody’s going to have any bullpen left and Tony La Russa is probably going to try to argue that Mark McGwire can totally pinch-hit for somebody late in the game. Grab some popcorn on the way home.
So I was talking with a friend of mine about the MVP battle yesterday – well, battle in the American League, anyway. As far as I’m concerned, Matt Kemp has the NL MVP all tied up and the Cy Young is gonna be Clayton Kershaw or Roy Halladay, so there’s nothing to worry about. Justin Verlander is clearly winning the AL Cy Young. That leaves AL MVP, the big ol’ debate.
The front-runners are Jacoby Ellsbury (BOS) and Jose Bautista (TOR). To compare them, here’s five sets of stats. They are kind of arbitrary, but they’re the ones that are often thrown around in the AL MVP debate, so I threw them in here. They’re batting average, runs batted in (RBI), home runs, on-base plus slugging (OPS), and wins above replacement (WAR), source Baseball-Reference:
| Ellsbury | Bautista | |
| Avg | .321 | .302 |
| RBI | 105 | 103 |
| HR | 32 | 43 |
| OPS | .928 | 1.056 |
| WAR | 7.2 | 8.5 |
Ellsbury leads in batting average (by 19 points) and RBI (by two). Bautista leads in home runs and the sabermetric stats of OPS and WAR.
It should also be noted that two of Bautista’s leading stats – HR and OPS – are actually the highest in the majors (the highest OPS in the National League was Ryan Braun’s .994, and Curtis Granderson trails in home runs by two at 41).
To me this table alone yells Bautista for MVP. First of all, it’s 2011, and batting average is way less important than sabermetric stats. Batting average doesn’t take walks into account, and Bautista’s walks are astronomical — 132 BB (also leading the majors) versus Ellsbury’s 52. This means Bautista walked an insane 25.7% of the time, while Ellsbury walked 7.8%. Joey Bats did have four times as many intentional walks, but if you factor those out, it comes out to 21% versus 7%. This is a no-brainer.
Second of all, RBI is a flawed measurement. It does measure how well you hit with teammates on base, sort of, but it also measures how well your teammates get on base for you. In Ellsbury’s case, 20 of his homers were solo shots, and 27 of Bautista’s – both coming out to 63%. We’d have to analyze this a bit with the RISP numbers and maybe the preceding plays and I’m not going to do that, but clearly this is a bit of a problematic stat, especially since they’re both obviously great hitters and went over 100 RBI and are still hitting two-thirds of their home runs without anybody else on base.
OPS isn’t a perfect statistic (it weighs slugging and on-base equally, which is awkward) but at least it takes into account reaching base in any way, which I think is vastly more important than looking at RBI in a vacuum. Both of these guys have really high OPS, but Bautista’s (also league-leading) slugging percentage is almost .200 higher than Ellsbury – .608 against .452.
So … Ellsbury was more likely to get a hit in a given at-bat, and ever so slightly more likely to bat in a run. Bautista walked in one out of every four plate appearances (that’s pretty much one walk a game), hit more home runs, hit for more bases, got on base more often, and earned his team one 1.3 more wins. Oh, and he gives one hell of a staredown.
Now that the Boston Red Sox are climbing out of the rubble of the worst September collapse in history, Jacoby Ellsbury no longer has the aura of contending-team edge surrounding his shot for MVP. It’s a ridiculous consideration – good players are good players, even if their teams keep letting them down – but it’s always been a part of the MVP discussion, and one that would undoubtedly have robbed Bautista of a win had the Red Sox won one more game. But now … looking at these numbers, it’s virtually impossible to understand how someone could not pick Joey Bats.
And anyway, how could the award go to someone whose nickname is Tacoby Bellsbury?