At present, there are 13 used copies of Eric Walker’s oddly titled, out-of-print 1982 baseball-themed paperback, The Sinister First Baseman & Other Observations, on sale from Amazon sellers, and the cheapest one, in merely “Acceptable” condition, goes for $104.96. Who, exactly, is Eric Walker and why does he have so much value for so few people?

There were always those who suspected that baseball’s conventional wisdom was not so wise, but in the 1970s, Walker, a Bay Area baseball fan birthed the idea of Moneyball before Sandy Alderson or Billy Beane had entered the game. Even he, however, had an important precursor. From “The Forgotten Man of Moneyball,” Walker’s 2009 Deadspin article, a passage about his inspiration:

“But who am I, and why would I be considered some sort of expert on moneyball? Perhaps you recognized my name; more likely, though, you didn’t. Though it is hard to say this without an appearance of personal petulance, I find it sad that the popular history of what can only be called a revolution in the game leaves out quite a few of the people, the outsiders, who actually drove that revolution. 

Anyway, the short-form answer to the question is that I am the fellow who first taught Billy Beane the principles that Lewis later dubbed ‘moneyball.’ For the long-form answer, we ripple-dissolve back in time …

. . . to San Francisco in 1975, where the news media are reporting, often and at length, on the supposed near-certainty that the Giants will be sold and moved. There sit I, a man no longer young but not yet middle-aged, a man who has not been to a baseball game — or followed the sport — for probably over two decades, but a man who in childhood used to paste New York Giants box scores into a scrapbook, and who remembers, dimly but fondly, such folk as Whitey Lockman and Wes Westrum.

Carpe diem, I think.

With my lady, also a baseball fan of old, I go to a game. We have a great time; we go to more games, have more great times. I am becoming enthused. But I am considering and wondering — wondering about the mechanisms of run scoring, things like the relative value of average versus power. Originally an engineer by trade, I am right there with Lord Kelvin: ‘When you cannot measure it and express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a very meagre and unsatisfactory kind.’ I fiddle with some numbers; but I vaguely remember Branch Rickey’s work, the cover story in Life magazine for Aug. 2, 1950, [ed. note: it was actually 1954 and not a cover story] and think that I may not need to reinvent the wheel. I go to the San Francisco main library, looking for books that in some way actually analyze baseball. I find one. One. But what a one. 

If this were instead Reader’s Digest, my opening of that book would be ‘The Moment That Changed My Life!’ The book was Percentage Baseball, by one Earnshaw Cook, a Johns Hopkins professor who had consulted on the development of the atomic bomb. Today, when numerical analysis of baseball performance is a commonplace, it is hard to grasp how revolutionary, even shocking, were the concepts Cook was developing (Rickey’s work, which had quickly dropped off everyone’s radar, notwithstanding). The book was, and remains, awe-inspiring.”

]]> http://afflictor.com/2013/05/14/who-am-i-and-why-would-i-be-considered-some-sort-of-expert-on-moneyball/feed/ 0 http://afflictor.com/2013/05/13/a-sensor-inside-the-baseball-and-one-inside-the-pitchers-cap-that-would-cause-the-ball-to-explode/ http://afflictor.com/2013/05/13/a-sensor-inside-the-baseball-and-one-inside-the-pitchers-cap-that-would-cause-the-ball-to-explode/#comments Mon, 13 May 2013 18:57:52 +0000 Aff. http://afflictor.com/?p=76213

Baseball pitchers should have been wearing padded caps or fitted helmets for years, but, you know, Bud Selig is MLB Commissioner, so everything has to move at a glacial pace. The only good thing to come out of the harrowing recent incident that saw Toronto pitcher J.A. Happ suffer a skull fracture after being struck by a batted ball was the solution to the problem brainstormed by Tampa Bay’s southpaw Matt Moore. From Roger Mooney in the Tampa Tribune:

“ST. PETERSBURG - It was after the shock of seeing the line drive slam into the side of J.A. Happ’s head had subsided a bit – after word spread through the Rays dugout that as scary as it seemed, the Toronto starter would be OK – when the Tampa Bay pitchers discussed ways to avoid such incidents.

Matt Moore suggested a sensor inside the baseball and one inside the pitcher’s cap that would cause the ball to explode when it came within a certain distance of the pitcher’s head.

‘That’s Matt’s great idea. I kind of like it,’ Rays pitcher David Price said.”

I was taken aback–and perhaps you were?–when I heard that Bennett Miller had cast Steve Carrell as John du Pont in Foxcatcher, the forthcoming film about the wealthy benefactor of amateur wrestling, a schizophrenic whose money kept treatment at a distance, who descended into utter madness in the 1990s, and ultimately murdered Olympic hero David Schultz. The heavily armed du Pont, who’d played host to underdog sports since the 1960s, was arrested only after a two-day stand-off with the police. The opening of “A Man Possessed,” Bill Hewitt’s 1996 People article about the tragedy:

“Lately he had started telling people that he was the Dalai Lama. If anyone refused to address him as such, he simply refused to talk to them. That was bizarre, but then John E. du Pont, 57, a multimillionaire scion of the fabled industrial family, had always been odd. For fun he drove an armored personnel carrier around his 800-acre estate, Foxcatcher. He complained about bugs under his skin and about ghosts in the walls of the house. By and large, friends and family shook their heads, fretted about his ravings—and waited for the inevitable breakdown. ‘John is mentally ill and has been mentally ill for some time,’ says sister-in-law Martha du Pont, who is married to John’s older brother Henry. ‘But this year he really went over the edge.’

No one realized how far over until Friday afternoon, Jan. 26. Around 3 p.m., Dave Schultz, 36, a gold medalist in freestyle wrestling at the 1984 Olympics, was out working on his car at Foxcatcher, in leafy Newtown Square, Pa., 15 miles west of Philadelphia, where du Pont had established a residential training facility for top-level athletes. Suddenly du Pont pulled into the driveway of the house where Schultz lived with his wife, Nancy, 36, and their two children, Alexander, 9, and Danielle, 6. From the living room, Nancy heard a shot. When she reached the front door she heard a second. Looking out in horror, she saw a screaming du Pont, sitting in his car, extend his arm from the driver’s side window, take aim at her husband, facedown on the ground, and pump one more bullet into his body. After pointing the gun at Nancy, du Pont drove down the road to his home, leaving her to cradle her dying husband. 

During the two-day standoff that ensued, some 75 police and SWAT team members surrounded the sprawling Greek-revival mansion that du Pont called home. Finally, on Sunday afternoon, du Pont emerged, unarmed, to check on the house’s heating unit, which the police had turned off, and was taken without a shot being fired. That evening, a gaunt, ashen-faced du Pont was arraigned in a Newtown Township courtroom on a charge of first-degree murder, which in Pennsylvania can carry the death penalty. As investigators tried to piece together a motive for the seemingly senseless killing, there emerged the sad, scary portrait of a man believed to be worth more than $50 million who was rich enough to indulge his madness and to put enough distance between himself and the world at large to ensure that no one really bothered him about it.”

In wake of the NBA’s Jason Collins announcing that he’s gay–and the largely positive and supportive response to him–Deadspin unearthed a 1982 Inside Sports article about Glenn Burke, a gay pro athlete during the 1970s, who was out to his teammates in a less-enlightened era for sexual politics. The opening:

“The game is over and the baseball player sits in the hotel lobby, his eyes fixed on nothing. He thinks his secret is safe but he is never quite sure, so at midnight in the lobby it is always best to avoid the other eyes. He neither hears the jokes nor notices that a few teammates are starting to wear towels around their waists in the locker room. He does not want to hear or see or know, and neither do they.

The baseball player waits until the lobby empties of teammates and coaches. Some are in the bar, some out on the town, some in their rooms. Some, of course, have found women. He walks briskly out the door toward the taxicab, never turning his head to look back. He mutters an address to the driver and has one foot in the cab. …

‘Hey, where you going, man? You said you were staying in tonight.’

The baseball player feels his lie running up the back of his neck. ‘Changed my mind.’

‘Can I come with you? I got nothing going tonight.’

The baseball player pauses. ‘You don’t want to go where I’m going,’ he says at last. He is leaving a crack there, in case this teammate knows the secret and really would like to go with him.

‘Okay—have it your way.’

The baseball player is in the back seat, the door slams, his heart slams, the cab is pulling away. Fifteen minutes later it stops a block from the place the passenger actually intends to go. He pays the driver. Did the driver look at him sort of funny?

The baseball player steps out and walks back a block, his face turned 90 degrees to his left shoulder, away from the traffic, just in case. What if he meets someone he knows there tonight? There was the ballplayer’s brother the one night and the son of.a major league manager another. Man, they have to know, don’t they? And if he is recognized tonight, should he pretend he is someone else?

Suddenly he is pulling open the door and the men inside smile and the music swallows him and for a few hours in the bar the baseball player does not feel so alone.”

For people with systemic issues, there’s little hope apart from the short-term. Give a lot of money to someone who spends compulsively and is in debt and pretty soon they’ll have spent compulsively and been returned to indebtedness. But if you’re free from these issues, a little luck–or a lot of it–can make you into the thing you know you are in your head, because the only resources you lack are external. From Joe Drape’s New York Times article about Conor Murphy, a racehorse stablehand with a hunch–five hunches, actually:

“GOSHEN, Ky. — Last spring, Conor Murphy was a hired hand who spent his days galloping racehorses, combing knotted manes and shoveling manure in a stable in Berkshire, England.

Mr. Murphy, 29, knew his horses well. He was able to tell which ones were on their toes and which ones needed a little more care. He also knew his way around a betting window. On a hunch, he bet $75 on five of his favorites. It was the sort of desperate stab that only a man who loves horses would make.

But he won — big. His $75 bet paid more than $1.5 million, enough to put down the shovel and become his own boss.

Now he lives in Kentucky, training horses for some of the most prominent figures in racing. On Saturday, he will be at the Kentucky Derby, rooting for Lines of Battle, a horse owned by one of his clients.

“Pure luck,” Mr. Murphy said of his life-changing wager. His past year reads like something out of a movie script, and his big bet has become the stuff of lore for gamblers from the backsides of American racetracks to the training yards of England and Ireland.”

Because the word’s highest cancer rates aren’t killing citizens at a fast-enough pace, China may be in the midst of importing American football. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has at least 99 problems–many of them-concussion-related–but he gets breathless over the thought of cracking the world’s biggest market. The opening of “Hard Knocks: Shanghai,” Hua Hsu’s new Grantland article:

“The National Football League currently maintains four offices around the world. There is an office in Mexico City. The NFL has been popular in Mexico since at least the 1970s, and some of the largest-ever crowds to watch preseason and regular-season games were recorded in the nation’s capital, where the league has staged games since 1994. There’s another office in Toronto, where the league claims a fan base of nearly 1 million, the most die-hard among them along the border. NFL Europa shut down operations in 2007 but an office continues to thrive in London, where an annual regular-season game is played at Wembley Stadium. Commissioner Roger Goodell has even mused, carefully and obliquely, about one day placing a franchise there.

The last office is in Shanghai.

How does one begin to explain how unlikely NFL China is? Anything you want to assume about a nation that constitutes nearly 20 percent of the world’s population is probably true. China is whatever you want it to be: Massive and diverse and black-hair sameness, ancient and postmodern and blink-of-an-eye changing, it requires a different scale of description. But it’s probably not the riskiest generalization to suggest that China does not conform to anyone’s vision of a hotbed for American football. When I arrived in Shanghai, I was offered a litany of reasons, ranging from the cultural to the genetic, for why the sport would never catch on among locals. For example: There isn’t a deeply ingrained sports culture in China, and what little energies were devoted to following such things usually involved international competition. Team sports aren’t big in China, either, and the one-child policy has made parents more averse than ever to subjecting their kids to potential harm. And beyond all this, there’s football itself, which has never been an intuitive product for American export. Even nations with an appetite for American things have traditionally found football exotic and inscrutable, one of those aspects of the culture that simply doesn’t translate well.

But something unusual is happening throughout China’s major cities, where football is one of the fastest-growing sports. ocal Chinese kids are buying cleats and pads and starting teams and football clubs.”

Poet Nikki Giovanni interviewing Muhammad Ali. Not sure of the exact year, but during the 1970s.

ESPN’s Colin Cowherd is a hideous man, full of bluster, arrogance and wrongheadedness–and it’s obvious that he’s a sign of the times in American broadcasting. He creates elaborate, asinine theories and stuffs them full of “facts” that are usually not true. His predictions are almost always wrong. If Cowherd tells you to bet the rent money on something, you best sock it under a mattress. But being wrong and obnoxious has yet to cost him because like most pundits, he’s not in the business of being right. He’s in the business of being loud and of being a brand.

Just one small example: Before the 2012 baseball season, the Texas Rangers let pitcher C.J. Wilson become a free agent, instead opting to invest money in Japanese pitcher Yu Darvish, whom the organization had scouted heavily. Cowherd went on the radio with one of his typical idiotic rants, stating authoritatively that this was an example of how people are attracted to the unknown instead of appreciating what has worked for them, that the team had fallen in love with an ideal instead of understanding what they already had was better, that Wilson would prove to be the superior pitcher. Mark my words, Cowherd said.

He didn’t take into account that Darvish was a young pitcher about to age into his prime and Wilson was older and exiting his. He didn’t pay attention to Darvish having a deeper arsenal of pitches. He didn’t pay attention to reality at all. The Rangers hadn’t fallen in love with an ideal; it was Cowherd who had fallen in love with his moronic theory. I guess I don’t have to add that in the 14 months since Texas made its decision–one based on scouting, data and analysis–Darvish has proven to be one of the best pitchers in MLB while Wilson has faltered badly for his new team. And this isn’t just the exception with Cowherd–it’s the rule.

Cowherd doesn’t limit his foolishness to sports–he also makes gross and insulting generalizations about women and anyone he feels isn’t as successful as he is, though your definition of “successful” may differ. The suits at the sports network are obviously bright enough to realize what a huge douche they have working for them. But they only care about one thing: Can we turn him into a star and make money from his noise?

Of course, this is just a sports guy and sports aren’t important. But the same holds true for media across all areas in this country, especially in our age of dwindling financial returns for traditional platforms. When Jeff Zucker became the new head of CNN, he promised that he would “broaden the definition of what news is.” That remark won him applause from Rupert Murdoch, who has been poisoning the air with non-news and dubious research methods for decades. Murdoch has always believed that news is just another form of entertainment. Perhaps its just a coincidence that CNN and News Corp. properties were fast and first and embarrassingly wrong in the aftermath of the horrendous Boston Marathon carnage.

Proud jughead Joe Scarborough was able to cherry-pick polls that helped him sell dishonest stories in the run-up to the Presidential election, while questioning the integrity of pollster Nate Silver, who stuck to the numbers. The facts didn’t matter.

These aren’t crazy conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones–the single biggest sack of shit in American media–but in some ways their dishonesty is more dangerous. It isn’t cloaked in extremism but in respectability. And there’s nothing respectable about it.

The opening of Colin McGowan’s new article about the cartoonish Cowherd at the Classical:

“This past Friday, Colin Cowherd sat down with Bill Simmons to talk mostly about Colin Cowherd. They also kicked around a few theories about the mutation of LeBron’s competitiveness gene and the link between fascism and food. In tone, the podcast is more or less what one would expect: two hip-shooters a-hip-shootin’, and some excessive mutual admiration—Cowherd talks about Simmons’s perspective and craft as if Simmonsian should join Kafkaesque as an OED-approved literary adjective; Simmons gushes over Cowherd’s ability to… talk to himself for nine minutes at a time. For my part, I cleaned my apartment and occasionally yelled ‘wrong!’ from across the room.

I listened to the interview because I’m not looking to set my brain on fire with intellectual stimulation while drinking gin and scrubbing cat piss out of my bathroom floor on a Friday evening, but also because I wanted to listen to two powerful media figures I dislike talk shop. I think both Cowherd and Simmons, in their own ways, are what’s wrong with sports media, which in turn makes for an increasingly facile and (in Cowherd’s case) needlessly hostile mainstream sports discourse. I’ve called Simmons ‘either a hack or a complete asshole,’ and Cowherd, along with his louder, more malignant cousin Skip Bayless, isn’t in the sports business so much as he’s in the infuriation business. He peddles haughty reductiveness and calls it honesty, then bats around an overmatched simpleton from Steak’s Landing, Wisconsin for a few minutes before returning to his now-basically-show-long rant about Carmelo Anthony’s facial expressions and how, he doesn’t care what you think, he’s gonna go on pronouncing it ‘jih-roh.’

The podcast isn’t uninteresting, which Cowherd might claim is the entire battle. He exclaims at one point ‘What’s wrong with being interesting?’ which is exactly the sort of unassailable bully logic he employs on his radio show. Of course there is obviously nothing wrong with being interesting—what with it being definitionally positive—but here, Cowherd isn’t talking about the Lakers’ playoff chances for the third time in four days or staging overrated/underrated debates about literally anything. He’s talking about himself, and why he is the way he is, what he believes in. This is engaging enough: Colin Cowherd the human being is unlike anyone I’ve ever met. If he wants to talk about what makes him strange, I’ll listen.

What makes him strange—wrong, but also strange—is that he sees a direct correlation between popularity and, if not quite quality, some inherent goodness.”

I’m always happy to answer your emails, be they positive or negative.

______________________________

[redacted] 4:17 PM (1 hour ago)

to me

In your piece on Babe Ruth, you say there were’nt a lot of great players in the early decades, in part because of the color line. What racist nonsense! So you have to be black to be great? There were many many stars from the very beginning. Come to grips with your prejudiced thinking.

Robots, not humans, should be calling balls and strikes at every Major League Baseball game. It should have been this way for years. There was a sad reminder of the reluctance to automate this aspect of umpiring on Sunday night when Marty Foster ended the Tampa Bay-Texas game with one of the worst ball-and-strike calls imaginable.

Of course, we won’t be seeing the game utilizing computers to greater effect anytime soon. Commissioner Bud Selig and his inner circle have shown a shocking incompetence in regard to most of the key issues facing the game–instant replay, home-plate collisions, the untenable stadium situations of the A’s and the Rays, the Mets festering ownership crisis–procrastinating rather than acting. These failings have been papered over by the sport’s runaway profits, which have everything to do with the explosion of regional cable and its hunger for a quantity of family-friendly events that defy time-shifting, and little to do with anything in particular that Selig has done.

What are the arguments for not using software to call strikes? There is a tradition of catchers framing pitches, purists will say, which will be lost. A small sacrifice that will eliminate larger issues. You don’t want that much variance in the execution of the rules of any sport, with the egos of the least-important “participants” taking center stage. A loose application of rules also opens up the possibility of officials tilting games for illicit purposes (not the case with the Foster call, of course). And inconsistent outcomes due to human error is one of the reasons why boxing has seen such a decline. (Knowledge of the impact of head injuries has been just as damaging, thinning the ranks of talent.) Professional basketball’s referee scandal of a few years back occurred because the rules of the game allow for far too much interpretation. That needn’t be the case with baseball.

The human element will be lost, the stalwarts argue, not acknowledging that baseball is not some pastoral pastime but a multibillion dollar industry, and one that can easily afford to ensure its integrity if it weren’t for the lethargy and myopia of its highest ranks.•