GatewayRedbirds.com

33anda3rd wrote:
I'd like to see him land at HBO, produce some content for them, maybe do something like 30/30 over there, heck even get him in on the boxing coverage, lord knows boxing panels could use an adjustment toward less-uptight.

Woot

The HBO thing is TV only.

So the blog and podcast stuff could still materialize as something interesting. If HBO pays his bills, maybe he'll start his own thing.

Spider John wrote:Colin Cowherd is leaving, so ESPN Radio will immediately be more listenable than before. I'm sure it will make ESPN better too, but since I never watch it any more I won't notice. OTOH, Fox Sports will immediately get worse, since that seems to be where he's heading.

He did stick his foot in his mouth again today.

http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2015/ ... rstand-it/

Also sounds like Jose Bautista already called him out on it.

I hate to admit it, but if I'm in the car, I'll turn Cowherd on. I genuinely think it's hilarious the way he chooses a position that tons of people also have, and frames it like he's the only one that has it and everyone is saying it's crazy. He's really the worst. That 'everyone is stupid except me' bit many in sports media do can't live on much longer, can it, given the Internet?

I actually think sports radio is going through a change right now. There's enough content out there that you don't have to take calls from Doofus McGoo in San Bernardino anymore. And every angle of an argument is represented somewhere, so a good host has to be genuinely interesting and a good curator.

You can't even find a Cardinals story on ESPN or MLB home page. How much do we have to dominate before someone notices?

We're not dominating

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fanc ... -baseball/

Actually this is the kind of story that fuels jmo and others unhappy with stat nerds.

lukethedrifter wrote:We're not dominating

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fanc ... -baseball/

Actually this is the kind of story that fuels jmo and others unhappy with stat nerds.

It sorta riles this stat nerd.

The St. Louis Cardinals have the best record in baseball...(snip)...They are doing it, however, without a single qualified hitter batting over .300.

Batting average isn’t the best barometer of hitting success — after all, a single is counted the same as a home run — so that isn’t troublesome but the Cardinals rank fifth in the league for OPS (.716) and weighted on-base average (.312), or wOBA, which combines all the different aspects of hitting into one metric, weighting each of them in proportion to their actual run value.

I absolutely hate that. Bring up a stat, in this case AVG, only to say in the next sentence that it's not the best thing to cite. Just go with the best thing, Jesus H [expletive] Christ you could save some time and come across as way smarter if you don't go "well there's this....but it doesn't mean anything so..."

Their overall ERA (2.68) is the best in the league, but that too can be misleading because pitchers can’t control everything on the baseball field...(snip)...This season, St. Louis’ team ERA is lower than its 3.28 FIP and 3.55 xFIP, indicating that its pitching is not fully being reflected in his results. In fact, that too is closer to the fourth or fifth best in baseball.

And that’s why they have a record earned more with luck than skill.

Gonna call [expletive] on homeboy here.
1. Pythag is 62 wins, so lucky? Yeah, by ONE GAME.
2. He's asking the reader to suspend disbelief and assume that defense is playing no part in the Cardinals' success. Everything that happens after the ball leaves the pitchers hand is luck. Just plain stupid. They have a defensive legend at C, the best defensive RF in baseball, a solid CF and SS and probably the best fielding pitching staff in baseball. That's part of why their ERA is better than their FIP, not just blind luck.
3. Even if their FIP is worse than their ERA, it's still the best goddamn FIP in baseball so let's go ahead and say that they have a great pitching staff.

Citing Base Runs, ugh, I get it, it's a fancy new toy, but it misses something important. It does not allow for the fact that sequencing your batting order properly can lead to runs and that the manager has some impact there. Think of it like this, you have a team that includes, say, Bryce Harper and Joe Panik. Joe Panik gets on a base a ton. Bryce Harper hits a lot of bombs. So of course you hit Panik in front of Harper, right? That you are smart enough to do that leads to runs. Base Runs assumes that all events happen independent of when they happen, in a vacuum, and makes them all neutral. But you can't do that, because the manager knows his squad and sequences them properly in a lot of cases. Saying Panik scoring on a Harper bomb (or any high-OBP guy hitting in front of a power bat) doesn't count as much is another thing I'll call BS on because the manager in that situation knows that the OBP guy is gonna get on for the power guy to drive him in. Acting like that isn't part of the game and needs neutralized is ignorant.

You can neutralize events for WAR. Harper can't control Panik getting on in front of him. So Harper is just credited for hitting a bomb. But you can't discredit the team scoring two runs on a Harper bomb when the manager knows that hitting Panik ahead of Harper will lead to more runs. I didn't know FanGraphs had a BaseRuns standings board until reading this link above and linking to that page. I think it's kind of blind for them to have it, really disappointed.

This is the best run prevention performance by a team in the history of baseball according to ERA+. Luck being involved with extreme outliers should be a given. That article is a terrible angle on what we're seeing.

The real anomaly is Cardinal Baseball® not finishing first every year.

someone email 33s response to the writer