Rather than actually going back to the tape to see if there was any proof that matched the description given by unnamed players, Nelson makes her argument based on some dubious eyewitness accounts and some statistics that show the Jays hit more homers at home last year than they did on the road. Never mind that that the Blue Jays almost have the exact same winning percentage at home (28-27) as they do on the road (30-30) this year despite the usual advantages associated with home-field,** the best stat to look at is homers.
What bothers me most about Nelson's uses of home run numbers to prove her point is that she could have looked at walks or strikeouts or batting average instead, all of which would have given her a larger sample size to work with than home runs and all of which would be expected to correlate more with knowing what type of pitch was coming than the ability to hit a home run.
Think about it: if you knew whether a fastball or a breaking ball was coming, wouldn't it be easier to lay off the junk? If you could then you would get more walks. Well, Nelson reports that the Blue Jays actually had an "abysmal team on-base percentage" in 2010, suggesting Jays batters didn't register many walks.
I also question why the split between home and away is proof of anything. If you are willing to cheat at home, why not cheat on the road, too? I concede that it is likely easier to set something up in your home ballpark but since the allegations are just that a guy sits in center field and throws his arm in the air, there does not seem to be a lot stopping the Jays from doing something similar at other ball parks that also have seats in center field.
Besides Nelson's approach to statistical arguments, the other part of the piece that bothered me was a stylistic nit-pick. Here's my quote of her quote (that she was not present for) of an unnamed but very angry pitcher:
"It's not too [f------] easy to hit home runs when you don't know what's coming!"Why replace the last six letters in the word "fucking" with hyphens and then also put square brackets around the word? It's not like we wouldn't have known f------ was a paraphrase if it weren't for the square brackets. Was the copy editor worried that if the square brackets weren't there people would think that the angry pitcher was stuttering or something? What would six hyphens in a row sound like?
Nelson does the same thing later in the piece when the same angry pitcher yells at Blue Jays slugger Jose Bautista:
"We know what you're doing," he said, ... according to the player and two witnesses. "If you do it again, I'm going to hit you in the [f------] head."Annoying. And I'd just like to note that uttering a threat to cause bodily harm to a person is an offence under s. 264.1 of the Canadian Criminal Code. That is a crime a bit more worthy of investigation than dubitable claims about baseball pitches.
*: Actual blue jays -- i.e. the actual birds -- have a reputation for stealing from other birds' nests, but this was not mentioned in the article which was disappointing to me. I suffer the same disappointment when writers fail to mention how white socks have a reputation for stinking when someone writes an article accusing the White Sox of stinking.
**: Of the 14 teams in the American League, 12 of them have a better record at home right now than they do on the road.
No comments:
Post a Comment