Last night I went to the Met game. My ticket was waiting for me at my PO box at Columbus Circle Station. That’s on the way. I even had time to stop for quick dinner, sadly it was at Wendy’s. Not that Wendy’s is bad, at least on the fast food curve. You now order on a computer kiosk. I like that, I can easily order things exactly the way I like. They didn’t prepare it correctly, the forgot the honey mustard on my spicy chicken. I’m going again on Friday. I’ll leave earlier and have time for a decent dinner. My internal subway guide was not as good as the one provided by Google. I would have taken the D or 1 to 42nd Street and switched to the 7. Google set me straight. I walked over to 7th avenue and got on the N, and took it to Queensboro Plaza to catch the 7. Why should I go south to head back north? It was far fewer stops.
We never sit in the seats that Alan buys. I get there earlier than him and sit on the top level but low, right behind the plate. If Alan is by himself he sits high up. He doesn’t care much about his view of the game, he doesn’t like having people around him. He thinks about it as having room, but of course it doesn’t give you any more personal space if there is no one in the row in front of you. It’s just the way his mind processes things; it’s different than mine.
My body has continued in its process of falling apart. Compensating for the aches and pains in my joints has led to damage to the muscle in my lower back. It hurt like hell. I chose my seat as the one that required the least amount of walking and stairs. I never left it during the game. It hurt a lot.
The game promised to be a pitching duel, it was. The Mets scored in the top of the first and then … nothing. Not even much of a threat. Wheeler pitched six shutout innings, got in trouble in the 7th; then looked like he got out of it when there was soft hit fly to left. If found the magic spot and fell in. That let the Giants tie up the game. Statcast says there was only a 9% chance it would be a hit. It was objectively bad luck.
I felt bad for Wheeler as it cost him the Win. He left the game after 7. The score remained 1-1 through 9 innings, then 10, then 11. Alan kept threatening to leave. Then in the 12th the Jints threatened to score, the Mets pitcher Bashlor seemed to get out of it when with two outs there was a pop-up to left. No, the same thing didn’t happen. This time the Mets rookie shortstop Rosario and their just shifted from first base to left fielder Smith collided and dropped the ball. Before that there was an errant pickoff throw that led to a runner advancing to scoring position. The Mets lost 2-1. It was very Mets.
I still had fun, the people in front of us where young men and women who took the game seriously enough to keep score. They understood the game, made intelligent comments, and could still laugh at the Mets’ inadequacies. Even better they laughed at my jokes. When Bashlor threw over to second the most vocal of the people in front of us said it was a daylight play. I said, “this game is going to be played until daylight.”
I said before that Alan’s mind works differently than mine. That helped shape the rest of what I’m going to write about, the way I understand, and have always understood baseball. We were discussing deGrom’s chances of winning the Cy Young award. From the chatter, I suspect that he is now the favorite despite his record being only 7-5. Alan thought the fact that he won his last few games and no longer has a losing record makes a big difference. Now he might, that’s a big topic of debate. That is old school thinking but the awards voters might be old school. Statheads and that now includes the people running every major league team, no longer judge a pitcher by won-loss record or a hitter by RBIs. Those stats involve too much not under the players control.
I have always been new school. When I first learned baseball I didn’t understand how pitchers’ win should be a thing. It has so much to do with how many runs the team scores for him. Now it’s even worse as starters pitch fewer innings and the relief pitchers can blow games that the starter left while winning. The pitchers coming in after deGrom have been terrible, their ERA is over 7.00.
RBIs depend on how many me are on base for a hitter. Why should that be the most important stat? Yet historically it was for may people. My father taught me about baseball and I’d argue with him. I thought those stats made no sense. I thought Batting Average was vastly overrated and always cared more about slugging percentage .What I didn’t know is how much walking was a skill of the hitter, not just the lack of skill of the pitcher. Once I discovered that On Base Percentage became another lodestone for me. I became a three true outcomes guy. Home Runs, strikeouts, and walks were the things under a batter’s control. There was no luck with fielding involved.
Thanks to people like Bill James and the sabermetricians that came after him, things changed. My heterodox views became the norm. I’m still resistant to fielding analysis, as the different methods often disagree with each other. With Statcast following the path of every ball that should change. Unfortunately the complete stats are not publicly available. The Major League teams pay to keep them exclusive.
Now all other baseball stats have been subsumed by WAR, Wins Above Replacement. it combines everything into one number to compare any player to the typical AAA call-up. It allows people to compare pitchers with hitters and takes fielding into account. I have doubts about the fielding, and there are two different methods of calculating pitching WAR, but they are the best stats out there. You need a reason to put your judgement ahead of WAR. You are never again going to have the ridiculous situation where Bob Welch won the 1990 Cy Young Award even though he gave up a run a game more than Roger Clemens while playing in a far more pitcher friendly park. Welch got incredible run support that year and won 27 games. Every baseball analyst was disgusted by his winning the Cy Young. He wasn’t on the top 10 in WAR. Alan’s response is, “but he won 27 games.” He can’t get the tradition out of his head.
This is as much or even more about me than it is about baseball. The foundation of my worldview is empiric and analytic. I am built to accept what FiveThirtyEight.com has to offer. Hunches and gut feeling are a great place to start an analysis but they are a terrible place to conclude it. My gut tells me that most people don’t feel the same way. I would love an objective way to determine if it is true.
Speaking of gut feelings, I’m hungry. I’m going to make breakfast. Not quite a gut feeling but I have been sleeping or sitting on a heating pad much of the time since I got home and my back is improving. It still hurts but it’s not that sharp pain that makes movement extremely difficult, just somewhat difficult. I would like to go out and see Cole Quest and the City Pickers tonight but I’m going to play it by ear, or should I say by back?
Wise Madness 