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"Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever."
-Lance Armstrong-
"Hard work beats talent everytime."
-Tony Dungy-
"If you can see yourself doing something you can achieve it." Dave Goggins
"I would rather leave it all out there then not go out there at all." Dave Goggins(Ultramarathon runner)
Or maybe they won't win because they dump millions of dollars on the likes of Carl Pavano, Kevin Brown and an ancient Roger Clemens, but then they suddenly get stingy and pull out of the bidding wars for Johan Santana.
I'm a Yankees fan, but the last 6-7 years have been embarassing. It's tough to pull for your team when you look out on the field and see Gary Sheffield, Johnny Damon, Jason Giambi and ARod. My sympathies have been tempered quite a bit recently!
Well, to be fair, the Red Sox won't win the Wrold Series either.
(and I'm going to put a moratorium on stupid Yankees-Red Sox trash talk. You have to be a complete saber-nerd or know exactly what you're talking about for me to not delete the post.)
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Quoth David Banner: "Like a pimp"
It's not a beer belly. It's a gas tank for a sex machine.
(I'll run through my stats and stuff tonight after the MU game)
Quote:
The best baseball managing is done by the seat of your pants, using good, old-fashioned, pre-sabermetric logic. That's another reason to like Dusty Baker. (Beyond his knowledge of single-malt Scotches and Van Morrison lyrics, which is merely astounding and downright Renaissance.) If Baker manages by a book, it's one inside his head, not one written by Bill James.
The other day, the Reds manager decided he wanted Joey Votto and Adam Dunn to swing their bats more. "I don't like called third strikes," Baker said.
Can we get an Amen?
It always amuses when fans defend heart-of-the-order hitters by pointing to their on-base percentage. Wow, look at all those walks.
Unless they're intentional walks, or the big boppers are being pitched around, walks aren't what you want from players hitting third through sixth. You want them up there smart-hacking.
As Baker said: "(Votto) needs to swing more. I'd like to see him more aggressive."
By-the-book managing is for men who aren't confident in their ability to read players and situations. It's for managers who don't know their players' personalities. It's what you do so you can say later, after it backfires: "Don't blame me. I went by the book."
The best thing about Baker is that from all accounts, it's important to him to know his players individually: what jazzes them, what scares them, the situations that best suit their talents and temperaments. Contrary to the notions of the seamheads and stat freaks, players are not numbers.
"Managing" means exactly what it says: the ability to manage people. How Baker runs a game strategically is far less important than what he is able to pull from his employees, 162 times a summer.
Anyone with a laptop can locate the Web site baseball- reference.com and sound like an expert. Anyone with a library card can pick up one of James' mind-numbing baseball "abstracts," in which the author makes the game sound like a first cousin to biomechanical engineering.
It ain't that scientific.
The NFL does the same thing, in a different fashion. To convince you that pro football is actually a 17-week MENSA convention, The League whips out its 800-page playbooks and offers up oh-so-serious coaches who work 20 hours a day and act as if their jobs involve brain surgery and a red telephone.
Possibly, it's less complex. Block. Tackle. Win.
Baseball's cerebral side involves numbers. While I believe in baseball-card wisdom - you are who the back of your card says you are - it's just a little piece of the whole. When some of us (OK, me mostly) advocated dealing, say, Votto and Homer Bailey for Oakland pitcher Joe Blanton, the Statboys came out flame-throwing numbers:
Blanton's a creation of his spacious home ballpark! Look at his ERA, home and away! Blanton's a flyball pitcher! Check out his ratio of groundballs to flies!
If you shot back that Blanton has won 42 times in the last three years - and that he went 7-5 at home last year and 7-5 on the road - if you suggested that no number matters but Games Won, you were dismissed as an illiterate.
(Actually, maybe Blanton won as many on the road as at home, even with a much higher road ERA, because Oakland's hitters worked under the same conditions as their pitcher. Allow more runs, score more runs. And factually, flyball man Blanton gave up only 16 home runs in 230 innings last year. But never mind.)
Numbers are fun to look at but dangerous to dwell on. Baker understands this. If Dunn walks 30 fewer times this year, he'll drive in 15 more runs. His on-base percentage will dip. Oh, no.
If Votto takes fewer first-pitch strikes, his run production will improve.
And so on. Here's a stat: Wins as manager: Dusty Baker, 1,162; Bill James, 0
__________________
Quoth David Banner: "Like a pimp"
It's not a beer belly. It's a gas tank for a sex machine.
This is why the yankees will not win a World Series
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