I have a post on whether Cliff Floyd was a winner. Back in my bicycle delivery days, a guy I worked with was neighbors with Cliff Floyd when he signed with the Expos. He liked to talk about the car Floyd bought with his signing bonus. Around this time (1992 or so) it was still an open question as to what kind of career Floyd would have, so it’s nice to see that Cliff has more or less done well for himself and his family.
But I don’t think it’s fair to any player to put the entire onus on winning baseball games on one player, particularly a good but not great player like Cliff Floyd. Cliff does what he does and sometimes his teams win and sometimes they don’t. I mean sure things like leadership and being a role model for younger players are important, but given a choice between that stuff and hitting, fielding and pitching, I’ll take the skills all day. Ultimately, those who excel at the jobs they do tend to be respected by others who do the same job anyway. Whatever you’d like to say about Gary Sheffield’s personality, a guy who hits baseballs for a living can’t help but show admiration for his skills.
It is my understanding that guys like Barry Bonds and Albert Belle were far better liked in the clubhouse then they were in the sports sections of the local papers and I think that’s what it comes down to. Whatever their personality flaws, they got the job done and I think that’s what players look for most in a teammate. When healthy, Floyd has tended to get the job done more often than not.
One of the things that’s special about playing England in soccer is that you get to play a very good team whose press you can actually understand. In this particularly instance, a sans Landon Donovan U.S. team got easily handled 2-0 in New Wembley. In truth the game wasn’t as close as that scoreline. As a result, the performance of the U.S. team did not exactly earn ravereviews from across the pond. Now granted the English press these days tend to throw compliments around like manhole covers to the English team, so they had to come up with a reason to explain away an otherwise impressive performance from them. It’s tough to say though that they’re not exactly wrong.
My personal impression is that U.S. Soccer is essentially satisfied with where it is in the grand scheme of things: the folks in charge make a comfortable living doing what they do and have no real impetus to make wholesale changes even if they knew where to start.
The U.S. plays Spain in seven days, and Spain is by most accounts a better team than England. On Big Soccer, there’s a thread asking about what to do about this game. I’m at a loss but with my baseball background I’m guessing maybe we can break out the lallygaggers speech:
Now it’s easy to jump all over someone when they say something that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and sometimes sensible people spout nonsense. I myself once argued that Major League pitchers have very little difference between them on balls in play. Ah foolish youth.
Anyhow, his reasoning is what bothers me. I mean far be it from me to get in the way of a good mad on over steroids, but the arbitrary way I’m sensing folks want to start applying “adjustments” befuddles me. First of all, if we’re going to essentially ban all power hitters from the Hall of Fame from the “steroid era”, shouldn’t we first decide when that era started and ended? 1985? 1990? 1995? 1961? In high school, the kid in the locker next to mine talked about taking steroids (or wanting to take steroids, I’m a little fuzzy) and this was back to the mid and late 80s. I mean if a wrestler in a Catholic high school was looking to juice up, how are we so sure that George Bell and Andre Dawson and Jim Presley and the rest of the feared power hitters of the 80s weren’t roided up to the gills? I mean steroids as a PED goes all the way back to the 1950s. Do we deduct Mantle’s power numbers from being from the “steroid era?” Could Johnny Mize have been the first juicer (have you seen pictures of him, he was HUUUGGGE) and that explains the writers inexplicably failing to elect him?
That sounds like a silly argument, but then I’m responding to an argument about whether or not the greatest hitting catcher ever (by a landslide) is a Hall of Famer.
It’s Noon on May 23rd and it’s 60 degrees in Phoenix, Arizona. Considering that most pool temperatures were 20 degrees higher than that a few days ago…
Well Fulham won their final game of the season to complete a pretty remarkable escape from relegation. Reading and Birmingham were not so lucky and will be playing in the minors next year.
On the more inspiring side of the coin, perennial yo-yo club West Bromwich Albion won the league below the Premiership and Stoke City finished second which is essentially the same as finishing first in that division. Both will earn the right to attempt to dodge relegation from the Premiership next year. Of the four remaining clubs battling it out in the playoffs, the most interesting is Hull City, the only one of the of the possible promotees to never have played in England’s top flight. That their home jersey looks like a gigantic yield sign probably explains why. That it’s an improvement on these from years past:
is amazing. I’ll give you three guesses as to what their nickname is.
The Premiership side with by far the most American players is in the process of possibly completing a monumental dodge of relegation. After a 2-0 win against Birmingham, Fulham finds themselves out of the bottom three relegation spots for the first time since the very beginning of the season. They still have one more game and could still go down, but this relegation nonsense sure makes for a lot more exciting games for the worst teams in the league than we see in September in MLB.
I mean the Marlins should be threatened with relegation purely out of principle if nothing else, but even ignoring that, this crap is thrilling. I don’t think Man Utd and Chelsea battling for the Championship is this exciting. I was talking to my dad about it the other day, and I theorized that maybe getting to keep what you thought you were going to lose is more exciting than winning something you’ve already won before (recently). Nothing seems to get right down to the heart of the matter better than threatening your team with becoming a minor league team if you don’t play better.
There are problems with promotion and relegation, of course, and the chances of it being implemented are roughly the same as Buzz Bissinger sending Will Leitch a Christmas Card this year, but I like it anyway. Besides, the Toledo Mudhens deserve at least one year in the Majors after all of these years.
I have a new post up on Baseball Digest Daily about the verbal tirade Buzz Bissinger launched against Deadspin’s Will Leitch on Bob Costas’ HBO navel gavzing exercise the other night.
Here’s a short post on BBDD about Brian Bannister and how a statistical phenomenon could be affected by knowledge of the phenomenon by one of the actors.
What’s funny is, Reyes isn’t always this easy to hit.
Nothing takes me back to my twenties than guys spitting blood in a bar at 2:30 in the morning. Methinks that today Big Al will be hurting more from last night’s libations than the punch.
I guess if I were to suggest a course of action for the statistical community, a soccer version of Bill James “win shares” might be the best idea. This is interesting because I’m not all that enamored of win shares in baseball; it’s interesting but I don’t think any significant improvement on the sorts of things already being done, particularly for modern players.
But for soccer, I think it’s the exact right approach. Figure out the quality of the team the player plays for, and then apportion out credit/blame to individual players based on those results. The difficulty, I think, is that intuitively I believe soccer is a multiplicative sport and not an additive one. That is, if one team has two players rated at 10 and 2 and the other has players rated at 5 and 5, the second team wins 25 to 20 rather than losing 12 to 10.
Granted I can’t prove that, which again is another problem. For the Billy Beanes of the world looking to crossover, they have a very difficult task ahead of them. The good news is that success may prove to bring monumental rewards, because they’d be one of the few people on the planet who would possess that knowledge.
