THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

FJM: group of very funny comedy writers fisking articles in a self-consciously over-the-top manner in order to 1)highlight the folly of those who consistently & outwardly spurn reason & evidence and 2)create hilarity.

Murray Chass: a hack member of the aforementioned anti-reason class with absolutely no sense of humor who pens one-sided hatchet jobs to advance his agenda of personal animus.

It’s a blog and Chass has long been put out to pasture by NYT, so I guess one can just read this hatchet job as another interweb screed. But I find something disturbing about a former journalist being given attention for such blatant axe grinding. Especially since his previous hit and run on Stan Musial (calling him a racist) proved to be total bullshit. Beyond the fact that he’s obviously distorting the full character of a man, there’s a decent chance that some of his stories here simply aren’t true.

Tango, I remember you trying to engage Chass with an open letter. Did he ever take you up on it and show a genuine open-mindedness and receptiveness to evidence that contradicts his intuitions?

Here’s the FJM archive on Murray:
http://www.firejoemorgan.com/search/label/murray%20chass

I have corresponded a few times with Chass, but he has never asked me about sabermetrics.

I agree with Chass more than I don’t in regards to Bobby V.

The guy seems fake as hell. Everyone is the best player. Everyone gets praise showered upon them, except the managers of course. They’re always wrong, especially when BV is looking for a job.

I always got the feeling that BV, from the booth, was kissing all of the players’ butts and pointing out how wrong the managers were, as if every broadcast were an audtition/interview for a managerial job.

“For Valentine, who espoused the statistical principles of Bill James and sabermetrics years before they became fashionable, it was a chance to flex his strategic muscles in front of a bright staff.”

He’s sabermetric-based? BV? The guy that says some of the dumbest stuff one will ever hear in a broadcast? I’d like to here more about his sabermetric foundation. His talk if too much bunt em over, get em over, etc.

I don’t like BV, which is rare, because I at least tolerate Joe Morgan for all of the outstanding things he did on the field. My impression is that BV is fake. All the smiling, all the praise on everybody for everything (except the managers), everyone is a great player, everyone is doing wonderful things, and on and on.

I think Alou and McRae are basically saying something important, in the nicest possible manner.

Followup:

http://www.murraychass.com/?p=4066

My favorite e-mail came from a former major league manager, whom I will not identify any more than I have used last names of other readers.

“A great article, he said, “Thanks for writing it. It sure hit my ‘home page.’ I’ve had that opinion for a number of years. Saw some of the traits when I was working and he hasn’t done anything to change my opinion of him. Been retired for 15 years and still feel the same way.”

MLB managers last managed between 1994 and 1997

Extra tidbit: not only did Kevin Kennedy last manage exactly 15 years ago, but he was the Rangers manager directly following Bobby V.

Which is more likely?

1)Valentine is a jerk with no integrity and a complete phony that totally fooled the owners/GMs of the Mets, Rangers, Red Sox, Chiba Lotte Marines (twice!), ESPN, the 100,000 Japanese fans who signed a petition on his behalf, the mayor of Stamford CT who appointed Bobby V the Director of Health & Public Safety (he donated his salary to charity), and the majority of sports writers with whom he worked despite the sometimes adversarial nature of their business (the NJ Sportswriters Assc named him “The Sports Humanitarian of The Year” in 2001)…

OR

2)Valentine is generally a good person with excellent character who deals with most people with integrity and charity, but whose outsized and imposing personality and relatively minor personality defects (some pettiness, a short temper) have rubbed a handful of people the wrong way and gotten them pissed off at him?

The question answers itself and leads one to believe that Murray Chass is a small-minded hack who betrays a pettiness that outruns Valentine’s by a comfortable margin.

I don’t like to characterize anything in a binary fashion and I don’t like to pass judgment on someone’s work that I am not intimately familiar with, however…

From the half dozen things I have read by Chass, I would assign zero credibility to anything he writes.

His writing is borderline bizarre. His recent piece on Tony LaRussa was mind-boggling.