THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

It’s not just TSN that does this kind of stupid credentialism.

It’s one of the prejudices that’s still accepted, describing someone by their previous work or hobby to snarkily imply that they’re not qualified, or weird, or not of the right pedigree.

They also do it sometimes to imply that the person came from an unlikely background, but in that case it’s legitimate. 

Snarky: “Bill James, a former security guard at a pork and beans factory, was hired by the Boston Red Sox as an expert on baseball decision-making.”

Non-snarky: “Bill James, a former security guard at a pork and beans factory, is now recognized as an expert on baseball decision-making and was hired by the Boston Red Sox.”

This cheerleader case is snarky.  First, cheerleader isn’t an unlikely background, since university cheerleaders are still university students.  Second, this woman is a lawyer, which makes the cheerleadership even MORE irrelevant.

I have less respect or understanding of the sport and work of cheer leading than tango has but the cheerleader headline is ridiculous for a woman with that educational background, beyond snarky. It’s plain ugly. When well-educated men are hired by baseball organizations I never see there extracurricular college activities in the lede or headline.

But Director of Decision Science is a douchebag job title if Lunhow’s description of the job is right.

What’s interesting is the URL does reference the lawyer angle and not the cheerleading angle:
“astros-new-gm-adds-numbers-cruncher-legal-eagle-to-staff”

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Academics have long used digs like that, for example, pointing out Wallace Stevens’s and Benjamin Lee Whorf’s careers in insurance to snidely denigrate their contributions as poets and linguists, respectively.
Ironically (maybe?), Einstein’s employment at a patent office is invariable mentioned when the theory of relativity is discussed.

Also remember that whoever writes the article doesn’t necessarily write the headline. The cheerleader reference occurs in the last paragraph, and is followed by two sentences detailing her actual qualifications.

This smells of a last minute change made by the editor to drum up page views (see the url as noted by mettle above and that the cheerleader angle is not a theme of the article.)

I think it worked.

Tossing in a provocative headline to drum up page views? Looks like Moneyblog was right, then: http://www.halosheaven.com/2012/1/4/2682571/moneyblog

"Blue Jays hire ex-mail room staff as GM”

http://www.alexanthopoulos.com/

So, read that bio, and you realize that it’s quite impressive how much Alex was able to accomplish in such a short time.  But, a snarky headline like that is intended to bypass all that.

Heck, any time Bill James is referenced as working at some factory as the night watchmen, it’s the exact same thing.

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mettle: fantastic!  After I just finished showing how Nate would have definitely wrote his own headline (you can see it in the URL), mettle notices that the URL and the headline are DIFFERENT!

So, the editor came in, and changed the title (while obviously leaving the URL untouched, which would have required extra effort, and may have broken some links).

There you go.  Huge editor fail at Sporting News.

Someone find out who the editor is, and find out what job he had when he was a teenager, please.

What should be my headline?

Grocery bagger?  Telemarketer?  Process server?  Gardener?

"Former 4th Grade Lunch Monitor Posts 9th comment”

Man, I forgot.  I sold encyclopedias door-to-door for two weeks.  I got one sale, which got them cancelled.  Terrible job (or terrible salesman more likely).

I’m also a former warehouse guy, combined with delivery truck driver, which was kinda cool. I’ve always enjoyed going to new places.

Mine would be: “Team hires former 50-goal scorer”

I was 11 when I did that, btw.

"Massachusetts man who was held back a year in little league regularly comments on an advanced baseball analysis blog”

Garry D. Howard is the editor-in-chief of the Sporting News. When he was hired, the press release was the opposite of the demeaning treatment Ms. Wilka received: It was overly complimentary.

[The announcement] said that “Howard’s hire marks the first time that an African-American will lead a national general sports magazine’s editorial staff,” and quoted Jeff Price, Sporting News president and publisher, declaring “our strong commitment to diversity.” [This passage was later dropped: Lee Ivory was named executive editor of USA Today Baseball Weekly, later Sports Weekly, in 1994. He added the title of publisher in 2000 and left the company in 2007. On the Internet, Rob King and Neal Scarbrough have been each editor-in-chief of espn.com, Scarbrough was additionally general manager and editor-in-chief of AOL Sports, and Leon Carter heads ESPNNewYork.Com.]

http://mije.org/node/1298

Nation hires former cheerleader as leader.

After an acrimonious recount tussle, the world’s last remaining superpower hired George W. Bush, a cheerleader while an undergraduate at Yale College, as its 43rd president.

Mr. Bush is expected to govern with “compassionate conservatism” and to refrain from involving the United States in foreign entanglements, as his predecessor William J. Clinton, did in Bosnia.

George W. Bush will be succeeded as governor of Texas by Rick Perry, a former cheerleader at Texas A&M University.  Mr. Perry also has experience as a door-to-door salesman and Air Force pilot.

Hawerchuk @12 really captures the triviality of the cheerleader reference, I think.