Fire Joe Morgan has already done a number on this bulbous sack of idiocy from Paul Daugherty of the Cincinnati Enquirer, but here is a sample in all it's unspoiled glory.
....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.
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.
You know, it's easy to dismiss Daugherty as another decomposing corpse waving the kids off his lawn with his last ounce of energy before drooling this column into his typewriter, but that can't be possible. Because no one over the age of twelve could find that final sentence to be a crippling rejoinder Daugherty thinks it is. (His rejected closer, apparently, was "Dusty Baker is rubber and Bill James is glue!1!11!")
I fear for the future of the franchise. Seriously, Homer Bailey and Joey Votto for Joe Blanton? It's no wonder Billy Beane is a genius; if people like Daugherty were running big league ballclubs I could be one, too. Of course, people like Daugherty obviously are respected sportswriters for big-market publications apart from all reason, giving hope that no-rate hacks like me could still make it big one day.
Ken Tremendous in FJM comments points out that Daugherty is also of the "global warming is a hoax because it snowed outside ZOMG1!!111!nerds!" school. How unsurprising.
See also Joe Posnanski.
