My hatred of the White Sox... continued

One of the great things about blogs is that they make for great conversation starters. Every time I write something here, I'll inevitably see someone in the next day or two start up a dialogue with me about something I write, and often, it's good for a decent debate or two.

Never is this more true than when I write about sports. It's tough for me, because I want to have the occasional deep analysis of issues in baseball and basketball, but at the same time I don't want all the non-sports fanatics (or the football-only fans) to give up on reading this thing. So here's what I'll do. If you don't care for baseball, feel free to stop reading; I'll write more next week, and you can come back then (on second thought, the last few paragraphs might be mildly interesting... perhaps you could skim those). But if you'd like, continue onward. In response to certain comments posted here earlier tonight, I'd like to take this opportunity to expand upon my White Sox hatred.

Nothing makes me happier than sitting down at my computer to see the words "starkiespree: i just raped your blog" waiting for me in my away messages. There's nothing more fun than a good old fashioned argument with the one and only Lord Starkweather about our national pastime. Normally I would just respond to his comments with a witty little retort in a comment of my own, but since no one ever bothers to read the comments because they're full of inane drivel (not to insult anyone, I'm as guilty as anyone else), I'm writing a whole new entry. Besides, this is an issue that I know a lot about, so I wouldn't mind going into more detail on it. Let's walk through this debate one step at a time.

"Evans you have such a limited knowledge of baseball and I have no idea how they made you NL beat writer or whatever."

Always fun to kick things off with a personal attack. They work better when they're true though.

"Do you even comprehend how much more valuable Podsednik is than Carlos Lee? Wow. We are talking about the best basestealer in the game vs. someone who wouldn't even be in my top ten outfielders (because I know you are going to ask who- Manny, Andruw Jones, Ichiro, Sheff, Vlad, Jason Bay, Cabrera, Abreu, Burrell, Giles (in no particular order)- and I'm sure I left out at least 5 more)."

First of all, Scott Podsednik is clearly not a more valuable player than Carlos Lee. Podsednik is an overrated baserunner, a powerless hitter, and generally a misunderstood player. Lee is a dependable 30-home run slugger, who can carry the heart of an order.

"Best basestealer in the game" is quite a bold assertion about Podsednik -- in fact, it's pretty much just wrong. Podsednik only stole 59 bases because Ozzie ran him into the ground (and not just Scotty Pods... he also abused the steal signal with Pablo Ozuna and Juan Uribe). Podsednik led the majors in times caught stealing, and it wasn't close. He was thrown out 23 times, laughing in the faces of his nearest competitors with 17.

Using a nifty little sabermetric tool called the Run Expectancy Matrix, one can actually calculate the risk-reward ratio associated with an attempted steal. If you want to see the actual matrix, Google will do the trick, but if not, it's easy to explain. Basically, every situation you can come across in an inning (number of outs, locations of baserunners), there is an average number of runs a team can expect to score. Using this data, you can determine just how useful a stolen base is.

Now, a new matrix gets published every year, so the numbers fluctuate, but generally, if a runner can steal bases at a rate of about 75% success, then he is an effective base stealer. If he's above 75, he is causing his team to score more runs; if he is below, he's causing them to score fewer.

Which leads us to an astonishing truth: Scott Podsednik, by stealing 71.9% of the bases he attempts to steal, is not only not the game's best basestealer, he is a BAD one. He is actually hurting his team with his baserunning. I kid you not.

(If you're looking for the real best basestealer in baseball, I'd recommend sticking close to home. Your buddy Jose Reyes ain't bad.)

So his "speed" is a detriment, and his offense is fairly mediocre to boot. He barely brought his OPS up to .700 this season, but he's still well below the league average of .750. He hit zero home runs this season (fewer than Jason Schmidt, Mike Hampton, and Jeff Suppan, just to name a few), and his slugging percentage was lower than his on-base. That means he was better at walking than at hitting anything other than a single (and he wasn't even that good at walking either). We may very well be talking about the least powerful hitter in baseball.

Podsednik's defense was good, but by no means outstanding. I'm sure there were several better AL left fielders this season -- Coco Crisp and Carl Crawford are two names that come to mind. All in all, you're looking at a mediocre baseball player who ends up being incredibly overhyped as a result of being misused by his manager. Someday, Ozzie will realize that it's Paul Konerko and Jermaine Dye who carry his offense, and not Podsednik.

"Lee isn't in the top FIFTY in OPS either. For someone whose only worth is to be a slugger that is pretty bad. I won't even talk about how much better Podsednik's defense is. Sorry to say, but it seems like you are just being a typical superficial analyst and focusing on the gaudy HR and RBI stats and not looking at more specifics. Right now, I am going to go look up win shares and see how Lee compares."

I don't know why you insist on bringing OPS or Win Shares into this argument. Podsednik's OPS was a miserable .700, whereas Lee topped the .800 mark for the fourth year in a row, finishing this season at .811. I don't care how Lee compares to the rest of baseball; we're talking about trading him for Scott Podsednik, and Podsednik's a sub-par hitter.

I couldn't possibly care less about RBI totals (and you're lucky, because if I did, I'd be going crazy over Scotty's astounding total of 25). But my focus on home runs has nothing to do with superficiality. Statisticians like Bill James, when they try to calculate figures like Win Shares, try to quantify the value of each individual contribution to an offense, and the home run is generally considered four to five times more powerful than the stolen base. The fact of the matter is, when a player goes an entire regular season without hitting a home run, he's pathetic.

And if you really must look at Win Shares, then I suppose you could go ahead and compare Podsednik's total of 12 to Lee's 24. I don't think that'll help your argument.

" There are 9 outfielders (yessss Floyd) in the NL alone with more win shares than Lee, including Brady Clark, his teammate."

Wonderful. Again, it's irrelevant; of those nine, none of them have been traded for Carlos Lee. And if you're interested, you could browse the list of AL leaders in win shares. If you have the attention span to keep scrolling down, you might eventually find Pods in a tie for 103rd. But hey... among just outfielders, that tie is for an impressive 29th place.

I've heard every argument in the book about how Scott Podsednik wins games in Chicago in ways that the sabermetricians can't measure. But if you ask me, they're all bullshit. The fact of the matter is, the White Sox won in 2005 thanks to their pitching. Mark Buehrle, Jon Garland, Freddy Garcia, Jose Contreras, and Brandon McCarthy were ridiculous this season. The credit doesn't go to the offense. In fact, the team finished ninth in the American League in runs scored. (In 2004, when their left fielder was some guy named Lee, they were third, behind only the Red Sox and Yankees.)

I apologize for going so far overboard just to respond to one silly little Blogger comment. But I just couldn't help myself. If there's one thing I know far too well for my own good, it's baseball; I might as well show off every now and then.

Come to think of it, I kinda like this style of blogging. Having an actual topic, and going into it with a bit of depth, seems a lot more interesting to me than simply wandering aimlessly through a pile of topics that all somehow connect to my life in some random way.

Perhaps there will be more of these to come in the near future. I haven't decided on anything for sure yet, but if I do decide to keep writing entries like this, here are a few potential topics:

-Why I absolutely despise Jerry Kilgore
-Why my opinion of Tim Kaine isn't exactly phenomenal either, although he's still the lesser of two evils
-Why I think there's a glimmer of hope for the Celtics this season
-Why I think there's nothing of the sort for the Red Sox in 2006, however
-Why I am absolutely sick of the fixation that college students (and applicants) have on the Ivy League

In addition to these, I have a few ideas for book/movie/music reviews in mind. Feel free to sound off on what you'd like to see next. I'd love to have some input from the people who actually read this blog, because I don't want to bore you all. (Offend you, occasionally... but bore you? Never.)