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Colin Cowherd offered these salient rants against the baseball fan culture today:
1.) Steroids have rendered statistics meaningless.
2.) People who quote baseball statistics such as WHIP (which he named specifically) are nerds. I could actually hear him frothing at the mouth and he said this.
3.) Baseball statistics have always been meaningless, and "gamers," "clutch," and "hustle" are what matters.
4.) He couldn't tell you what Jeter's on base percentage is -- the sarcasm was dripping from his tone and burning holes in my car radio, kind of like the critter in Alien -- but he knows that he's a "gamer."
I'm sure every fantasy baseball afficionado was frantically looking for a way to change the station. I cut off a mom driving her two kids to school and nearly ran over a prison work gang, I was so eager to switch to any other station. Cowherd hates fantasy baseball and its fans. This means he hates you. But more importantly, his outmoded way of thinking is exactly the opposite of the current trend in baseball. Statistics are now MORE important than ever. It's the "gamer" mentality that's getting Bill Bavasi and eventually Ned Colletti and Brian Sabean fired, and a focus on objective measures of performance that's allowing Theo Epstein and Billy Beane to stay ahead of the curve.
As a fantasy baseball owner, if you buy into hype or "gamers," you're going to get demolished. Period. End of story. Why? Because baseball, with so many at-bats and so many repeated situations, is a numbers game. If you try to deny that, you're just wrong. And when you think you see a "gamer" pattern emerge (RBIs in late-inning situations, for example) it's almost always the result of a small sample size. Over time, players tend to basicall do what they've always done, assuming that they're in their prime years and not still ascending or descending. Here's what steroids have actually done: make baseball less predictable for stat-heads. You never know when a Gary Matthews, Jr. is going to come out of nowhere and demolish his career norms. But, by and large, it's all about the numbers. And don't you forget it!
I'm really surprised that Cowherd didn't mention that champion of grit, David Eckstein.
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