Postlude to a facebook Message

Wyatt’s reply:

Just be glad you’re being broken in “slowly.” If you were watching this game on the World’s Greatest Network, Hawk would be informing you of all types of information you would be surprised to learn.

Georgy Handsome always wins.

He is the straw that stirs this blog’s drink.

So I just sent a message to Wyatt which included the following:

“I think during the summer, I get numb to bad baseball commentary because I watch so much ball through media where that sort of chitchat is common. But then I just spent the last month and a half just reading box scores and reading BP and like-minded news sites, and I had forgotten how bad some commentary could be. I learned this while watching the White Sox/Twins just now, as they said silly things about how Jon Danks, since he was young, could probably throw about 3.8 million pitches tonight on 3 days rest. Harold Reynolds also talked about how he always liked hitting 9^th because “you could do a lot of things” because the 1 and 2 hitters were up next – apparently this gave you license to go willy nilly on the bases.”

[end quote from my message to Wyatt]

When you think about it, White Sox-Twins is just about the perfect storm for bad commentary.  Why?  Thanks for asking.  The Twins have been ridiculously successful this decade by being really, really good at drafting and development (I’m counting the Rule V pick of Johan Santana as a D and D success).  That’s basically the entirety of why they have been great.  Oh, and because Brian Sabean had a fever and the only prescription was more AJ Pierzynski, even at the cost of Francisco Liriano, Boof Bonser, and Joe Nathan.  However, the mainstream media likes to make them a smallball story.  Sure, they don’t hit very many home runs, I won’t dispute that, but they have had really, really good pitching and defense during their success.  Having Joe Mauer and Justin Morneau in the middle of the lineup recently has helped, too.  But the Twins have won in spite of their Nick Punto/Christian Guzman-pre-LASIK/Luis Rivas/Carlos Gomez/Jason Tyner-@DH-occasionally jones, not because of it.

On the other hand, the White Sox of recent vintage have hit a lot of home runs (actually, it seems like the White Sox of every vintage have hit a lot of home runs, but I’m speaking especially of their recent renaissance years).  In reality, they’ve been just about the typical Weaver Ball team – pitching, defense, and the three run home run.  This year has been less about defense (23rd in the Majors in defensive efficiency, the percentage of balls in play converted into outs), so it’s even more true that this Sox team plays a style of game that many oldtimey media types do not find aesthetically pleasing.  Therefore, they make team quality judgments about it.  Obviously, people who hit home runs are lazy and don’t understand “the way the game was meant to be played.”  Actually, a guy I live next to just came in and said something to the effect of “all the White Sox do is hit home runs.”  I actually had to convince him that the team that allowed 15 fewer runs than the Twins this season was actually pretty good at pitching.

All this to say…I mean, there is a lot of room for error tonight based on surfacy player/team value judgments.

If I get some time soon, I’d like to post on the guys who would win my awards, provided I got a vote.  As it is, I’ll have to settle for voting in the Internet Baseball Awards, I guess.