Annoying thing No. 37

It'll list his height, just not his stats.

 

People need to go back to talking about "fielding" if they're going to talk baseball. Screw "defense" -- that's for football and basketball.

 

Isn't it enough that we've got an entire thread devoted to Uggla's poor play, Zeke? Must we keep raking him?

He tries, Zeke. Let him be.

 

Does he understand that's subjective?

 

Tell him it might seem like his kid is a good fielder, but until he can produce Johnny's expected runs cost/saved relative to the average fielder number, you ain't putting it in the agate page.

http://stat.wharton.upenn.edu/~stjensen/research/safe.html

 

I got the stupidest e-mail from a parent the other day. A game went 6 innings, I wrote "Starter Stephens lasted five innings and allowed 4 runs" and the parent goes "Starter Stephens was relieved by Johnny Jerkoff in the 6th inning". I wrote her back and said that I didn't say that SS lasted all game. I forget the rest, I'm kinda drunk.

 

We had 47 swim team photos that the swim club wanted us to put in the paper last year (not, 47, obviously, but a number too high to print even over a number of issues). So we printed the two or three youngest age groups in the paper and directed people to the web site for the rest (including the ones we already ran since the ones on the web were in color while the print ed was B&W that day).

Not good enough, of course. Why? Because "a lot of the grandparents don't have the Internet." So print off a copy of the page and give it to your technologically-impaired grandparents and leave me alone.

My dad, who's 63, knows more about computers and the Internet than I do, so age is no excuse for not being able to check your grandkids' pics on the website.

 

Long ago, in a far off land, a mom blistered me in a voice mail. "How dare you call my daughter a losing pitcher?"

Mom continued with, in this order, how well her daughter threw and how hard she worked and how devastated she was at being called such a bad thing and, of course, how bad the umpire was.

 

I've had a parent get upset at me that I wrote that his son, the pitcher, was the hard-luck loser after the kid pitched a complete game and lost 1-0, giving up the run on three hits with a walk and nine strikeouts.

 

Actually, I think a note from Buckweaver would suffice just as well.

 

Lady, she wasn't just A losing pitcher. She was THE losing pitcher....

 

I'm not sure how much a lot of people understand the "objective thing." They only talk about it when it's about politics and Sean Hannity tells them to.

That said, I couldn't help thinking: If this is only Annoying Thing No. 37, man, you must have gotten into the business like last Tuesday.