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Yeah, I thought that was unfortunate as well. But you really have to give the piece credit for encapsulating the scope of James’ journey, from night watchmen to valued member of the Red Sox front office. Pretty amazing.
I guess they just needed 60 Minutes to tell them it was ok to crawl out from under their desks...the bombing is over.
Costas must be hanging around with Keith & Clyde too much...waaay overboard with the Lilliputian Formula 16®
That's what I thought. Not that it was great to see him, but that he was a guy who could convince people to take a look.
I thought it was a shame they didn't portray more of the fan in James. I think they were getting to it at the end but I'd guess they edited James' humble comments down a bit. Anyway, my wife really enjoyed it and thought it (James') was a great story.
James' answer: There are guys here who understand that stuff more than me.
The answer you know he wanted to give: It's amazin' how no one ever talks about the great chemistry on a losing team.
I disagree, Craig. Bill has always admitted that chemistry is important, even if he has trouble quantifying it. And I find that part of him kind of endearing, that he is willing to admit what he doesn't know. I think what yoou are referring to is the "proven veteran" thing, which is a different kind of question. For instance, he just wastes Dick Allen, despite his gaudy numbers.
He's also coming around on the clutch hitting thing, as his recent writing has reflected.
I agree with the comments above that the quality of his writing was mentioned. Writing is such a funny thing. Some people write just like they talk, while for others, it seems to be a vehicle for some hidden alter ego to emerge. I find that in Bill. He's nothing like he is in his writing as he is in person.
Yeah, I assume the NCAA tournament went late; my tivo missed it also.
This tournament cannot end fast enough for me.
Quoted for truth. I think better of Costas, having seen this.
This tournament cannot end fast enough for me.
Why? I'd have CBS blocked except for the tourney. Their shows give me a headache within 30 seconds of watching them.
The North Carolina Tarheels are awesome, babyyyyy!!!!!!!!
Let me tell you something!!! Ty Lawson can flat out play!!!!!! This kid is a ptper with a capital P!!!!
And how about Tyler Hansbrough??? Psycho T, that's what they're calling down on Tobacco Road!!!! Mark this down!!! Tyler Hansbrough is going to win the John Wooden award!!!! You can take that to the bank!!!
You can chalk it up right now!!! The North Carolina Tarheels are going to get it done and Roy Williams is going to win his second championship in 4 years!!!
Roy's sayin' "Look at me, Dean Smith!!!!! We're rockin' and rollin' all the way to San Antonio and the national title!!!!"
I can't wait for the silky restraint of a Harrelson or a Sterling after reading that.
Dick Vitale, I presume?
A more annoying person may not have walked the planet.
I also agree with kevin that James wasn't biting his tongue at all on the chemistry question. I think Safer misrepresented James and the best of sabermetrics in his implicit claim that the statheads think they have everything figured out. James' response to Safer was that there are innumerable aspects of baseball we don't know and don't understand - and perhaps that we can't understand with both abstraction and precision - and that "chemistry" features prominently among that great group.
What amazes me is how the man can be so loud despite having his head firmly implanted continuously within a one coach's or another's arse. You think it would muffle him at least a little.
He gets his shouting in as he's moving coach to coach. He's up everyone's arse. A truly unique talent.
That said, Davidson should have run some play other than "let the double teamed guy try to break loose". Ugh.
To me, Dick Vitale dropped his pants with his reaction to Bruce Pearl's exposing how corrupt big time college basketball is back in the day. Not even squeaky clean Duke is squeaky clean (amazing how the parents of some of their recruits are able to land cushy jobs they have absolutely no qualifications for), but Dick Vitale wouldn't want to besmirch those greatest men of history--the college basketball coach! Not a crook or charlatan among them. Those 7 footers wouldn't even know how to dunk if not for the genius instruction of the college basketball coach.
(Not that I think the coaches aren't good and important for the player's development, but how about a little measure in the praise? The players aren't just chess pieces being moved around by basketball Einsteins. They actually have to have skill and heart themselves. Their effort is their own and not wholly the product of their coach's greatness.)
OK, rant over. Sorry. Back to Opening Day!
I'll never understand why teams who are losing by one or two near the conclusion of the game and who have the ball feel it necessary to take the last shot. I mean, I understand the premise -- hit a three (in Davidson's case) and end it right there without going to overtime. But with 16 seconds to go, that's plenty of time to set up a play and still have time -- in case of a miss -- to foul a Kansas player on the rebound.
FWIW, the kid who Curry handed the ball off to got a relatively decent look. I just don't think he was at all prepared to take that shot.
And w/r/t the James interview, the only thing I take issue with is that they used Ortiz to disprove the whole 'clutch' debate. Ortiz is a great hitter -- in my mind, that's the reason you want him up at the plate when you're down one in the ninth. Calling him clutch seems to pigeonhole him a bit. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the basic premise of the clutch debate that a career .200/.300/.350 hitter -- over the long haul -- isn't going to be able to keep up a .330/.400/.450 line in close-and-late situations?
Guilty as charged. That sums up my feelings perfectly.
Where's Bob Feller? I should have a drink with him now that I know what it's like to be a crank.
Not to derail conversation on the James piece, but I agree with your post. It wasn't a terrible last shot. But it was too long and with not enough time on the clock. If it's tied, sure, take it down to the very last second. Behind, you have to get a shot off with time for a rebound or foul. I think they were trying this but it was clear that the play they'd called was to have Curry take his man one on one. Which, if they could've gotten it would've made sense. But why they thought KU would let Curry go one on one and not help is inexplicable. In any case, it was a nice run by Davidson.
I think that's a little extreme, Keith. Clutch merely means that in crucial situations, certain players can ratchet it up a notch. I think Ortiz is one of those players.
I think the unclutch argument is more persuasive. That is, there are some great hitters who have a history, or at least a reputation, of faltering in big spots. Alex Rodriguez springs to mind.
To me, being clutch means not so much the ability to somehow raise your game under pressure but rather the ability to simply perform at your usual level under pressure and not wither. The guys who have a reputation for being clutch are typically, like Ortiz, plain ol' great hitters who just continue to be great regardless of the situation. Jeter, the archetype of clutch, doesn't perform any better in the clutch...he just doesn't get any worse.
I think some of that is in the marketing of college basketball. Players come and go relatively quickly, especially the big-time ones who bolt for the NBA after one year or two, but the prominent coaches (and, even moreso, some of the programs) are more or less permanent fixtures.
I also can't help but wonder if there's a bit of a racial/cultural component to this as well; the kind of people CBS wants watching this thing probably identify more readily with the coaches than with the players, for a variety of reasons.
????? Everyone in the country who ever went to college can immediately identify with the players.
Pass.
Of course, if you're a guy who is able to maintain in a clutch situation and you're facing a guy who isn't, your numbers may actually go up. I think this is one of those areas where sample size, number of variables and uncertainty will prevent us from ever really knowing THE ANSWER.
I think it has been shown, well enough, that you don't want some "clutch" player who isn't all that great up instead of a guy who is really good but may come down a bit in pressure situations. Say you were offered ARod or Francisco Cabrera (vintage 1992) in a clutch situation. You go with Arod every time.
If it's Ortiz or Arod you probably go with Ortiz. I guess I'd view the "clutch" adjustment as being pretty small over the long haul. Maybe Arod (for argument's sake) is .0006 worse and Cabrera is .0006 better. That doesn't make up the huge talent difference. But between Ortiz and Arod, maybe it does.
Yes, but knowing that, couldn't you have built that into your Tivo calculations?
Alex Rodriguez, 2007:
overall: .314/.422/.645
close & late: .357/.439/.686
bases loaded: .500/.444/1.286
runners on: .329/.443/.719
runners on, 2 out: .326/.435/.816
scoring position: .333/.460/.678
scoring pos, 2 out: .318/.448/.776
september: .362/.470/.723
Some people went college a long time ago.
I realized the possibility at about 8:20, just when the baseball season was starting, which was about 20 minutes too late.
Especially the CBS audience. "Martha, is that that James Meredith everyone keeps talking about? I must be seeing quintuple again. Get me my pills."
The problem is that if you didn't realize there was a basketball game on, like me, you didn't program tivo effectively.
Post-season:
.279 .361 .483
Now let's look at big papi:
overall: .289 .383 .558
Post season: .317 .418 .587
When I briefly had tivo, the damn thing programmed me. You vill vatch Space Ghost now, Herr Shooty.
I just always assume CBS' Sunday programming is going to be running late, since as David mentioned, it usually is.
Regular season: 7350 at bats
Postseason: 147 at bats
I agree, if for no other reason than the fact that in every event he broadcasts, he goes completely insane by the end of the game.
Ok.
"big papi" career: 289/.384/.559
"big papi" in the 9th inning: .228/.328/.446
Oops.
Obviously he chokes in the 9th inning.
Hey, random splits in data are fun!
150 at bats amounts to six weeks of play, stretched out randomly over 12 years.
Did you miss the 2004 ALDS?
The mistake was that Curry should have shot with six seconds left when he broke the defender's ankle. Richards (who took the last shot) had been cold all night and he was well out of his range. I would have liked the chances better with Curry squaring himself in midair and shooting with three men in his face than with any other player shooting.
I'm still depressed from the long ride home from Detroit...
Unless I'm very much mistaken James and Costas go way back. I'm pretty sure they did some talk radio together in the 80s.
It's not so much I missed it, Ray. It's that the memory of it has been obscured by the subsequent 2004 ALCS.
Another mistake was that during the entire play, Sander was totally uncovered for an easy drive to the hoop for a dunk/lay-up that would've tied the game. There was no one within 10 feet of him.
He did fine in the 2004 ALCS, obviously. He put up a .900 OPS against a playoff team.
He was 7-17 with 2 HRs over the first four games of the series. Had Mariano Rivera not choked :P and blown the save, Rodriguez would have been an ALCS hero on his way to the World Series.
It was a pretty fluffy piece, but I guess a good one for one not accustomed to baseball, let alone sabermetrics. My mom really enjoyed it.
I agree that I wish they would have said more about his writing and given some examples. They gave the impression that he's a math nerd with writing incomprehensible to the layman. That's the furthest thing from the truth. He made stats accessible to people that didn't even know math that well.
My dad got a big kick out of the "closer fallacy". He's been harping on that for years.
I'm really shocked they didn't mention Moneyball. I thought for sure that would be a topic of conversation.
Bill James went to "a large state school". Why the heck couldn't they say KU? Give credit where credit is due! You just showed them winning a basketball game, and they did show a picture of William White Hall, just say the name!
Steffen Curry is really, really good at basketball. He had Andrew Sander wide open for the last shot, but couldn't see him. I really think since KU was so focused in on Curry, Davidson probably could have gotten off a fairly easy two point bucket. Thank god they didn't.
I always TiVO "Cold Case" because "60 Minutes" always starts at 6:30 Central due to sports. I hate that CBS doesn't account for this, and that TiVO is subject to CBS's quirky scheduling whims.
GO HAWKS!
Well no. Standard error in a 200 PA trial is on the order of 110 points of OPS.
Or to put it another way, do the stats for full-time players in the middle of May tell you anything worthwhile about how good a player is?
Oh, it was Rivera who was the choker, not A-rod.
You mean Mariano Rivera, right? The guy with the career 0.77 post-season era?
Maybe you're thinking of Bombo Rivera.
James now has clutch hitting on his website, so why didn't Morley ask him about it. Also, I do recall that James had stated that he thought if anyone was a clutch hitter, Ortiz was. That really wasn't what 60 Minutes conveyed.
I don't know what world you live in, but in the world I inhabit, every single network fails to accommodate sports into their schedules.
I, too, was disappointed with the final play by Davidson. In that situation, I push the ball quickly upcourt (rather than walk it up) and run my normal offense, but with an eye on the clock.
I think it's more that either he or the Davidson coach (or both) should have realized during that timeout that there was no way Kansas was going to let Curry take that last shot, come hell or high water.
I think he wrote that there was no evidence that clutch hitting existed and is now fighting against the notion that this lack of evidence means it absolutely doesn't exist. He holds out that it may, in fact, exist, but we haven't discovered the right tool yet to measure it. Is that about right?
I'm not trying to be critical so much as figuring out the "mistake" if there was one. The quote points one out: KU was surrendering the two pointer. Davidson essentially decided that Curry would take a 3 pointer, no matter what. Clearly that was optimum, but no way was KU giving that up. He could have dished early and had a teammate take a relatively open three or gotten a really good two, all with time on the clock. And, yes, that is really easy to say in hindsight or when you're not on the floor. But I also think the way KU had been defending him made it really, really, really unlikely Curry could get a 3point shot off and Davidson should've known that during the timeout.
Well, the difference is 123 points in 167 plate appearances so the point still holds.
If we split up ARod's career into 42 samples of 200 PA each, each sample made up of ten random 3-7 game stretches, would a sample of .279/.361/.483 stand out in any way?
I still maintain that Curry throwing up a heavily contested shot would have given the Wildcats better odds than anyone else shooting, even if it's Sanders with an open layup.
They would it the PA's in question constituted his entire post-season performance.
Yes, insofar as I once played pickup basketball with Ricky Calloway.
I think they recognize that going to KU is an abomination in the sight of the Lord.
GO KSU!
Actually, I think it might because he said that what they were trying to teach him he would only take and use in relation to baseball.
Incidentally, no one would be happier than Bill that a discussion about him would be completely derailed to talk about a KU basketball game.
As it turned out, he was right. Richards was open. he was just standing a little too far out of his range and missed the shot. If you want to criticize someone, criticize richards for not getting into proper position to take a shot within his shooting range.
But I don't want to do that either. That was a hard-fought game and the players on both sides must have been exhausted.
I fart in your generale direction.
That's how I understand the "Underestimating The Fog" essay. Alot of baseball studies trying to find a skill look at y-t-y correlation of stats. As I understand it though, there's too much noise in the data in many instances which means that absence of evidence in these studies doesn't mean evidence of absence.
FOX usually has a postgame show after football (The OT) that runs until 8 Eastern.
FOX is good at it. I've never noticed the other networks to have much problem having their prime time programming start on time after a golfing, NBA or NASCAR event.
I'll add a caveat about my above statement on Davidson having an easy two. While its true KU probably was focusing so much on Curry shooting a three, that they were very vulnerable to allowing a two, its also a big risk because KU's athleticism is so good that they could get back on defend a two.
However, I think it also increases the chances of a foul situation, which I think Davidson would have done well in.
Its easy to say in hindsight. Obviously at the time you want the ball in the hands of the best player on the court which was Curry.
My main point is that I liked the call to put the ball immediately in Curry's hands. Someone said they should have run their normal offense, which consists of players who are absolutely no threat to shoot holding the ball beyond the arc and waiting for Curry to come off of screens. It hadn't been working all night and I think it was a great call to have Curry bring the ball up.
You can make the case that they should have gone for the wide open layup (wow, I can't believe I'm about to argue against this). My brother spent the entirety of the final time out screaming, "One shot for the final four!" and I can't really blame McKillop for going for it.
After any football, baseball, or college basketball game, it seems all networks don't properly allow for time.
That is, there are some great hitters who have a history, or at least a reputation, of faltering in big spots.
I think A-Rod's case is a better example of the bolded bit than the overall point, so it's my fault for obfuscating my own point by bringing him up. A-Rod's unclutch rep was generated by his two utterly dismal playoff performances in 2005 and 2006. Last year didn't help; despite not being awful, he wasn't nearly as good as he was during the regular season either. But all of that tends to ignore the fact that he was a veritable postseason monster up until 2005. It's a mixed bag.
I don't view A-Rod as being particularly good or bad in the clutch, but I do think his struggles in the 2005 postseason got into his head come playoff time in 2006. He was absolutely miserable in that Detroit series, and I don't think that was just random. That said, I must reiterate that I don't believe that was an example of player who is, intrinsically, unclutch. I believe that was an example of an excellent player going through a rough stretch mentally and choking badly as a result.
So, as more general clarification, I find the idea of a player choking to be far more believable than the idea of a player being clutch. I have difficulty envisioning a mechanic by which a player may will himself better, i.e. "rise to the occasion" or "feed off the intensity" etc. A player collapsing under pressure, though, is a lot easier for me to understand.
He was the first to simply go through the game records and track how many bases were stolen off any given catcher.
Actually, given the way the information was arranged back then, the best he could do was stolen bases per games started.
One of the earliest example of his actually checking whether conventional wisdom is correct.
This is fair to consider. I believe it was Sanders (fairly certain, although aside from Curry I don't know the Davidson players by their face) who at one point was wide open at the top of the key (the guy who was guarding Sanders was 'showing' on the screen and fell down). Even if Sanders got the ball, he still would've needed to get to the rim for the lay-up/dunk, and I'd bet a Kansas defender would've been there to hack the hell out of him -- and isn't Sanders basically a 50% free throw shooter? Is that really better than the shot they got from Richards?
I just don't think you can 'blame' (I'm using that loosely here -- it's tough to criticize in such a hectic situation) Curry for giving up the ball. As kevin said, KU had him completely covered -- Davidson ran at least two or three separate screens for him and Kansas defended those screens about as well as possible, absolutely blanketing Curry -- so he gave the ball up to an open teammate who got a relatively decent look (albeit from a few feet beyond the arc).
It was without a doubt the best game of a weekend chalked full of blowouts, and ranks up there amongst the best games of the tourney (right up there with Marquette/Stanford -- awesome game, even if (I'm a Marquette student) it was the most heartbreaking sporting event of my lifetime). That being said, I have epic expectations for next weekend. When Memphis actually plays defense, they can hang with anyone. UNC looks unstoppable and both UCLA and Kansas are talented as hell.
I don't get you, Mattbert. Being clutch and choking are two sides of the same coin.
There's a contranym. Clutch. Being clutch or clutching up.
Or, to drop the metaphor, if "clutchiness" is hidden in the noise, it may exist but it's too small a factor to matter. There may be a mathematical distinction between "doesn't exist" and "can't be detected," but there's no practical distinction.
It's not easy for me to understand how a player who "collapses under pressure" makes it to the majors in the first place (let alone, in the ARod example, becomes one of the greatest players ever to play the game).
Bonds is a good example. For years people would talk about how he "couldn't" hit in the postseason. Then after the 2002 playoffs, nobody talked about it anymore.
Peyton Manning shows that this idiocy is not limited to baseball. He couldn't win the big one. Until he could.
Easy. A player overwhelmingly talented might not be pushed until he gets to the bigs and faces players who can match him talent-wise. See McClellan, George.
See above. He had to acquire a chemically-induced edge on his peers before he broke out of his choking cycle.
Well now, I'm convinced. I'm going to start a steroids regimen tomorrow. There is clearly nothing they can't accomplish!
Randy Johnson used to be a playoff choker. Until he wasn't.
Did you miss the 1992 NLCS?
Randy Johnson used to be a playoff choker. Until he wasn't.
This is where the noise comes in. Maybe clutch ability is something a player can develop as he matures or lose as he ages. It seems a hoplessly complicated weave. All I know is I'm convinced Marco Scutaro has some kind of walk-off hit ability. Scooter is freakin uncanny in those situations. (And no, I'm not going to look up the stats to dispel this myth that may exist in my own mind. I like the myth.)
Kenny Rogers is a great recent example: 23 scoreless innings in the 2006 playoffs, including a huge game against the team he was supposed to choke against, the Yankees. (Although people may have varying views on whether the foreign substance issue diminishes that a bit.)
When it comes to using the playoffs to measure clutchiness, the extremely small sample size means it is ALL noise.
And not liking the tournament because of Vitale is a pretty stupid argument, since he doesn't even work for CBS. If you don't like Vitale, don't turn on ESPN.
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