Thanks for voting for The Best Offensive Player Over The Last Two Months, Geoff.

It’s landed our country in fantastic shape, as evidenced by the last half-decade of economic turmoil

Hold on ... people ranting on the internet and watching Fox News created (and crashed) the housing bubble, credit default swaps, etc? Seems a wee bit of a stretch to me.

My memory is telling me that Baker often writes lengthy, rambling "not being a stathead is just, like, my opinion, man" pieces.

I'd almost rather read Chass, because at least he isn't even pretending to be weighing the stathead argument.

(Almost.)

I agree with the headline (though not the content) and I agree that I've probably been around too long too.

FART NOISE

I'm not even going to wade into the terribleness of the reasoning. I just want to make one general comment:

You can't tell people to chill out when the whole premise of your article is that there IS NO DEFINITION OF VALUABLE AND SO PEOPLE DEBATE IT.

Your argument is that MVP being ill-defined provokes controversy. You can't get mad when people respond to your position with a position of their own. If this is true: "I like surprises. I like diversity. I like differences of opinion," then you can't get annoyed when people express different opinions!!

Exchanging ideas? No, let’s be honest. We use the internet to take our own ideas, seek out anyone who agrees with them, then dismiss out-of-hand those who don’t. We use it to insult the other side and never consider what they’re trying to say.

Somebody brings up a valid point worth considering? Hey, just switch web sites (or news channels) and go to one that tells you exactly what you want them to. It’s a great way to grow one’s mind.

This is actually a point that I agree with entirely.

Agreement is boring. I think it's a lot more fun to argue with people I disagree with. I suspect most other people here do too, otherwise people wouldn't keep coming back to our political threads.

Agreement is boring. I think it's a lot more fun to argue with people I disagree with.

What the hell is wrong with you?

This is absolutely the last post I will make on this thread. you go to hell.

This is the guy who wrote the stupid "White Jays" article from about 10 years ago, right?

Yeah, as seen on BBTF's wiki. When the article was posted, I was going to snark about how if anyone knows about having readers switch news channels (or newspapers) en masse, it'd be Geoff Baker but then I figured it's been a long time and I should let it go. Still, it was kind of funny to watch Mariners fans/bloggers slowly turn on Baker.

I suspect most other people here do too, otherwise people wouldn't keep coming back to our political threads.

Have you ever noticed that those threads are really just about 10-15 people (out of hundreds of frequent posters) repeating themselves over and over again?

I realize that it creates an echo chamber effect, and as a result can dominate the Hot Topics, but if you pay attention, I'm fairly certain at least 90% of the regular contributors to this site ignore them.

...at the same time, though, I think there's something to be said for being able to have strongly differing opinions than someone else without allowing that to affect your view of them as a human being.

I'm often critical of the Toronto MSM, but White Jays was over-the-top stupid. What made me angry was when non-baseball fans would ask me for weeks after if I thought the Blue Jays were actually a racist organization.

Trout produced an OPS of .866 in August and .900 in September. Very good numbers, to be sure. But Cabrera took his numbers well beyond those, posting a 1.092 and a 1.071 in August and September.

For me, in an MVP debate, that's a marked difference. Enough of a difference to assign more "value" to Cabrera and give him the award. That's it and that's all. No more complex than that. In a very tight race between two deserving candidates, I'm giving it to the guy demonstrably better on offense whose play helped his team win the division.

Now, I suppose we could try to factor in the defensive and baserunning differences over that two-month span and try to see how much closer Trout got in terms of WAR over that timespan. But I also know that I keep being told how WAR is somewhat unreliable over small samples. Just like defensive metrics -- part of WAR -- should not be looked at on a monthly or even half-season basis for anything too reliable.

This sounds like he's aware that Trout had a higher fWAR than Cabrera in both August and September/October--maybe even that Trout led the AL in fWAR in August and was 2nd to Cano (by 0.1) in Sept/Oct. But if we can break up the season into different piles, then we never have to consider defense or baserunning!

Agreement is boring. I think it's a lot more fun to argue with people I disagree with. I suspect most other people here do too, otherwise people wouldn't keep coming back to our political threads.

Having an intelligent argument with someone who disagrees with me is awesome.

Sadly, most arguments don't go that way. The vast majority of people I've encountered who want to argue, say, politics aren't interested in actual discourse; they want to just shout their position at me until my mind changes. That is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike fun. I prefer to enter debates where both parties (including myself) are open-minded enough to actually listen to the points the other is making.