If James' conjecture is correct, I suspect it may have to do with the mechanics that produce these violent sinkers. Wang and Webb in particular were felled by shoulder injuries, though this is not entirely the province of sinkerballers. Rich Harden and Chris Young both were (are?) extreme flyball pitchers who have had shoulder problems. Guess I'll have to RTFA.

this is not a new thought for bill. he has been muttering about ground ballers since bill swift went belly up. bill thought swift would be the be all to end all and went swift crashed and burned james was vexed.

Brandon Webb was good for over half a decade. Yeah, he eventually exploded his shoulder, but up until that point he was going on about 5 years running as the most durable pitcher in baseball. In general, I don't buy this premise. Here are the "true" sinkerballers of the past decade.

2003-2012, SP, >400 IP, >57% GB%, Ranked by GB%



This group doesn't strike me as particularly injury prone as compared to any other random grouping of 7 starters. 5 of the 7 were worth > 20 fWAR over that span.

The article is behind the paywall, and Neyer's excerpt doesn't mention that James performed a study, which didn't support his preconceived view about groundball pitchers. He concludes: “So what do we conclude? Well. ..I still don’t really like Ground Ball pitchers, but I do concede that I was, in the past, too radical in my distrust of them."

That study doesn't relate to the speculation that extreme groundball pitchers are more injury prone, which appears to be anecdotal.

Hudson's one IOC the underrated pitchers of this generation. Any chance he makes the HOF?

This group doesn't strike me as particularly injury prone as compared to any other random grouping of 7 starters.

Between injury, ineffectiveness, usage patterns and so on (which all factor into selection bias issues) finding a control group of pitchers for any given thesis always seems to be a huge issue. I don't have anything to help, just pointing out the obvious.

The Hudson and Mulder trades still fascinate me. It's almost as if the universe had to balance the equation to keep everything from falling apart.

It's too bad that James seems determined to be the Pete Rose of sabermetrics, concluding a brilliant career with years of sub-replacement-level analysis. As with Rose, even years of crappy performance can't obscure the greatness of the career: the peak was too good and too long. But still, it's unfortunate. James should open a bar, entertain customers with stories about the glory days of the 1981 Abstract, and enjoy being "Bill James."

Red Sox keep him around, so they must feel he's contributing something. In that situation he can't really offer any useful ideas to the public.

But still, it's unfortunate. James should open a bar, entertain customers with stories about the glory days of the 1981 Abstract, and enjoy being "Bill James."

That's pretty much how I view everything that comes from his website.

James should open a bar, entertain customers with stories about the glory days of the 1981 Abstract, and enjoy being "Bill James."

"Sabermetricians these days don't have the same guts and and intensity like me and Pete Palmer and the boys did in the early days. They're too worried about girls and iPhones and their mom's bringing them meatloaf to the basement. Two Bud lights, that'll be $7.50"

Sabremetricians were far from fans of Wang. I remember every time I read an article about him it was that his success was unsustainable based on his k rate and he'd be coming down to earth any day now. And his career exploded after he hurt himself running the bases, not pitching.

Hudson's one IOC the underrated pitchers of this generation. Any chance he makes the HOF?

I doubt it, but he seems to have a pretty good HOM shot. Kevin Brown was another durable groundballer.

It's too bad that James seems determined to be the Pete Rose of sabermetrics, concluding a brilliant career with years of sub-replacement-level analysis.

I tend to take a lot of what he says in public with a grain of salt these days. My guess is that his more innovative stuff is being kept in-house.

2003-2012, SP, >400 IP, >57% GB%, Ranked by GB%

1 Brandon Webb - 198 GS, 1318.2 IP, 64.2 %
2 Derek Lowe - 323 GS, 1926.2 IP, 61.9 %
3 Chien-Ming Wang - 120 GS, 741.1 IP, 59.3 %
4 Tim Hudson - 283 GS, 1869.1 IP, 59.1 %
5 Jake Westbrook - 242 GS, 1491.0 IP, 59.1 %
6 Roberto Hernandez - 153 GS, 911.1 IP, 58.2 %
7 Aaron Cook - 219 GS, 1332.2 IP, 57.5 %

Barnaby, where'd you get that list? I can't find GB% on BRef PI.

I doubt it, but he seems to have a pretty good HOM shot. Kevin Brown was another durable groundballer.

Agree, but again, another pitcher that is significantly better than Jack Morris. Jack Morris is going to get in through the veteran's committee if he doesn't go in next year, there will probably be 50 pitchers on the outside looking in, who were better than he was.

I tend to take a lot of what he says in public with a grain of salt these days. My guess is that his more innovative stuff is being kept in-house.

So your theory is that James' subscribers get to see the stuff that the Sox review and say, "hmmm, thanks Bill, what else have you got for us?" Perhaps, but I doubt it. I'm sure his work for the Sox is more specialized, to meet their needs, but I see no reason to think it's higher quality.

Isn't there a belief that sinkers work better when the pitcher is tired? That could have something to do with it, if either the player or the manager is deliberately pitching tired.

Isn't there a belief that sinkers work better when the pitcher is tired? That could have something to do with it, if either the player or the manager is deliberately pitching tired.

Makes sense. If they are getting better results deeper into the game, the manager might keep them in longer. Adding that to the theory that the true damaging to a pitcher happens when they are tired and you have a mechanism almost designed to increase injuries among true groundballers.

Kevin brown sat at 1.45:1 (59%) over his 19 year career.

Derek was looking like a fly ball pitcher in last nights game, or at least in the fourth inning. I do hope he catches on with the Rangers, though. I always pull for the veteran trying to gut out one more year.

Rob Neyer's opening comment: "* I've eliminated Bill's [deleted: preference for] hilarious insistence on two (or three!) spaces after each period. Sorry Bill!"

Rob Neyer is obviously a young pup who's done most of his writing on a computer. Had he spent a good part of his career working on a typewriter for a newspaper his muscle memory would insist on two spaces before starting a new sentence.

Computers allow for justified type at the flick of a switch, typewriters didn't. Thus, James is justified for using multiple spaces.

(Ack! I just realized I've inserted two spaces before each sentence. It's a habit nearly impossible to break [and I did it again!]).

For a long time I would write stuff out and then have Word (or whatever) replace two spaces with one everywhere. I eventually broke myself of the double space habit.

What is wrong with 2 spaces after a sentence?

I'm only 30 and I always doublespace. I didn't know it was out of fashion until the last year or so.

I'm only supposed to put one space after periods?

I must have been drunk when they sent out that memo.

I think the idea got into James's head long ago with the career arc of The Bird, arguably the patron saint of the Sabermetric Era's low 90s hard sinker groundball pitchers. His obsession kind of showed itself with his multi-thousand word rant in the Historical Abstract about how The Bird was going to suck anyway, even if his shoulder hadn't blown, since he had such low strikeout rates.

What is wrong with 2 spaces after a sentence?

Reporters were always taught one, since space itself was valuable. I don't think that should govern anyone else's usage.

Of course, it doesn't matter if you put one or two after you're period in your posts here. Primer is going to make it one space for you, so you might as well save your space bar thumb the work.

I was taught to doublespace after a period growing up and that's what I always do.

And, like all civilized people, I use the Oxford comma.

What is wrong with 2 spaces after a sentence?

Apparently one space is typographic convention and the two-space thing started when we were typing on monospace typewriters--the two spaces were needed to contrast with all the white space caused by the proportional spacing. I had no idea it was even a thing until Farhad Manjoo was ranting about it on Slate.

I still do the two-space-after-a-period thing. As others have said, it was common practice in the typewriter days, and it's a habit I find difficult to break. For that matter, I can't think of a good reason to break it.

I'm also a Gov. George Wallace typist, and I say: "Two spaces now, two spaces tomorrow, two spaces forever!"

People who complain about 2 spaces after a period are self-obsessed weenies and scolds who should have been drowned at birth.

Apparently one space is typographic convention and the two-space thing started when we were typing on monospace typewriters--the two spaces were needed to contrast with all the white space caused by the proportional spacing. I had no idea it was even a thing until Farhad Manjoo was ranting about it on Slate.

Yeah... as the rant says, every official style sheet under the sun -- except some oddball academia discpline... psychiatry I think? without (re)-RTFA.... now says that using two spaces after the period is incorrect. Only one space should follow the period.

However, I still do two spaces - mostly because that's how I learned and double-tapping the space bar is a force of habit I'm not going to or interested in trying to break at this point.

We actually had a big effort last year to try to get our in-house analysts/editors to cease using two spaces after the period.

The ironic thing is that as we have started integrating more and more machine learning and semantic interrogation/automated classification and enrichment into our publishing -- two spaces as a standard would actually make a lot of things a wee bit easier. We build ontologies and relationships down to individual sentences in some instances - but as we publish case law, regulations, et al - a lot of our content has various constructs where periods are used extensively in strings. Add to that the non-standard (in normal writing/language anyway) capitalization and such. You can regexp your way around most of it, of course, but more than once us on the technology side have mused how much simpler a lot of this would be if the two space thing had been kept holy!

James puts 3 to 5 spaces after each sentence and randomly varies the number. At some point he got annoyed at someone insisting one or two (I forget which) spaces was the only correct thing to do and anything else was wrong, and now goes out of his way to put random high numbers of spaces after each sentence. He's been doing it at least since he started Bill James Online.

One space after each sentence is standard now. It was two recently enough that my high school teachers, in the late 1990s, taught me to always use two. Good thing for me it was never my nature to do what I was told.

People who complain about 2 spaces after a period are self-obsessed weenies and scolds who should have been drowned at birth.

A friend of a friend used to know somebody whose cousin was drowned at birth for complaining about two spaces after a period, so this isn't funny.

I was taught to doublespace on Apple IIs in elementary school. I have never even entertained the idea of breaking the muscle memory to do otherwise. Even though it's completely unnecessary in the online world because HTML collapses consecutive whitespace to one anyway.

I had no idea it was even a thing until Farhad Manjoo was ranting about it on Slate.

What an #######

Interesting premise, but not sure I'm buying it with such a tiny sample size (Wang, in particular, is a convenient but highly questionable inclusion on this list: he injured his foot running the bases, which was thought to mess up his pitching motion, which led to the arm troubles -- had nothing to do with wear and tear on his arm).

I stopped double spacing and using Oxford commas about 15 years back, though I've intermittently gone back to the latter - they're useful.

I stopped double spacing and using Oxford commas about 15 years back

I'm not sure why anybody would want to go to the effort of deliberately single-spacing after a lifetime of double. How did you train yourself? And if you forgot, did you go back and delete one?

As for the Oxford comma, its absence in a sequence of three or more is always jarring to my eye. On top of that, I can't think of any justification for not using it.

As for the Oxford comma, its absence in a sequence of three or more is always jarring to my eye. On top of that, I can't think of any justification for not using it.

More often than not, the Oxford comma does clarify what would otherwise be cloudy. But not every time.

My brother, Thomas, and Steve like having sex with farm animals.

If you use the Oxford comma, then it's not clear if this is two people (Steve and my brother Thomas) or three (Steve, Thomas and my unnamed brother).

Like the extra space after periods, I had the Oxford comma drilled out of me by my very first journalism professors. At my current publication, we'll slip it in when its exclusion would lead to confusion, but otherwise eschew it.

"Only one space after a period" is a relic of the time when people mostly produced documents on desktops and laptops. iOS uses "double space" as the standard mode of signaling a new sentence.

a relic of the time when people mostly produced documents on desktops and laptops.

I remember 2012 like it was only last year.

"Only one space after a period" is a relic of the time when people mostly produced documents on desktops and laptops. iOS uses "double space" as the standard mode of signaling a new sentence.

That's a shortcut for automatically inserting a period. It still only types one space.

More often than not, the Oxford comma does clarify what would otherwise be cloudy. But not every time.

My brother, Thomas, and Steve like having sex with farm animals.

I didn't know Oxford had an animal husbandry major. #the3wassilentyousee

I use two spaces after a period and I will never stop. Never!

Also, the punctuation should go on the outside of the quotation mark, unless the punctuation is part of the quotation.

My room mate when I moved up to the cities did electronic publishing (mostly advertising) for a living. He cared deeply and eventually convinced me to switch.

EDIT: The two space after period. And I agree with #47, but sometimes it looks horrible and I switch for aesthetic reasons.

This is the kind of sh*t I visit BBTF to escape, guys.

My brother, Thomas, and Steve like having sex with farm animals.

Oxford comma can be safely ignored with better writing, such as:

Steve and my brother Thomas like having sex with farm animals.