Adjust onion, adjust belt…some good old-fashioned Bob Ryan.
The AL MVP award is shaping up as a Boston-New York battle, with Adrian Gonzalez, Jacoby Ellsbury, and, if his August and September rival his July, Dustin Pedroia all legit candidates, and Granderson very much in the hunt.
People who favor pitchers are also throwing in the name of CC Sabathia, who will take the mound this afternoon with a 13-2 record in his last 15 decisions, not to mention having surrendered just seven earned runs in his last 62 2/3 innings. Along those lines, you can bet Tiger boosters are putting forth the candidacy of Justin Verlander. But that’s not going to happen. The 2011 AL MVP was at Fenway Park last night.
...He shrugs all this off as simply being a product of his environment - i.e. Yankee batting order, including all the aforementioned, plus the ever-dangerous Robinson Cano and the speedy Brett Gardner. That’s nice and noble of him to say, but any man with 49 percent of his hits (55 of 113) going for extra bases is no accident of a lineup. He’s a tremendous hitter.
...That’s his story, and he’s sticking to it, but consider one more stat, this one resurrected from the Old Math of baseball. Twenty-five years ago, before any of us heard of OBP, OPS, and Adjusted This and Adjusted That, good old-fashioned Runs Produced was all the rage. You added someone’s RBI total to his runs, then subtracted homers. This gave you an idea of true offensive worth to the team, or so we thought. With 155 runs produced going into last night, Curtis Granderson was leading the league.
Reader Comments and Retorts
Go to end of page
Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.
1. Weekly Journalist_ Posted: August 06, 2011 at 12:36 PM (#3894150)And even during that brief shining moment when this was or was not all the rage, penalizing guys for hitting the ball over the wall made no sense at all.
Granderson is having a career year, but let's not forget that over the two previous years he hit an aggregate .248. I'd never knock Granderson; he's going out there and getting it done this year, and he had some good years in Detroit. But it's safer to say "he's putting it all together this year" than to suddenly impute tremendousness to him. He's basically Dwayne Murphy – a very valuable player overall who would improve any team – but I'd reserve "tremendous hitter" for a tier or two above that.
It's still a stupid stat, obviously.
No he's not. He just wasn't at Fenway last night, so he doesn't exist.
he hits too many home runs
Every other run gets counted twice, so yes, it penalizes a player for doing both parts of the job of producing a run. It would be a lot more logical to just add runs scored to RBI and divide by two, so it would be on the same scale as team runs. And yes, it's a stupid stat, but there's no need to make it even stupider than it inherently is by defining it in a stupidly biased way.
[EDIT: "producing a run" probably should be in quotes above; consider: BB, 2B, SF... guy who did the biggest part of the job of producing that run gets no credit for it.]
I think Bob Ryan is forgetting about a certain dude in Toronto.
Articles like this could actually help Bautista by splitting the "East Coast Bias" vote.
I think the commissioner should investigate this new PED that Granderson is taking that suddenly allows him to hit left-handers
Besides Yankee team .285/.363/.461 to .265/.344/.444* triple slash 20-point drop-off since he took over in '07?
screw across the board MLB offensive fall off...Long's a genius ya know!
"Up until this year I always used to shut my right eye at the plate. I taught myself that as a concentration and focus technique when I was six. Kevin showed me that most hitters don't necessarily do that, and he's right, I think I'm hitting better than ever with this new approach. Kevin is really good with picking out what hitters do with our eyes, since he got hit in the eye with a sledgehammer back when he was playing."
there was Twin in the 70s (can't remember who) who claimed he added 20 points to his average by adopting a more open batting stance that allowed him to see around his nose
But Kevin Long is, in fact, a ####### genius.
Genius.
"Uhm....Curtis, that's ####### stupid. You see, there's this think called 'depth perception'."
You're right, the unending buildup for Ron Guidry being a pitching guru/genius was on the money.
BTW...Is he still the pitching coach for the indy Catahoula Cajunkies?
Had you said 80s, I'd have guessed Gaetti.
Kevin Long did get in the eye with a sledgehammer when he was a player, though.
I thought that was the giveaway that it was a joke.
So you're saying the whole, 'turn your head a little more' thing eluded him?
Sorry. It's MLB...nothing surprises me.
You must be Registered and Logged In to post comments.
<< Back to main