Wow, the terrible writing in the first few paragraphs makes this awfully tough to read.

Wow, the terrible writing in the first few paragraphs makes this awfully tough to read.

it's not any better by the final paragraph

the fifteenth anniversary of our yeoman efforts to merely look askance at the misbegotten moonings of the MBA cadre

Boy those sure are a bunch of words put together!

EDIT: Can someone translate what this excerpt is saying?

Can someone translate what this excerpt is saying?

well, I understand "the fifteenth anniversary.." after that, it's kinda murky

Ah, Don's inimitable style. Like someone took a postgame call-in show and shook up all the words in random order. That sounds bad, but I love me some Don Malcolm, especially when I can't figure out what he's saying.

Also: needs more QMAX.

Or Ashley's Hexagon.

Can someone translate what this excerpt is saying?

Old Prospectus writers are dumb, and so are modern stats. The Orioles prove this.

Can someone translate what this excerpt is saying?

I put it into the Star Treck translator, and it said "wOBA, wOBA..."

Also: needs more QMAX.

QFT.

Does the article say that the O's have been playing above their heads, probably aren't much more than a .500 team but fans should enjoy the run and (hopefully) continued return to competence with real prospects waiting in the wings? 'Cuz it should say that.

I've loved the Birds so far, enjoyed this season the most of any since '89, but... have been realistic.

[10] FTFA:

Not counting the '12 O's, there have been 74 teams since 1901 who've started the year exactly 29-17 after 46 games. Of those teams, 29 have finished first (league or division). ...

So 45% of the teams that started 29-17 continued into the postseason.

69 out of the 74 teams finished at .500 or better. (Remember that Rany assured us that the O's would finish under .500. That's happened only five times--or just 7% of the time.)

We could find no usable correlation between teams' Pythagorean Winning Percentage (PWP) after 46 games and their eventual won-loss record. So the fact that the O's are playing better than their runs scored-runs allowed suggests is not a serious predictive factor, despite what the ideologues would like to have you believe.

Rany’s material remains so one-note that it still fits into the original Stalinist model that propelled the post-neo-sabe movement into its current mystical WAR zone, where the “dance of the dueling uber-stats” continues apace even as each competing pirate-boat furiously retools its wind machines to offset their slackening sails.

Reading this in one breath would be good aerobic exercise. (I dig Don's style, but I can certainly see where mileages would vary).

Greg (#3)asks, EDIT: "Can someone translate what this excerpt is saying?"

I usually can figure out Don (whom I've known since 1971), although the following is my fail if I got it wrong. Tell Don to blame me. As for translation, it's easier to look at the whole paragraph, quoted below. Don is saying that, some 15 years ago, a "knee-jerk" reaction developed in his mind. That reaction was to analysis by the group he calls "the MBA cadre", which probably contains several members of Prospectus. The form the reaction took was to "take the opposite tack from what Rany Jazayerli ... and Joe Sheehan...were putting forth." This reaction took some time to develop during the 15 years, during which Don claims to have made "yeoman efforts to look askance" at what the two and the rest of the MBA cadre were doing, which he calls "misbegotten moonings." In particular, about Joe Sheehan, he assigns Joe the "Mike Love" role as a sabermetrician, meaning, probably, that he thinks that Joe is derivative and wants to freeze sabermetrics in one place, much as Mike Love of the Beach Boys has tried to keep the Beach Boys going as a surf-pop band, rather than trying to cooperate with the new places (Pet Sounds, Smile) that Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys' resident genius, was trying to take them, which Mike did because he had no real role in Brian's new stuff. That's what I got out of it, anyway. Don isn't usually hard to figure out; he just has a large vocabulary, so he will use an obscure word if it is closer to the exact definition he needs, rather than use a more familiar word that isn't that precise. And he likes to go on digressions, and often compares sabermetricians to musicians.

"Our knee-jerk reaction (which began to coalesce way back in 1997, meaning that this is the fifteenth anniversary of our yeoman efforts to merely look askance at the misbegotten moonings of the MBA cadre) was simply to take the opposite tack from what Rany Jazayerli, in full bluster mode at (g)Rantand—and Joe Sheehan, cementing his position as the Mike Love of neo-sabermetrics over at SI—were putting forth."

- Brock Hanke

Don is an intelligent guy whose perspective is often interesting. But he is far more smug and self-satisfied than the worst of the MBA cadre ever were. He wields his vocabulary like a sledgehammer, as self-evident proof that he is indeed smarter than the "sabe" and "neo-sabe" idealogues. He may well be, but he seems less interested in clearly imparting his views than he does in engaging in cartoonish ad hominem attacks.

He's also wildly wrong about Rany Jazayerli, whose piece on the Orioles at Grantland was descriptive, intelligent, and open to various possible evaluations and outcomes.

One little side-note is that the most MBAish of the late-90s "MBA crew" was clearly Keith Law, who has renounced late-90s BP orthodoxy in pretty much every way other than personal style.

The article also gets better/less rhetorical and over-the-top as it goes along. Thanks for #13, Brock, I had no idea who Mike Love was (I actually looked him up on B-Ref <.<), so that's a help.

As an aside, I pretty much agree with all of Matt's #15, particularly regarding Rany's article - I normally find him fairly insightful (at the least worth reading) as opposed to "one-note".

Not counting the '12 O's, there have been 74 teams since 1901 who've started the year exactly 29-17 after 46 games. Of those teams, 29 have finished first (league or division). ...

So 45% of the teams that started 29-17 continued into the postseason.

69 out of the 74 teams finished at .500 or better. (Remember that Rany assured us that the O's would finish under .500. That's happened only five times--or just 7% of the time.)

Not much interesting analysis here to balance out all the frothing at the mouth. More like trivia.

Orioles are obviously different than the typical team in that 74 team sample. Would anyone bother writing about the reasons the Yankees could not sustain the pace if they had started out 29-17? Of course not, because that record is not far out of the range of outcomes we expect for the Yankees.

So of those 74 teams, how many were coming off a last place finish? Of that group, how many sustained a surprise season and how many faded over the last 4 months? That might be interesting to know. You might need to adjust your criteria though if your sample is too small. For instance look at teams with 27-31 wins out of their first 46 who finished below .500 the previous year, instead of requiring last place.