Toward the end, Bill writes ...
When I talk about ground ball pitchers getting hurt, I’m not really talking about guys like Adam Wainwright and Andy Pettitte, with Ground Ball Rates around 38% or Ground Ball /Fly Ball Ratios around 5 to 4. In that context, I was talking about the guys with really extreme Ground Ball tendencies, like Chien-Ming Wang and Brandon Webb. Those guys, it seems to me, always self-destruct after a couple of years, unless their name is spelled “D-e-r-e-k-L-o-w-e”. I don’t know why.
... and he concludes, “However, many of the statements which have been made by sabermetric advocates of ground ball pitchers are also inaccurate. But I will leave it for them to clean up their own messes.”
I think that’s fair. I think some of us just sort of assumed that since home runs are bad and ground-ball pitchers tend to give up fewer home runs, then ground-ball pitchers are good. But it turns out the difference between ground-ball pitchers and fly-ball pitchers tends to be exaggerated. The only significant difference is between extreme ground-ball pitchers—of whom, there aren’t many—and fly-ball pitchers ... and Bill argues that those extreme ground-ball hitters usually get hurt after two or three years anyway.
In fairness to extreme ground-ball pitchers, Bill hasn’t offered in this essay any systematic injury analysis; just a long list of sinker-ballers who did get hurt. It’s a compelling list, to be sure. Maybe there’s something particularly dangerous about throwing sinkers that sink enough and are fast enough to fool the world’s greatest batters.
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1. Jason Michael(s) Bourn Identity Crisis Posted: March 22, 2013 at 08:22 AM (#4394078)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 %
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.
That study doesn't relate to the speculation that extreme groundball pitchers are more injury prone, which appears to be anecdotal.
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.
That's pretty much how I view everything that comes from his website.
"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"
I doubt it, but he seems to have a pretty good HOM shot. Kevin Brown was another durable groundballer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!]).
I must have been drunk when they sent out that memo.
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.
And, like all civilized people, I use the Oxford comma.
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!
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.
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.
What an #######
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.
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.
I remember 2012 like it was only last year.
That's a shortcut for automatically inserting a period. It still only types one space.
My brother, Thomas, and Steve like having sex with farm animals.
I didn't know Oxford had an animal husbandry major. #the3wassilentyousee
EDIT: The two space after period. And I agree with #47, but sometimes it looks horrible and I switch for aesthetic reasons.
Oxford comma can be safely ignored with better writing, such as:
Steve and my brother Thomas like having sex with farm animals.
Sure, but that's true with all ambiguous sentences like this. The challenge, frequently not met, is recognizing when the sentence can be interpreted another way.
Part of why it is going away is in online use, consecutive whitespace is ignored, so double, triple spacing has no effect. Your browser will treat it as a single space. So you guys are welcome to pound out as many spaces as you'd like, but us typography nerds won't be subjected to this bizarre practice.
If you are absolutely set on double-spacing you can put in non-breaking spaces manually by typing non-breaking spaces using:
Here is an example. Doesn't it look stupid?
The sentence in your example, if it's referring to just two people, would properly be punctuated as "My brother Thomas and Steve like having sex with farm animals." No ambiguity there. Written with the commas, it can only refer to three different people. I know because Ben Yagoda told me.
But y'all can do what you want.
(I also prefer punctuation outside the quotation marks, but not living in England, I'm stuck
With the US punctuation rules on that one.)
This caused me to look at the source code on the Hey, Bill page at Bill James Online... and yes, James actually does use 2-5 consecutive ampersand-nbsp's after every sentence, varying the number every time. Direct quote from the source:
I replaced the &'s with !'s to stop the interwebs from converting my non-breaking space tags to actual non-breaking spaces. But you get the idea.
I actually didn't know people stopped using double spaces until this article. Very strange. I just (Oct 12) finished an MS thesis paper and definitely used double spaces throughout, and they were very anal about formatting, so I'm surprised.
Big "believer" in 47/quotation punctuation.
The challenge is quitting those farm animals. You wouldn't believe how gentle they can be.
I negotiate and draft contracts, and there isn't a lawyer in my biz that doesn't use 2 spaces after a period. It's never been an issue.
Makes me long for the good old days of no-registration BBTF, when a thread hijack was generally a lot more rude and clever. Cookie Monster, where art thou?
Maybe this is why firms won't hire me. I need to go edit my resume now.
I don't mean to be mean, but instead of complaining about thread hijacks, maybe people should try and steer the thread to in topic comments. It's ridiculous to see people who have not participated in the thread on topic, to then pop in here and complain about thread hijacks.
There were plenty of in topic comments on this thread, a hijack only happens when the thread doesn't show speed enough to prevent a hijack. Come in and join the discussion. Prevent the hijack with on topic discussion, instead of a piss and moan about a thread hijack.
FanGraphs.
Are you from Europe?
This was one that cost me an A on my first brief in law school, the punctuation goes inside the quotation mark more often than not. The general rule is to put the punctuation inside the quotation mark. The exception would be if you asked a question, but your quote wasn't a question. For example:
Did you just say, "hello"?
As opposed to:
Did you just ask, "what's up?"
Both are correct, what is not correct is:
The sign changed from "Walk", to "Don't walk".
This is not the rule anywhere other than America, as near as I can tell.
edit: btw, this is another one of those things they get right over there. The overall ease of the metric system leads me to believe that were baseball created in Europe sabremetrics would have been invented and perfected in the 1950s.
Like we have perfected football stats? If baseball was invented in Europe there would have been one stat, runs. RBI? Bah, nerd.
If it shows how non-globalized my thought process is, I had literally no idea what you were talking about for like 5 minutes. That's how long it took me to remember Soccer was a thing, and it was made in Europe, and ya'll call it football. Do you call American football gridiron? Is that really a thing or just something people are trying to get everybody to say?
In my experience you call it "American Football".
Sorry, I should correct that for UK punctuation. 'American Football'.
"American Football", or a suitable translation, like "Amerikansk Fotboll". Of course, there is seldom any need to distinguish between the sport and the league here, nobody cares about local leagues or college ball, so "NFL" works too.
Interesting. When I was learning Arabic the book always translated it as gridiron, and I was wondering if that was a European thing as I didn't know where else that word could have come from.
I am not. I just think punctuation outside the quotation makes more sense. Much like #61, I also negotiate and draft contracts for a living. I have begun to follow my preferred approach to punctuating quotations in my documents (the European approach). I have found many who are willing to to accept this approach as correct. I have also found that lawyers aren't all that militant on the two spaces thing.
Interesting article, and I have little doubt that its conclusion--that capital letters are making their way out of our written language--is correct. I'm not sure whether it'll take merely 30 years or 100, but that's the direction the language is moving.
More generally, whether crotchety old whiners like myself like it or not, txtspk isn't just a teenage fad, it's English evolving in front of us. I can foresee a time in the not-too-distant future--probably not during my lifetime, but probably during my grandchildren's--whn vwls n a lot of sprflus cnsnnts fal nto gnrl dsuse.
The Gdanskians are way ahead of us on this.
Only if you have more than one brother. If you have one brother and toss in his name anyway, it's your brother, Thomas, ...
Player W GS ERA+ IPCarl Hubbell 253 433 130 3590.1
Joe McGinnity 246 381 120 3441.1
Stan Coveleski 215 385 127 3082.0
Billy Pierce 211 432 119 3306.2
Tim Hudson 197 405 126 2682.1
David Cone 194 419 121 2898.2
CC Sabathia 191 383 125 2564.1
Dutch Leonard 191 375 119 3218.1
Jimmy Key 186 389 122 2591.2
Dave Stieb 176 412 122 2895.1
Kevin Appier 169 402 121 2595.1
This suggests he's got something of a HOM case already in terms of quality and longevity, but of course without the high IP and thus Wins totals that prevailed for such starters in the early 20th century and got Hubbell and McGinnity and Coveleski to the HOF. (Hey, there's how to avoid the ####ing Oxford comma, just keep repeating "and.")
Here's a list with the same criteria, but "through age 36" instead of complete career:
Player W GS ERA+ IPEddie Plank 251 406 123 3432.2
Whitey Ford 232 422 132 3053.1
Warren Spahn 224 404 127 3231.0
Tim Hudson 197 405 126 2682.1
CC Sabathia 191 383 125 2564.1
Kevin Brown 180 399 130 2776.1
Jimmy Key 180 378 122 2512.1
Dave Stieb 175 409 123 2845.0
Kevin Appier 169 402 121 2595.1
Hudson doesn't have some of the charismatic accomplishments of Plank or Ford or Spahn (another way!), but if he keeps cranking out the 16-9 seasons for another few years, he's going to have some impressive career totals.
Oh definitely. I've only been a lawyer for less than a year now, and I'm still learning what I can and can't ignore from law school, but I knew all along that lawyers and judges are much less demanding than a legal writing professor. That said, I have a few appeals going before the Arkansas Court of Appeals, and I've been told by multiple clerks to make sure my briefs would garner at least a B in legal writing.
In Aus/NZ it's about an equal split among "gridiron," "American football" and "NFL." It is way more popular than baseball and, surprisingly to me, the NBA. The latter could be an age thing and maybe the kids are more into NBA ... certainly you see a lot of NBA jerseys around and Lebron is used to sell shoes.
The metric system can get bent. "190 centimeters? That's so much shorter than 205!"
Everyone falls off. Even Picasso. Matisse was reduced at the end of his life to doing cut-paper compositions. One reason we're stuck with such shitty mainstream media work is that the people who are good when they're young get to stick around forever. How else do you explain Eddie Murphy?
But, yeah, sadly, Bill's not interesting these days. He wasn't all that interesting, either, as early as the 1990s. We'll always have the abstracts, though. That was a Ruthian peak.
I actually had heard somewhere that one space was the new standard for word processing. I did not pay much attention at the time, but I guess it is the new wave, as I am seeing it more and more when I am sent documents in Word or WP. Still, as a long time touch typist, putting two spaces after the period is pretty much a matter of muscle memory now.
I was taught to NOT use the oxford comma. I think it looks odd when I see it.
I was taught to put the punctuation inside the quotation marks, and I mostly do, but sometimes it just looks wrong.
As to Caps Lock, I hate that key because there is some combination of keys that I keep hitting by accident that turns on the all caps function in the font, so that even when I hit the Caps Lock key again to turn it off, it stays on. I have to go into "font" on the ribbon and uncheck "all caps". I would be very happy to see that key go away.
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