SPORTS pic.twitter.com/sv69FiEIcm
— ParadigmShift35 (@NAWTADIGM) November 16, 2013
BASEBALL
Another year of MLB award voting came and went, and once again, there was controversy. AL MVP winner Miguel Cabrera had a truly great year, but he was still clearly behind Mike Trout in terms of being the best all-around player in baseball.* That said, the rest of the voting was actually pretty reasonable. I even agreed with 4 of the 5 other winners (and Max Scherzer was a fine selection for the other award, although I know at least some of the writers did it for the wrong reasons).
*In the NL, the voters went the other (and correct) direction, picking the all-around CF over the slugging corner infielder. This would be interesting if it weren't for the one variable that explains everything: playoffs. McCutchen and Cabrera's teams made the playoffs, hence they won the awards. Sigh.
While none of the winners surprised me, I can always count on examining the full results (on the BBWAA site) for a few interesting nuggets (and good laughs). Full ballot reveals also lead to some new areas of discussion about the relative merits of other players besides the main contenders. These discussions are usually glossed over in advance of the awards because people mostly like to speculate on who will win. This singular focus does a disservice to all the great players who come up short, which is too bad when there is a loaded year like the NL in 2013.
Of special interest to me (for reasons that will quickly become clear) were Joey Votto, Paul Goldschmidt, and Carlos Gomez. These are not the only notable runners up. In fact, they probably aren't even the three best runners up. However, every single one of their stat lines indicates an MVP-type season:
Goldschmidt: .302/.401/.551 (156 wRC+), 36 HR, 15 SB, 6.4 fWAR
Votto: .305/.435/.491 (156 wRC+), 24 HR, 1 infield flyball (!), 6.2 fWAR
Gomez: .284/.338/.506 (130 wRC+), 24 HR, 40 SB, +26 UZR, +38 DRS (!), 7.6 fWAR
Gomez leads the other 2 by a bit in fWAR, but you probably want to regress those defensive numbers a bit (while still acknowledging his awesomeness in CF), so they all appear to make a pretty even case. They are so even, that I put them 6-7-8 in my own meaningless ballot. However the voters, being the lovers of RBI that they are, put Goldschmidt ahead of these other two by a good margin. Not every voter agreed with this line of thinking, as a few put Goldy in the same range that I did. This angered fellow Diamondback and noted Twitterer Brandon McCarthy. His tweet about the matter evolved into a long chain about the relative merits of other candidates as well. Here was my contribution:
Now, Brandon McCarthy is one of the most stat-friendly major leaguers there is, so I don't want to pillory him for this. When you spent the vast majority of the past 8 months playing with someone as awesome at baseball as Paul Goldschmidt, I can certainly understand the desire to see him celebrated as much as possible. That said, this whole debate between Votto, Goldy, and Gomez gets to the heart of an important thing about Sabermetrics that is too often glossed over: There is very rarely a correct answer to debates such as these.
You may very well point to WAR or something like that and say that Goldschmidt is better than Votto because he was 0.2 WAR ahead of him. The problem with that is that there are enough margins for error in the components that make up WAR (especially the defensive components), that we can't say anything definitively for such small separations. Furthermore, there are a lot of things that aren't in WAR that may very well determine value. Areas such as sequencing and clutch hitting haven't been found to be particularly predictive, but that doesn't mean there aren't some aspects of those areas that may indicate real value. And then there are small things like defensive shifts that almost certainly have value, but we haven't been able to turn them into useful individual stats yet. WAR is awesome and is our best look yet at the total value of a player, but it isn't yet the final word on the matter.
The main point to take away from all of this is that, like most things in the world, very few of these awards debates have clear-cut answers. Yes, I'm pretty sure Mike Trout is the best player in baseball, but after that there are a bunch of gray areas. Rather than thinking we have all of the answers, let's embrace debate honestly, and appreciate great players for what they are. Goldschmidt's dinger prowess, Votto's insane eye, and Gomez's range are all things that should be celebrated by baseball fans everywhere. Don't let the awards process convince you otherwise.
COLLEGE FOOTBALL
This past Saturday was as good of a day of football as we've seen this season. Ed Orgeron pulled off the biggest win of his career, beating Stanford in the Coliseum. Duke ran for all the yards against Miami, in a game that put them into the driver's seat in the Coastal division. UCF held off a surprisingly feisty Temple team with one of the best catches you'll ever see. Michigan beat Northwestern largely due to an insanely well-disciplined field goal unit. And of course, Auburn beat Georgia with a deflected heave on fourth down in one of the craziest final quarters ever.
Of course, if you know me, you'll know that I want to talk about something much more mundane. In this case, it was something from the Oklahoma-Iowa State game during the early timeslot. Chris Simms was the color man, which continues the trend of ex-Buccaneer players invading the media. While I generally support this as a good thing, it unfortunately gives them a lot of chance to say stupid things.
I'll paraphrase what he said, because Google tells me that apparently no one else on the internet heard this and was inspired enough to write about it. The setup was that he was asked about whether or not he thought Baylor deserved consideration for the title game, and responded with something like this: "They're really good, but we haven't seen if their style of football can win a title yet, so I can't put them in the top two." There are a couple of hopefully obvious problems with this:
1. There's a massive circular reasoning problem there. If the people in power (of which Chris Simms isn't one, thankfully) don't consider teams that haven't won titles before, then titleless teams they shall remain.
2. Chris Simms said this with presumably a straight face while broadcasting a game involving the first team to win a title with a spread offense (Oklahoma in 2000....you can make an argument for Florida's 1996 team as well). Yes, Baylor's iteration of the spread is dialed up to 11, but a lot of the principles are similar to what Oklahoma still does to this day.
This leads to my main point: Sometimes people are so blinded by tradition and the golden days of college football past, that they fail to see what's right in front of them. In this case, stick-in-the-muds who shrug off Baylor's success this year are missing out on one of the most exciting teams of all time. One of the strengths of college football is its adherence to tradition. The hallowed ghosts that live in the decades-old stadiums are often brought to mind when we see a classic uniform like Alabama's, or hear a name like Notre Dame. In spite of how much this respect for the past gives life to college football, it can also hold it back. Thankfully, there seems to be enough impetus within the game to overcome the lines of thinking that Simms' statement embodies. More and more people are appreciating and even celebrating the uniqueness of what Baylor does. Next year, we will have a four-team playoff, and finally playing players for their work appears to be close to happening as well. The traditions of college football are good, but when they become they alone are the only reason for continuing them, it's time for them to come to an end.
COLLEGE BASKETBALL
I was in Carbondale, Illinois visiting a friend this past weekend. We spent most of the time watching football, playing pong, and eating pizza and platters of meat. All of that was great, but being the Valley fan that I am, I just had to make my way over to the SIU Arena to catch a game while I was in town. As luck would have it, the Billikens from St. Louis were in town. Ever since the 2012 squad pushed Michigan State to the brink in the round of 32, I've been a big fan of this group of players. A lot of the key contributors are still around for one more season, so I'm making sure to catch as many games as I can. But until I saw this game on the schedule a couple days before my trip, I had no idea I'd be able to see them in person.
The SIU Arena is quite nice. It was difficult to judge just how rowdy it could be since it was only about three quarters full, but the set up seemed conducive to creating a difficult atmosphere. The stands on the baselines go all the way up to the ceiling without a break in the middle, which would create an impressive wall of noise and mayhem if entirely filled with students (it was not).
The game itself was quite good. SIU jumped out to an early lead as big as 13 on their ability to get to the basket, both through one-on-one drives and deft passing. This led to a bunch of free throws for the Salukis and a little early foul trouble for the Billikens. Luckily for SLU, their shooting heated up right before halftime, with Mike McCall and Jake Barnett both making multiple threes. When the teams came back out for the second half, Saint Louis looked like a team that remembered how to play defense, and quickly built up a lead that they would not relinquish. It wasn't their greatest game (Evans didn't dominate, and Jett only made 0.5 spectacular defensive plays), but it was a relatively easy win on the road against a decent opponent.
After watching one game and looking at a couple of other box scores, I don't know exactly what to make out of this year's Saint Louis squad. The defense is still good, but it's probably not quite up to the level of the last couple of teams (losing Cody Ellis, Cory Remekun, and Kwamain Mitchell will do that). The Billikens don't shoot particularly well from 3 (34% last year, 28.3% this year), though the quick spurt that got them back in the game suggests that their best offense might be one where they launch a lot of threes. Dwayne Evans is the reigning player of the year in the A-10, but he had a pretty non-descript day against a team without a lot of effective size (318th in the country). I still think that St. Louis is one of the teams to beat in their conference (along with VCU), but there will be a few questions that Jim Crews and his staff will have to answer if they want to make a deep run in the tournament.
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