I think avoiding biting analysis too early in the season is a great aspiration, but I know that I personally couldn’t do it. I may recognize that, intellectually, it’s unfair – but it’s just the nature of the fan beast. I’m not saying I want to be the guy who talks about something (or bitches about something) because he needs something to talk about, but it’s probably my message board background. Ironically – given this post – I’m a knee-jerk kind of guy. I try to fight it, but if a player – *cough* Milton Bradley *cough* – is sucking balls through five games or fifty games, I’m gonna get grouse-y.

This is not, of course, a defense of the beat writers.

I’m generally against any kind of analysis until there has been around 100 games played too. I think at that point we have a decent idea how that specific team is going to perform over the next 60 games. You still have to regress quite a bit, but at that point there is a decent amount of information available to perhaps influence opinions you may have had before the season began. Anything prior to that is, in my opinion, relatively ignorant to do because it shows little grasp for statistics and the importance of small sample sizes.

I’ve been thinking about writing something on Mike Fontenot, but each time I start I’m led to the same place immediately: I simply don’t have much additional information now than I had before the season began. It’s true that at this point Fontenot’s production is more than 1 standard deviation away from what we expected, but it’s still not statistically significant difference. In other words, his production is still within what we know what his true skill level prior to the season. He’s underperformed, but there’s still no reason to adjust what we thought going into the season.

I don’t write about Fontenot because although he’s not performed anywhere near expectations, he’s still performed within a range that makes it statistically insignificant. To add numbers to this discussion, Fontenot’s wOBA is .307. .300 is replacement level so he’s played quite poorly. .335 or so is average. He’s had 130 plate appearances. The variance in that amount of plate time from his true skill level is about 0.050. Fontenot’s true skill level prior to the start of the season was about .350. He’s performed within expectations. Anywhere from .300 to .400 is where we would expect Fontenot to be after 130 plate appearances. He’s sucked for sure, but it’s not surprising because of the sample.

Many people would jump at the idea of analyzing him through this much of season and it’s not only the wrong thing to do, it also shows us that someone doesn’t understand statistics and/or this game.

This is why I despise beat writers. All of them. Yes, Bruce Miles is better than the others, but being the best of the beat writers in Chicago is like being the tallest midget.

Sorry for rambling.

I think you’re right to caution against knee-jerk defenses of Cub players just because they’re Cub players, though. Close reading and thinking critically is something we should all encourage, because God knows the beat guys won’t!

Still, I’m learning.

Telander likes to arrogate a certain authority to himself in his writings, but if he knows so much, it seems odd that he wasn’t so boldly suspicious in 1989, whe, as we know from the Mitchell Report a “serious” steroid problem existed in MLB, and as an SI reporter, Telander had sufficient access to break that story. But remained silent, and now that it’s en vogue to be a skeptical sportswriter, he sees fit to smear Theriot (whether intentionally or not, it’s how his poorly argued and even more poorly researched article works) and blame MLB and the players while ignoring the role that the silence and “see no evil, speak no evil” approach of MSM sportswriters played in the steroid era. His piece in clumsy, inaccurate, and alarmingly myopic. A serious topic deserves serious argument. His piece doesn’t rise to that standard.

Muskat is not as terrible as folks in the Cublogoverse make her out to be. I think she’s constricted by her contacts. I think I’d give the nod to Miles as my favorite Cubs beat writer. Of course, I think there are several bloggers that I would put above all of them, but that’s another story.

If Theriot hitting 5 home runs in may is what got Telander to write the article he did about the bigger picture then he just isn’t very smart. I don’t really think it matters why he wrote it. I think it was because of theriot and you don’t, but the end result is the same: it proves Telander is an idiot.

If he wrote it for the reasons you suggest then he’s an idiot because he hasn’t the foggiest clue about sample size and somehow compared what Theriot is doing to that of Bonds and McGwire and A-Rod and Manny.

I don’t think telander is smart enough to do what you suggest. His past wok suggest someone who isn’t very bright and someone who has no understanding of the game.

I might be giving him too much credit, but the veiled idiocy in the article, to me, is intentional.

I’m glad to hear that fans are getting past the steroid thing – it’s just a matter of time, and it’s for the better. But the thing is, when a guy like Manny Ramirez (regardless of how suspicious we should have been) tests positive, it’s huge. It brings it all back. And it sucks.

Oh, and I’m with you on the guys who get paid to write about the Cubs. Some are good, some are merely ok, and some are terrible and make me wish one of the major publications would stumble onto this here web site sometime.