I figured before I hit the uncertain “real world” that lies ahead of me post-graduation (a lot of good these two Sport Management and Communication degrees will do me), I’d have a few yuks with a couple of e-friends from the Phillies forum world.  We’ve never met in real life (outside of Ruckus and I attending our first Phillies game on the SAME DAY – July 5th, 1995, Phillies v. Padres), so thankfully I don’t have to send these clowns Christmas cards.

So here it is… one more thing that my girlfriend will officially hate me for.  Add it to the growing list of things including my unmanly 2004 Honda Civic that has LED lights under the seats, quoting movies, baseball sim leagues, farting, and man-boobs.  I’m working on that last part.  Don’t want to look like Todd Coffey and his DD’s.

Tits

And finally:  Mets suck.  That is all.

Some of you may have already read my introduction the last time Long Drive briefly opened its doors to the public.  For those of you that didn’t, rejoice! for this version is about 53% more readable.  I’m The A Team, check out my theme song and trailer.

I’ve been brought aboard mostly for my familiarity with advanced statistics and scathing indictments of the Mets.  Being a first hand witness of Omar Minaya’s bungling of a second in-division foe has been a truly rewarding experience made all the richer by the play-by-play of The Contest.  But in all seriousness, my job isn’t to be resident Mets basher.  I think Chris can handle that just fine.

I’m here to talk stats, analyze trades, ruminate on the virtues of our various prospects, second guess management, and keep up with the latest hype.  I’m really mostly here to do that first thing.  When doing analysis at Long Drive, we’re going to be using a suite of stats that the casual fan will be unfamiliar with.  I will be trying my damnedest to explain why context adjusted statistics are more useful than the standard crap on the back of a baseball card without putting you to sleep.  Along this line of thought, I will be starting a roughly weekly “primer” series on helpful stats.  I put primer in quotes because these articles will be intentionally light on math and therefore not very primer-ish.  I do this for three reasons.  First, being a liberal arts grad, my own math chops aren’t really up to snuff when it comes to doing my own analysis.  I can import an excel document into Stata and run an ordinary least squares regression on it, and that’s about the extent of my ability.  I’m not even sure why someone would do that for baseball…  Second, I’m aware of my audience.  Chris’ claim to fame is calling people douchebags.  I can’t compete with that by discussing the various subtleties of different compilations of Wins Above Replacement.  Third and perhaps most important, all this shit has been done already by people with major sabermetric chops.  Why do a poor job re-writing someone else’s work when I can link to it, pop in a quote or two, and relate it back to something relevant to us Phillies fans.

(you should click that read more button!)

My first two articles in this series are already planned and I have high hopes that they will be well received.  One will be titled something like “Why Roy Halladay Shits on Johan Santana’s Face aka How to Use FIP/xFIP/tERA to Make Mets Fans Cry”.  Nothing like using recent trash talk to teach stats right?  The other will be about Philadelphia’s favorite son with the title, “Chase Utley, You Are the Man.”  I’m aware that dozens of entries at other blogs already have that title, but seriously, that phrase brings more goosebumps than the 2007 Phillies “Goosebumps” ad campaign (or the entire R.L. Stine series for that matter).

I wasn't fooled...

All this talk of stats may have some of you reflexively cringing.  You may be wondering, “but what about clutch? what about the intangibles?”  Fear not!  Despite the well publicized (and highly exaggerated) discord between the statheads and scouts, no saberist worth his salt will tell you that any of their beautiful numbers is perfect or that scouting isn’t as much or more important than statistics.  For both real decision makers and us internet baseball junkies/trolls, context neutral statistics serve several meaningful purposes.  Here are just some of those:

• They give decision makers a tool to quantify an approximate dollar value for a player
• They serve as a useful semi-objective means to double-check the subjective work of scouts
• When scouts and stats agree, decision makers can be very confident in the assessment
• When they disagree, decision makers can focus their resources to figure out why, stats could pick up on something the scouts failed to see and vice versa
• Stats can help identify inefficiencies in the game, see A’s and OBP circa 2003 or defense and Rays (2008), Mariners (2009), Rangers (2009), Red Sox/rest of the decent GM’s (2010)
• Stats allow fans to evaluate players with minimal actual scouting
• Stats help us to identify which fantasy performers are likely to breakout/collapse, see my trade of Emilio Bonifacio for Mark Buehrle and Nate McLouth last year after week 1
• Stats let us write articles that definitively say that Roy Halladay is better than Johan Santana
• Stats help us make Mets fans cry
• Stats hate Jeff Francouer

nice catch clown...

Let me repeat my exclamation to Fear not!  My articles will not be totally stats reliant.  In the absence of scouting reports (and personal scouting) I will rely heavily on statistics, but I will also seek out that scouting data and use it whenever possible.  I like scouting data more than stats data.  Unfortunately, it’s rather costly to get personal scouting data on everyone I’m going to talk about in this blog.  I watch a lot of baseball, but I’m only one man and I have a job, girlfriend, and video game addiction to maintain on top of the time spent writing, watching, and reading baseball.  It’s not like I’m a family man, blood spatter expert, and serial killer of serial killers like Dexter, but my plate’s not empty either.  I will also occasionally call people douchebags.

If anyone is up for some homework, I highly recommend fangraphs.com as a starting point to self-learning advanced stats.  If you ever have any questions, please post away in the comments or you can email me at pitchin432ATyahooDOTcom.  Until next time, I’ll leave you with the latest shenanigans from Jim Bowden.  Be sure to see the last 10 seconds.  http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/article/jim_bowdens_sabermetrics_primer/

At least in the early going, you may not see as many posts from me as the other Horsemen of the Apocalypse, or Musketeers, or Amigos, or whatever the hell we’re going to end up calling ourselves. One reason is that I’m getting ready to move several hundred miles. The other is that I already maintain a delightful little non-baseball blog by the name of Bullsnark! If you like to see stupid people get ripped a new asshole, or you find yourself especially fond of my impeccable way with words, go ahead and check it out.

Among the stuff I’ve got planned is a comprehensive review of Ruben Amaro, Jr. ‘s tenure as general manager to this point. That’s probably going to end up a series, both because it figures to be long and detailed, and to make it look like I’m contributing more to LD than I actually am. Spoiler alert: I am a harsher critic than most regarding Amaro.

I’m not going to throw the dizzying array of statistical analysis at you that The A Team will – because he is way, way more of a nerd than I will ever be – but I am very much sabermetrically-inclined, and it’s rare that he and I aren’t on the same page. I just prefer to leaven the numbers a bit with acerbic wit. Think Fire Joe Morgan, with less talent. (Cut me some slack, those dudes are actually getting paid to write in Hollywood.) Don’t be surprised to see me emulate that basic style a few times, when one of our many God-awful beat writers lays a traditionalist turd in the sports pages. I’m placing the over/under on time into the season before Bill Conlin says something dumb at an inning and a third, and taking the under.

To me, using sabermetrics is less about crunching numbers or running computer simulations in my mother’s basement than simple common sense. Of course a hitter has no control over how many guys are on base when he comes to the plate. Of course you should use your best reliever when you’re clinging to a one-run lead and the bases are juiced, rather than with a three-run lead to start the ninth. Of course batting average is a terrible way to evaluate offensive production because it pretends a single is equal to a home run, and that walks don’t exist. So, while I’ll throw stuff like wOBA and FIP out there with regularity, I’m not going to be busting out leverage charts or regression lines.

I will, however, contribute to the hallowed LONG DRIVE tradition of remarkably shitty MS Paint work. And, in the end, is that not what man has dreamt of since first he looked up at the stars? (A million e-points to whoever gets that reference.)