Blowing Smoak at Reporters

Let's engage in a little hypothetical hijinks.

Let's suppose your friend complained to you that he didn't understand why Oriole backstop Matt Wieters is selected to the All-Star squad while Mariner first-sacker Justin Smoak is considered a flop. The two are contemporaries from the Charleston, SC area and former first round picks in the MLB draft. Consequently they get compared 'round these parts.

After all. your companion notes, Smoak's 162-game average for the first four years of his career is a .223 BA with 21 HR and 71 RBI. Wieters' performance during the same period is .260, 21 & 79. It's a red pubic hair's difference, right?

Knowing the progressive sort that you are, no doubt you would patiently explain to your unenlightened friend that Smoak has managed to stay on the field more than 130 games in a season just once while Wieters has done so three times. You would point out that Triple Crown stats were demonstrated 33 years ago to be woefully inadequate to the storytelling task and that the difference in OPS, .749-.683 in favor of Wieters, is not insubstantial. 

You would further mention that Smoak is a lumbering first baseman, the lowest form of defensive player this side of the DH, and Wieters is a Gold Glove catcher, the most grueling position on the field. More to the point, the two should be compared to hitters at opposite ends of the offensive spectrum -- Wieters to catchers and Smoak to first basemen. Viewed against their position-mates, Wieters has been worth eight-and-a-half wins compared to a replacement level catcher while Smoak IS a replacement level first baseman. 

And that's just the offensive side of the equation. Accounting for their glovework takes the former to 14.7 wins against replacement in four years and the latter down to 2.7 wins BELOW replacement. In other words, an All-Star and a bust.


Sadly, you were not around to apprise the author of this story in my local paper of such considerations. And so, a professional journalist, whose area of expertise is supposedly sports, managed to pen this stunning piece of ignorance. He will not be fired or reprimanded or even educated because no one at his paper has the slightest awareness that they are living in the Dark Ages. 

And none of his knowledge-challenged colleagues or editors will be fired, reprimanded or educated themselves because neither their colleagues at other newspapers in South Carolina, or in the Southeast, or nearly anywhere, nor their TV or radio counterparts, nor virtually anyone else who is considered a sports reporter or commentator or analyst has the slightest idea about the advances in their field since they stopped learning anything new back in 1974.

And so they continue to peck out tripe like this on their IBM Selectrics, completely oblivious to the development in the interim of the IBM Wheelwriter, word processor, personal computer,  smartphone and tablet. They are the Amish of journalism, refusing to adopt advancements of science and technology, continuing to view the game as their great-grandfathers did with horses and buggy metrics.

Thirty-three years since Bill James's first Baseball Abstract. It'll be 34 years in March.