Mitch Albom: Miggy's award a win for fans, defeat for stats geeks
The eyes have it.
Starting with a homophone. Writing. Righting.
In a battle of computer analysis versus people who still watch baseball as, you know, a sport, what we saw with our Detroit vision was what most voters saw as well:
A nightmarish hellscape of desolation? Broken dreams? Maybe Kid Rock wandering around?
Is Mitch’s assertion here that sports are not meant to be viewed critically? Sure don’t need to pay all these sports writers so much goddamn money to manufacture drama and storylines then, do we? Let’s all sit quietly and take in the game as, you know, a sport and stop writing stupid elegies on how Jim Leyland’s success as a manager makes him a shining reflection of Detroit. Because baseball is just a game, you nerdy nerdbombers.
Miguel Cabrera is the Most Valuable Player in the American League this year.
No, he just won the award. Probably going to come back to that one a lot.
"It means a lot," he told reporters over the phone from Miami. "I'm very thankful. ... I thought it was gonna be very close."
So did everyone. But the debate ended Thursday night when the results were announced, with Cabrera earning 22 of the 28 first-place votes from the Baseball Writers' Association of America. It reinforced what Tigers fans have been saying all season: This guy is a monster.
The tautology here is breathtaking. Cabrera deserved to win the award because he won the award. Look at all that award winning! This guy is a monster.
It also answered the kind of frenzied cyberspace argument that never shadowed baseball 20 years ago but may never stop shadowing it now.
Not to be too much of a dick here (I’ll save that for later, believe me, it’s going to happen), but there weren’t many cyberspace arguments about, well, anything 20 years ago. Cyberspace was barely a thing. Also, one might argue that continuing to refer to “cyberspace” as a thing further illuminates what a luddite Mitch Albom is, and that his understanding of the internet comes almost exclusively from Angelina Jolie’s dialogue in “Hackers.”
Statistics geeks insisted Cabrera was less worthy than Angels rookie centerfielder Mike Trout. Not because Trout's traditional baseball numbers were better. They weren't. Cabrera had more home runs (44), more runs batted in (139) and a better batting average (.330) than Trout and everyone else in the American League. It gave him the sport's first Triple Crown in 45 years.
Yes, Cabrera won the first Triple Crown in 45 years. He should win the 2012 MVP because in 2007 Alex Rodriguez led the AL in HR and RBI, but couldn’t pull off a higher batting average that Magglio Ordonez. Magglio Ordonez is why Miguel Cabrera deserves the MVP Award.
Telex machines were an amazing piece of technology in 1967. Some people still own telex machines because they value a simpler, more familiar world that they can easily understand even though telex machines have been superseded many times over by better more efficient technology. Seeing a telex machine in working order sure would be neat since it’s been such a long time since I have seen one, but most people would still prefer to use the general betterness of email rather than an outmoded telex machine. [Also true for baseball statistics.]
But Trout excelled in the kind of numbers that weren't even considered a few years ago, mostly because A) They were impossible to measure, and B) Nobody gave a hoot.
Trout did not excel in numbers. He excelled at baseball. The numbers just reflected that.
Today, every stat matters. There is no end to the appetite for categories -- from OBP to OPS to WAR. I mean, OMG! The number of triples hit while wearing a certain-colored underwear is probably being measured as we speak.
ZOMFG ROFLMAO! The most informative thing about this paragraph is that it lets everyone know that Mitch Albom spends a little too much time thinking about baseball players’ underwear.
So in areas such as "how many Cabrera home runs would have gone out in Angel Stadium of Anaheim"
First off, this is really not that “advanced” of a stat. Even Mitch Albom must have looked at home-road splits before. We’ve been keeping those for a while, and the peculiarity of ballparks (Polo Grounds, Fenway, etc.) have long been the shit that makes old guard writers touch themselves. Don’t pretend now that you don’t like that shit. That’s being an asshole.
And furthermore, in order to determine which home runs would have gone out at Angel Stadium, nerdy stat dweebstains pretty much just look where the ball landed and compare it to the fence distance. That is, they look for where the ball landed and compare it to the fence distance once someone beams a clip of the home run into their subterranean stat lairs. They are not allowed to look directly at a baseball.
or "batting average when leading off an inning" or "Win Probability Added," Trout had the edge. At least this is what we were told.
I mean, did you do the math? I didn't. I like to actually see the sun once in a while.
Yes, he just said, “No, I didn’t do any research for this article I’m about to write. I like to just throw feces at my computer screen. Preferably outside.”
And again: HAHAHA GREAT POINT MITCH THOSE FUCKING DWEEBS NEVER LEAVE THEIR COMPUTER ROOMS WHAT FUCKING DORKHOLES HAHABNVBSJS@#$Wer23W
Plus he has intangibles
Besides, if you live in Detroit, you didn't need a slide rule.Deriding slide rules is the most cliched fucking thing in the world. I have no idea how to use a slide rule. If I saw one, I probably wouldn’t even know that’s what it was. Slide rules, also not necessary to calculate OBP. Maybe that’s why Mitch Albom hates stats so much: No matter how hard he shakes his slide rule, no advanced metrics fall out.
This was an easy choice. People here watched Cabrera, 29, tower above the game in 2012. Day after day, game after game, he was a Herculean force. Valuable? What other word was there?
You tell me, you’re the asshole who gets paid to write things.
How many late-inning heroics? How many clutch hits?
I understand that these are all rhetorical questions, but the arguments would be a lot stronger if they were actually backed up with evidence. Just saying.
And he only missed one game all year.
We’re a whole lot of words into the article, and this is only like the third legitimately good point made in favor of Cabrera’s MVP candidacy.
"During the season, a lot of guys tell me I'm gonna be the MVP," Cabrera said, laughing. "But they said the same thing to Trout."
Yes, it's true, Trout is faster, Trout is a better defensive player, Trout is a leadoff hitter, and Trout edged Cabrera in several of those made-for-Microsoft categories.
This is supposed to be an article about why Miguel Cabrera is better than Mike Trout.
But if you are going to go molten deep into intangibles, why stop at things like "which guy hit more homers into the power alleys?" (A real statistic, I am sorry to say.)
Intangible: adjective
- unable to be touched; not having physical presence: the moonlight made things seem intangible
- difficult or impossible to define or understand; vague and abstract: the rose symbolized something intangible about their relationship
- (of an asset or benefit) not constituting or represented by a physical object and of a value not precisely measurable: intangible business property like patents
Everything Mitch just listed is inherently tangible. We can argue as to whether or not our oh-so-tangible measurement of fielding is still a little flawed, but we can measure for better or worse everything Mitch just listed. And - - tangibly - - Mike Trout was better.
Why not also consider such intangibles as locker-room presence? Teammates love playing around -- and around with -- Miggy. He helps the room.
Implication by comparison: Mike Trout is a registered sex offender.
How about his effect on pitchers? Nobody wanted the embarrassment of him slamming a pitch over the wall. The amount of effort pitchers expended on Cabrera or the guy batting ahead of him surely took its toll and affected the pitches other batters saw. Why not find a way to measure that? (Don't worry. I'm sure someone is working on it as we speak.)
Implication by comparison: Mike Trout, hitter of 30 home runs, hit almost no home runs. Mike Trout, leadoff batter, was not a concern for pitchers at all (even though an at bat to leadoff an inning is almost twice as important as batting with 2 outs and no one on).
I guess a guy who steals almost 50 bases in a season doesn’t have any effect on pitchers.
What about the debilitating power of a three-run homer?
Miguel Cabrera hit 3 three-run homers this year, out-debilitating Mike Trout by 1 super-debilitating three-run homer.
How many opposing teams slumped after Cabrera muscled one out? How about team confidence? You heard everyone from Prince Fielder to Justin Verlander speak in awed tones about being on the same team as Cabrera. Doesn't that embolden teammates and bring out their best?
Most times, people say nice things about their teammates. Every time, what people say about their teammates is not relevant to anyone’s baseball value.
So does this mean that Justin Verlander wasn’t trying his hardest last season, because Cabrera wasn’t the MVP that year? But Verlander was the 2011 MVP. So maybe Verlander emboldened Cabrera and brought out his best this year. So I guess Verlander should be the MVP again.
How about the value of a guy who could shift from first to third base -- as Cabrera did this past season -- to make room for Fielder? Ask manager Jim Leyland how valuable that is.
According to FanGraphs, Cabrera went from being a fairly-better-than-average first baseman at 2 earned runs fewer than average to a fairly-terrible third baseman at 4.6 earned runs more than average. If Jim Leyland cared to look at these simple number comparisons, he would say that this was not a valuable move. He might also tell you that Prince Fielder only being 1.3 earned runs better than average at first base (the acquisition that precipitated Cabrera’s move across the diamond) did not make Cabrera’s move any more valuable. Then Jim Leyland would probably light four cigarettes at once, clap his hands and mutter “Let’s Go” as he walked away from you.
And regardless, you know what’s more valuable than that? Being the best fucking centerfielder in the league. And that’s the kind of thing you can see by just watching baseball games. Does anyone actually think that Albom watched games that the Tigers weren’t in?
How about the fact that Cabrera's team made the playoffs and Trout's did not? ("Yes," countered Team Trout, "but the Angels actually won more games.")
Thanks! I am a member of Team Trout and was justing going to say that. You are either not arguing anything, or arguing the opposite of what you want to.
How about the fact that Cabrera played the whole season while Trout started his in the minors? ("Yes," said the Trout Shouters, "but the Angels won a greater percentage with Trout than Detroit did with Cabrera.")
Oooh, I like Trout’s Shouters better. We’re gonna vote on the name change the next time my mom says I can have friends over.
Trout was still better despite missing those games, and the Angels won a greater percentage of games with and without Trout than the Tigers did with Cabrera.
How about this? How about that? The fact is, voters are not instructed to give more credence to any one category than another.
But when they do, they pick the wrong categories.
Twenty-eight sportswriters, two from each AL city, decide, in their own minds, what is "valuable" and who displayed it the most.
They chose Cabrera.
By an overwhelming majority.
“I burned The Five People You Meet in Heaven, so it must have been worth burning.”
And sportswriters are so fucking smart. They give us well-written, thoughtful, insightful pieces like this one.
In the end, memories were more powerful than microchips.
Here “powerful” means “subjective.”
A rival for the future
Which, by the way, speaks to a larger issue about baseball. It is simply being saturated with situational statistics. What other sport keeps coming up with new categories to watch the same game?Every sport.
That’s the beauty of it though: you can watch baseball and totally ignore all of that. None of it matters if you’re just trying to go sit in the sun, watch a game, and drink beers. But when you’re charged with determining who the most valuable player was, you need to go beyond what’s enjoyable, and what’s subjectively fun and interesting, and make an honest effort to determine who is most worthy of the award. And it sure seems like the majority of voters did not bother doing that.
A box score now reads like an annual report. And this WAR statistic -- which measures the number of wins a player gives his team versus a replacement player of minor league/bench talent (honestly, who comes up with this stuff?) -- is another way of declaring, "Nerds win!"
I’m starting to think Mitch Albom was sexually abused by his middle school math teacher, such is his hatred of math. It’s OK, Mitch. It’s not your fault. Show me on the slide rule where he touched you. It’s going to be OK.
Also, Mitch Albom needs to stop acting like a fourth grade bully, it’s like he’s trying to impress the little girl with pigtails and bangs by calling people “nerd.”
We need to slow down the shoveling of raw data into the "what can we come up with next?" machine. It is actually creating a divide between those who like to watch the game of baseball and those who want to reduce it to binary code.
Setting aside for a second that watching baseball in green-coded Matrix-vision would look pretty fucking cool, the assertion that looking at stats of any variety and loving baseball are mutually exclusive is the most offensive part of this whole debate. Mitch is right about one thing, the sort of statistical analysis that he loathes is not easy and comes from hours of labor and years of data collection. That immense effort is derived from and fucking driven by an intense love of baseball. But what do I know? I’m just a worthless nerd who deserves to be wedgied by the cool kids who write super butch novels about kids hanging out with their dead mothers.
Yes. I love watching baseball. I love watching players play, especially great players. I still remember the first time I ever saw Randy Johnson pitch in person, and it was mindblowing. But I also like knowing who’s really, really good at baseball. And, unfortunately, I can’t just watch baseball all of the time. So the “what can we come up with next” machine is actually pretty helpful.
To that end, Cabrera's winning was actually a bell ring for the old school. There is also an element of tradition here. The last three Triple Crown winners were also voted as MVP.
So what? That’s like saying leeches made that one guy better all those years ago, and then a few decades before that, too. But no one is going to suggest leeches to cure cancer, they’re probably going to go with Chemo and Radiation. Things NERDS came up with. Old School doesn’t mean better. It doesn’t necessarily mean worse. But here it totally does.
"I think they can use both," Cabrera said when asked about computer stats versus old-time performance. "In the end, it's gonna be the same. You gotta play baseball."
Miguel Cabrera probably doesn’t have more than an eighth grade education. He’s still smarter than Mitch Albom.
Indeed.
As luck would have it, both top vote-getters for AL MVP played a lot of baseball this year. Mike Trout played baseball a little bit better than Miguel Cabrera, who also played very well. Thankfully this wasn’t another MVP race like 2002 when Miguel Tejada lost out to the Baseball-Matic 2000XL, which was simulated before the season to have hit 78 home runs, drive in 246 RBIs, and score 219 runs. Miggy never really had a chance.
This was a nice moment for the Tigers -- and a small consolation prize for owner Mike Ilitch and president Dave Dombrowski, who, like Cabrera, would have traded a World Series ring for any postseason award. But the Tigers now have back-to-back MVPs (Verlander last year), which speaks pretty well for their ability to develop and sign talent. It's also nice that Cabrera has seemingly made a turn for the better with his off-field behavior.
Reduced drunk driving arrests also not a reasonable factor in MVP consideration.
And, for what it’s worth, the Tigers neither developed nor signed Miguel Cabrera. They traded for him. Is knowing that too nerdy for Mitch Albom? (Seriously, Mitch Fucking Albom.)
And none of this diminishes the season Trout gave the Los Angeles Angels -- and baseball history. Rarely has a rookie so dominated on so many levels. It is scary to think that Trout, only 21, will get better. And if he improves even incrementally, who is going to beat him for MVP in years to come?
Who will beat him in years to come? Shitty fucking sportswriters who are more interested in preserving their luddite baseball worldview than actually doing their job to the best of their abilities. You know, the same people who beat him for MVP this year.
But for today, for this season, anyhow, Cabrera gets the nod. In a season of fits and starts, he was a reliable Tiger, a consistent source of power, and a shadow that fell on opposing pitchers even before he reached the batter's box. He was the meat in the stew that became the American League champions, and while it is possible to argue the other way, it's undeniable to argue this one.
Food Metaphor! Food Metaphor! Food Metaphor! Also, this paragraph was stupid.
"Hopefully every year it can be a battle like that," Cabrera said.
This year, what you saw is what he got.
MVP.
The eyes have it.
/Powers down what-comes-next-machine
/Turns off lights in mom’s basement
/Kills self
