Smartball

Posted by David Wade on Tuesday, December 29, 2009 at 10:44 pm

There are times when I miss firejoemorgan.com more than others.  Mostly it’s random days when eating lunch at my desk and scrolling through my favorite sites.  However, some other times in life, when feeling especially retrospective and maybe even engaged in some deeper philosophical moment of inner reflection, well, those times seem to provide the periods of greatest longing for the comfort that could only be found in the unlikely combination of sabermetrics and sophomoric humor that, like many of the greatest and brightest things in life, lasted for all too short of  a time.

Now that the Chicago White Sox traded for Juan Pierre, I thought I’d find myself missing the blog more than usual. 

The site started as a joke among some fairly bright and funny guys.  They didn’t so much want Joe Morgan fired as they wanted a place to make fun of bad announcers, bad writers, and the non-progressive thinking often found in baseball (both in analysis and in front-offices).  Much to their surprise, it developed a sort of cult following among those that think signing low-OBP, out-making machines to multi-year multi-million dollar contracts is dumb.

They feasted on baseball writers that relied all too heavily on the notion of team chemistry, dirty uniforms, and productive outs.  They cited things like VORP and derided things like R.B.I. as a way to measure offensive production.  They also pointed out grammatical mistakes and overused metaphors, the latter as prevalent in sports-writing as jalapenos in Mexican cuisine.

So, with that in mind, I figured slap-hitting, hustling, base-stealing Juan Pierre’s move to the Chicago White Sox would be met with article upon article with writers gushing over Pierre’s grit, .300 batting average, and ability to wreak havoc on the base-paths.  This, I figured, would be the type of tripe I’d find when searching stories about the Dodgers trading Pierre to the Sox.  The type that the guys at FJM would destroy, referencing Pierre’s below-average career OPS+, noodle-arm, and overall history of being overrated.

But, I found nothing of the sort.  It seems that FJM may be gone because there’s just not quite the need anymore.  Oh sure, I may be letting this one story influence me and the kind of writing they panned is still abundant, but damned if I didn’t fully expect the Tribune and SunTimes to be full of analysis extolling Sox G.M. Kenny Williams for finding a ‘true lead-off man’ who ‘knew how to win’.  When I looked and didn’t see that, I chuckled inside, thinking that somewhere, some successful t.v. writers and former bloggers might feel they made a difference.

What I did find surprised me as much as what I didn’t find.  Most of the articles noted that Pierre is not a whole lot different from Scott Podsednik (except for Scotty Poddy’s relatively prodigious power) and that the flawed Pierre at least comes with the Dodgers picking up a good chunk of the contract. 

Not the stuff that I figured I’d find, and not the stuff that used to allow FJM to riff on unsuspecting beat writers that figure intangibles lead to championships.

Looks like maybe there’s not quite the need for them anymore.  Unless they find me…