Congratulations to our finalists – 2 Days Left to Vote

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As we've said before, the finalists for the OV Slogan Contest are in, but we haven't officially officially announced who came up with those five fabulous slogans. They all win copies of the Essential Games of the Chicago Cubs DVD Series and a chance at an Obstructed View t-shirt or OV personal grooming tool. So here's where we turn the voting into a popularity contest. Without further ado, the authors and their slogans:

Phil: Because we have to

Kim: Year of the facepalm

Nick: Don't say we didn't warn you.

Josh: Right town. Right team. Wrong year.

Eric: If rebuilds were easy, anyone could do it.

So, now that we've brought personal bias into this, don't hesitate to vote repeatedly for whoever you think you can recognize on a first-name basis.

UPDATE: The erroneous caption credits have been fixed. I think. h/t Nick (dying laughing)

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  4. Mercurial Outfielder

    @ Aisle424:
    Like I said in the last thread, MB and were beating that drum at OV around 2006 or 2007, whenever the Strange Fruit pieces went up. It’s nice to see some empirical data (however tenuous the methodology) back up a stance for which we’ve been arguing for some time now.

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  5. Aisle424

    @ Mercurial Outfielder:

    Yeah, and it covers all of MLB, not just the Cubs. It makes it easier for the defenders to argue that nothing is wrong because they hear the same stuff from national media, so it can’t possibly ALL BE WRONG, right?

    This study suggests that, yes, yes it is.

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  7. Eric

    Hey Adam, just a heads-up that it looks like your listing of the submissions got intercepted by the innerweb gremlins and scrambled up a little … my submission was the Rebuild.

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  8. Author
    AndCounting

    @ Mercurial Outfielder:
    It was a terribly unfortunate coincidence that they just so happened to pick the week when Jim Thome, the most beloved white guy in all of Caucasia, happened to make history and Carlos Zambrano, reviled among stereotypes, happened to do something more Zambrano-y than anything he’d ever Zambranoed before. You can’t necessarily throw out all the conclusions they made, but it’s hard to imagine it didn’t skew the results enough to render the statistical analyses less than bulletproof. Doing all the research in one week, a week in which both major events were likely to be mentioned by every broadcast team at least once in that time period, gave those two events undue weight in the study.

    I think the general assertions are probably correct, but it’s not the most reliable study on the planet.

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  17. PFD

    For how terribly he started out, I was pleasantly surprised to see Brett Jackson is OPSing in the .730s now. And a Cubs player that has an OBP 100 points higher than his average?!?!? Incredible. Even if the average is only .206 (dying laughing)

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  18. Author
    AndCounting

    @ Aisle424:
    I don’t know why they even picked that time. But yeah, I was expecting them to explain what they did to compensate for those events, but no explanation came.

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  19. Suburban kid

    AndCounting wrote:

    @ Aisle424:
    I don’t know why they even picked that time.

    Why August? In theory, due to how long the baseball season is, selecting any one-week window should be representative of any other one-week window. August, however, is unique:

    The make-up of rosters has largely stabilized: players who left spring training with their teams but failed to impress are in the minor leagues, and will not be called up until rosters expand in September.

    The trading deadline has passed, further lending stability to rosters.

    Most teams are well aware of their chances to make the postseason, a factor that may play into how announcers describe the on-field product.

    This late in the season many players’ statistics (most of which are ratio-based rather than count-based) have normalized, so that very little is left to the announcer’s imagination when measuring a player’s on-field contributions.

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  22. Author
    AndCounting

    @ Suburban kid:
    Well, they didn’t appear to do anything to account for the Thome/Zambrano events, so they never explained their non-activity. And I read those reasons for why they picked August, and they were bad reasons. Right after the trading deadline, rosters are normalized? That’s dumb. It’s the time when rosters have gone through the most significant upheaval across the league.

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  27. Suburban kid

    @ AndCounting:
    Regarding Thome/Z, they did mention that these were special events and that they “needed to be accounted for”. It’s true they didn’t say how they did that, but they did say they needed to do it.

    My guess is that they limited counting of Thome/Z mentions to those that happened on the day of the events, or maybe only on the four broadcasts of the two specific games.

    But maybe they forgot?

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  31. Suburban kid

    @ AndCounting:
    Maybe so, in which case the reader can just throw those out from the two top ten lists. Yes it would have been better if the authors did this, and added the next two guys who were mentioned a lot.

    One thing for sure is that they couldn’t account for such events in advance. Any week they picked to mobilize the tracking of 190 broadcasts could have had exceptional events take place.

    Regarding what time of year to do it, I don’t know if it really matters if you can only do one week. If you could do two months, I’d probably do May and August to escape some of the hyperbole of April and September.

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  34. Aisle424

    Suburban kid wrote:

    @ Mercurial Outfielder:
    I can’t believe they are 10 games ahead of the Cubs.

    The Cubs have been bad, but the Astros have been complete shit. They won 3 games in July and then only 5 so far in August. They are 8-42 in the last 2 months. That’s impressive losing.

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  38. Rice Cube

    @ Aisle424:

    They’ve turned it into an art form. I kind of hope that the Astros underslot on their top pick again so the Cubs can snag the best available player, though. Though I do wonder if the Astros really want to pass on Mark Appel twice.

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  40. Rizzo the Rat

    @ mb21:
    I don’t see how they can cancel each other out since they both bias the data toward the same conclusion (i.e., that white players get positive coverage and latinos get negative coverage).

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  41. PFD

    Why the hell does Vitters bat 2nd and BJax bat 7th? Seems like it would make sense to flip them.

    Edit: Didn’t realize that would make the first three hitters lefthanded. I’d still do it though.

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  42. mb21

    @ Rizzo the Rat:
    (dying laughing) for some reason I was thinking Thome was getting negative coverage, but that obviously wouldn’t be true. That being said, I think it’s a large enough sample that I doubt the results would be all that much different. Would it be better if it’s over a month or longer? Sure, of course, but considering how obvious it’s been for years the results only confirm what I and others have thought for a long time now. What I’d be curious about is whether or not announcers are more racially biased than the average Joe.

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  43. mb21

    @ PFD:
    I’ve mentioned that about 5 times. Batting Vitters 2nd is dumb. It’s dumb even if he’s hitting as well as the projections think (not at all good). He’s a terrible OBP guy. Just terrible. Dumber than shit to have him bat 2nd.

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  44. Rizzo the Rat

    One other reservation I have about the study is that in order to demonstrate that the announcers are biased based on race, the groups of players being compared (whites and latinos) would have to be identical in every other respect besides race. Clearly that is not the case (e.g., white players are more likely to be pitchers). It’s not racist to consider the possibility that a higher proportion of latino players have characteristics (other than their race) that incur the derision of announcers.

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  45. Mercurial Outfielder

    Sveum’s lineups have been strange of late. But if you’re going to tinker, I guess now is the time to tinker. (dying laughing)

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  49. mb21

    @ Rizzo the Rat:
    I don’t think it’s necessarily racist, but it’s almost certainly wrong. To think that there is a considerable difference between races in professional sports when it comes to such things are being a professional, playing hard, playing the game the right way and so on and so forth seems absurd to me. I don’t think we need to look any further than Alfonso Soriano. Nearly every person he’s worked with has said he’s one of the hardest working players they’ve ever seen. They say he’s always in a good mood, always has a smile on his face and loves to play the game, but if you listen to the announcers or the journalists you get the feeling he’s the laziest person around, is hated by his co-workers and hates the game. From what I understand Ryan Braun is much the same and prior to his positive drug test nobody had a negative word to say about him as far how he plays.

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  50. Mercurial Outfielder

    6 K, 4 BB over the last 7 days for BJakks. No coincidence that has come with a dramatic increase in OPS.

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  53. Rizzo the Rat

    mb21 wrote:

    To think that there is a considerable difference between races in professional sports when it comes to such things are being a professional, playing hard, playing the game the right way and so on and so forth seems absurd to me.

    That’s not really what I was driving at. Just that there are all kinds of confounding factors. For instance, power hitters that strike out a lot are often seen as being less “clutch” than other hitters. I don’t dismiss the possibility that race is the deciding factor, but it’s possible that it’s incidental and the difference in coverage is due to some other population difference.

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  55. Mercurial Outfielder

    Via Miles:

    In the pregame, Dale Sveum was asked about patience at the plate in general and Ryan Braun in specific. So let’s get into another of our “inside-baseball” segments here.

    On the Brewers’ Braun, Dale said: “When he came up, he swung at more pitches out of the strike zone than anybody in baseball his first two seasons.

    “Like I’ve said before, it’s not the easiest thing to teach because you’re still trying to create slugging percentage, guys that have the ability to hit home runs. You have to remember that Braun went to a major college and played a long time. He was able to make some adjustments, but he came to the conclusion that he was strong enough, fast enough and confident enough that he was going to hit any fastball in any count. A lot of times, young players don’t have that confidence in their abilities to hit a fastball in any count, so they speed things up. But obviously, he’s changed things. He’s able to hit 0-1 without panic. He doesn’t swing at a lot of 2-0 pitches. He doesn’t swing at 3-1 pitches. But that comes with a tremendous amount of confidence.”

    On teaching young players to be patient, Dale said: “It’s very difficult unless you tell them to take pitches. That’s a very difficult. About the time you do that, there’s a ball right down the middle, and then they get frustrated, and the whole system breaks down. The system of on-base percentage and OPS, obviously, it’s the stat that we all judge everybody by offensively. But you’ve got to remember that curve is brought up by the Yankees and Red Sox and the Rangers, all these guys are 28-32-year-old hitters. That’s why that scale is so high.”
    http://blogs.dailyherald.com/node/7128

    I have no idea what that last statement meant.

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  63. GW

    good points by ac and rtr. given the echo-chamber nature of sports coverage, a week’s worth of coverage is going to be systematically biased in favor of the current news. seven random days would be better. and to rtr’s point, a bill james style pairwise comparison of groups of similar players based on stats, height, salary, etc… paired with a lexis-nexis search would be a better way to go about this sort of thing. i would be specifically interested in some sort of english-fluency variable, as well.

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  66. GW

    @ mb21:

    the key would be to make it pairwise like bj always does, or large scale combined with a regression, controlling for the various confounding factors.

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  68. mb21

    @ GW:
    I think a more exhaustive study would be nice, but I don’t think it’s necessary. I didn’t even think what these guys did was necessary. Humans are racially biased and unless we believe that announcers are somehow immune to this then we can safely say they are also racially biased. This is especially true when you consider the average education level of the announcer (former ballplayer, little to no college education). The more interesting thing to me anyway would be to see how their bias is different from the population and I don’t think that can be done because it’s not like we have a racially biased measurement.

    If I was going to say anything about the study being talked about, it’s that it’s going to miss a lot of instances of racial bias. A white guy is often a scrappy guy while the foreign player is more of an athlete. Both were considered good terms in that study, but the terms aren’t equal. The foreign player is an athlete because he can’t possibly be David Eckstein scrappy.

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  74. mb21

    @ GW:
    That’s fair. I didnt think much about it, but you guys are probably right. The research just confirmed what I already knew. Actually, it didn’t make it sound as bad as I think it really is, but it’s possible with the declining number of blacks that the bias is less than what it once was. I don’t know.

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  78. Mercurial Outfielder

    @ mb21:
    And I think this feeds into the stuff we get about Soriano, for instance. He doesn’t have to work hard because he’s so talented. He just does whatever he wants and it’s easy for him, where a guy like Sandberg has to work for everything he gets. So when the guy who is working hard fails, it’s sad, but when the guy who can do whatever he wants fails, it’s a moral failure because the guy is so talented he doesn’t have to fail…or at elast that’s the way the narrative seems to run. You see that same thing with black QBs and white QBs in the NFL. Nevermind that no-one coasts to that level on mere talent and that most if not all of these guys work insanely hard just to maintain, let alone the massive amount of work it takes to improve!

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  84. mb21

    @ Mercurial Outfielder:
    That’s the whole issue I have with the laziness remarks. If someone wants to say that Soriano takes the ocasional play off, fine, say it. It would be true. If they want to say it about Ramirez, go for it. But the idea that anybody gives 100% effort all the time is laughable. Nobody does. Not you, not me, not anyone. It’s ridiculous to call any of these guys lazy. Are they lazy on an individual play sometimes? Sure, they all are, but that doesn’t make them lazy. Nobody focuses on the times that Ryan Theriot didn’t bust ass out of the box, but god damn, if Soriano does it’s front page news for a week.

    By the way, one thing I always thought was kind of funny was that the word with Juan Pierre is that nobody worked harder. NOBODY. He got the ballpark first, left last, worked harder than anyone and rarely took a play off. What’s interesting to me is that his game was much the same as an Eckstein or a Theriot, but who was given more praise for being a winner, scrappy or whatever other intangible term you can think of? It wasn’t Pierre.

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  92. Mercurial Outfielder

    @ mb21:

    Good point about Pierre. More of a grinder than Theriot ever was. Same for Lance Johnson. But those guys are regarded as simply mediocre-bad ballplayers.

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  96. Berselius

    I think you guys are selling the Pierre hype a little short. He’s not getting the late career scrapster reputation that Eckstein did, but I remember the billion mentions of Pierre’s basepaths intangibles back when the Cubs got him in 2006. Of course, I guess I’m just proving the point anyway since all of that stemmed from his speed (athleticism!) than his will to disrupt pitchers.

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  103. Mercurial Outfielder

    @ Berselius:
    @ mb21:

    It was never intangible talk with Pierre. He wasn’t “energizing” he was “exciting.” He wasn’t a leader, he was a leadoff guy.

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  112. Mercurial Outfielder

    @ Rizzo the Rat:

    Ugly, ugly, ugly at the dish. Even when he makes contact, it’s not the sort of quality contact you might expect from a nice compact stroke like he has. I’m beginning to think he’s just not very good, but he’s started every level slow like this, so maybe he can get this thing righted.

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  122. Mercurial Outfielder

    @ Jed Jam Band:

    I hope more fans adopt this stance, because it’s the healthiest stance. Jackson is an incredibly talented player, but he has a serious, almost debilitating, flaw to his game.

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  124. cwolf

    josh wrote:

    I saw Buddy Guy once live. He bragged about how he does most of his shows piss drunk. He got drunker and drunker as the night went on.

    I went to the old Checkerboard Lounge after a family wedding in the mid-80’s. A friend who was also at the wedding hung out there occasionally and knew the guys in Buddy’s band who were playing there that night. We somehow ended up in the bathroom with the band smoking a joint and Buddy came in and (kind of) good-naturedly told the guys that it was show-time and to get their asses out on stage. So, it’s me and my buddy and Buddy and I’m thinking this can’t be good. Buddy pulls out a pint bottle and another joint out of his pocket and laughs as he lights it up and passes the bottle around. We could hear the band starting up with a jam and after a couple hits, Buddy gives us a shit-eating grin and says “I gotta go. Enjoy the show.” It was cool as hell.

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  126. josh

    @ cwolf:
    I remember that he came out after the band was already going. I can’t believe that dude is still alive.

    My much less amazing story is that my wife and I were tired and left early, and while we were outside, Buddy actually came outside and played. So for like one second, it was me and him and my wife. Then he ran down the side of the building and went in a different door.

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  128. cwolf

    josh wrote:

    @ cwolf:
    I remember that he came out after the band was already going.

    Yeah, the band was just kicking out a great intro-style blues jam. After Buddy blasted through the bathroom door, I looked at my buddy who just said something like “That’s Buddy” and we headed out and watched him stroll / strut through the crowd to the stage and pick up his guitar and PUT ON A SHOW.

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  130. Eric

    @ Rice Cube:
    Shit. I missed a fun-bad game. Little lefty, throwing a couple of soft looping curves and a rising fastball into some beefy right handers wheelhouse. That’s gold. And Mather pitched? The photo at the Trib makes him look like a first year little league kid trying to make a “T” with his arms, like coach taught him. Point your glove at the target… But it looks like he was throwing a knuckler. Was Mather throwing garbage? Aw, man, I wish I saw that.

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  132. josh

    MLB has a video of Aramis labeled “Must C Clutch!” of the b2b2b homers in the 9th. Is it really “Clutch” if you hit 3 homeruns in a game that is already a blowout?

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  139. mb21

    Are there any Android users here who can check something out for me? If so, send me an email at ov [at] obstructedview [dot] net. I’m going to need you to send me a screen cap.

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  141. Suburban kid

    Late entry to the contest: “2013 Chicago Cubs: Because There’s a Small Chance B-Jax Might Not Suck”

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  146. josh

    Just a total raincheck, actually. The highlight of this season is November, when we can go back to thinking about how the Cubs could possibly get better in the off-season.

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  148. Suburban kid

    It’s funny that two guys who have seen every single game have to ask fans (who only watch a portion of games) for highlights.

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  150. SVB

    For me, this season’s highlight is Rizzo.

    Since the 3C’s have been converted to C-R, I’m happy to do a Carriage Return on the season and move on to next year. By next year, I mean 2014.

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  152. josh

    @ SVB:
    Rizzo has been okay. His strikeout rate is only 15.6%. Maybe he can maintain that? He hasn’t exactly been a superstar, but maybe he’ll be one of those guys who gets better consistently for a few years before he hits 30..

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