ex”C”uses

ex”C”uses

B. Congratulations to your wax statue last night. Hell of a job. Hell of a job.

Bottom 9th, NOBODY out, runner on third, K’s on ball four.

SOLID>

Stitch on that C

And someday, someone will look at Pujols’ numbers and say, What the hell? That guy hits almost exactly like Ted Williams.”

ARod .300/.391/.575/.966

Wright: .300/.387/.538/.925

Wright is the best player in baseball minus 40 pts of OPS. playing the same position.

period.

The only question is whether his value on the field is worth putting up with his salary demands and his obnoxiousness, which makes the team less flexible and less fun to root for, respectively.

I put a high premium of whether a team is fun to root for, so I would say no–particularly when we have someone on pace for a Hall of Fame career playing his position. You don’t want to mess with that.

Some people were pushing for getting ARod’s declining phase and his 200M contract and trading Wright’s full prime and his 40ish million. This was so berzerk (even in pure baseball terms–to say nothing about the spirit of a team and sports in general) that it made me think of suggesting to Cerrone that Metsblog posters should be subject to drug tests.

It’s a good sentiment; but it’s actually very poorly stated; but I’ll take sensible, coherent, and syntactically atrocious from Cerrone any day of the week.

Perhaps this is a better way to put it:

It makes no sense that Wright would be a choker in the 9th inning and have guts in late and close situations in general. These discrepancies in clutch stats point to the conclusion that 80% of “clutch”–a generous estimate–is the result of random variance among small sample sizes and preconceived narratives that fans reinforce by the application of selective memory. Fans get caught up in simple narratives that they can easily understand–heroes and zeroes, that sort of thing–and lose sight of the fact that reality rarely if ever conforms to simple narratives, because discerning narratives from reality is much harder than constructing them from fantasy. It is possible that fans’ narrative for Wright is in a state of flux, and that his performance from here on out will result in a shift of narrative. One can only hope that the new one will be more nuanced and “reality based” than the various old ones.