April 21, 2017

Canton, OH – Not much has been made of the hard turn that the Canton Longshoremen front office has made towards hard core sabremetrics with the hiring of the new regime, now in its third year.  Old hands in the press box held their tongues when old standards like Jacques Fillion, Frank King, and Albert Rishworth were ceremoniously dumped.  We wrote some retrospective columns about the good ol’ days when Steve Fergus roamed the shortstop position, and Geoff Green played all around the diamond, but there was no criticism, at least not public criticism.

Well, those days are over.  The Longshoremen have built a stat geek’s dream team, a team that would send a tingle down a slide rule’s leg if slide rules had legs, a lineup that has 42 year old boys blogging from their mom’s basements as giddy as a schoolgirl.  And today, with half of April gone, the Longshoremen sit in last place in the Great Lakes Division, already eight games out of first place, proving what old baseball men everywhere know – the grand old game isn’t played on paper, and it’s not a computer simulation or a board game. It’s time someone set the record straight.

OBP Is Life – Life Is OBP

Make no mistake, this is exactly the team that the Longshoremen wanted – a team that above all else gets on base.  The Longshoremen’s on-base percentage of .337 is second in the Sovereign League.  Sabremetric theoreticians would tell you that is the be all and end all of offense in baseball.  Why, then, are the Longshoremen 10th in the Sovereign League in runs scored? Could it be because the Longshoremen have been turned into a namby-pamby group of players too scared to swing the bat, letting gopher ball after gopher ball pass by unmolested?  Indeed, the Longshoremen have a Sovreign League worst 9 HR to date, despite playing in one of the homer-friendliest parks in all of baseball.

Walks Kill

On the other side of the ball, the Longshoremen also excel at that other Bill James-inspired tenet – walks kill.  Well, Canton pitchers have handed out only 41 walks, better than all but three teams in the Sovereign League.  The reward? A whopping 81 runs scored by Canton opponents, worse than all but two pitching staffs in the league, and both of those pitching staffs have had an extra game in which to get battered.  If there is any consolation to this miserable start to what is certain to be another miserable season, maybe this will spell the end of spreadsheets and geeks at Svab Memorial Stadium, and the renewal of tobacco-stained scouts, real men, and baseball players.