I’m done with Baseball Prospectus

I don't even know where to begin. I'll make a long story short and mostly just focus on today's blunder. Baseball Prospectus is becoming more and more mainstream. That's good and bad at the same time. It's good because it shows that sabermetrics is spreading and when the average joe reads about some of these advanced metrics in his daily paper, he'll be less turned off by them in the kind of discussions that take place around here. It's bad because the quality of the stuff published at BP has also become mainstream, which is to say that it lacks the quality it once had. Some of this is obviously the result of the best of BP moving on to other endeavors. As those authors moved on, they were replaced by a less than stellar group of researchers and writers. Another reason why the quality has suffered at BP is their egos have become more important to them than the quality of their work. We often point out the absurd errors, innuendos, and other frustrating examples that weren't a part of BP even a few years ago. I'm not going to bore you with a detailed list because I simply don't have enough time to find all of them and we've already discussed most of them anyway. The latest example is from Will Carroll's UTK piece yesterday. To be fair to Carroll, who still publishes some quality material, he's not a big stats guy. An example of this is not long ago in one of his online chats, Carroll claimed that nobody fears the Cubs rotation. Apparently fear is now a measurement of how good a staff is. When called out on that absurdity, Carroll told the person to find stats to disprove him. He seemed to think he could make statements without facts and then leave it to others to disprove him. That's not how it works, but someone did disprove him, using metrics that have nothing to do with fear of course. This has become typical of Baseball Prospectus. Back to the UTK piece from yesterday, Carroll stated the following, More worrisome is the continued absence of Gaudin, who was acquired to take some of the workload off of Carlos Marmol and Kerry Wood. He's served that purpose so far, but his lingering back issues have kept him out for all of September, and threaten to end his season. The Cubs pitching is systematically breaking down under the workload. This isn't the same as the post-2003 overwork failure, just an inability to keep the staff healthy through a combination of events, but there's no curse involved in it. The emphasis added is mine. I have no clue what Carroll means by this since he doesn't really explain what it means and provides nothing to back up such a claim. Once again, I am left to go looking for information to check whether or not he's right. He's written about the workload of Marmol, Howry and Wood several times this year. I'm the first one to agree with him that Bob Howry should not be worked as hard as he has been. In fact, I'd argue he's not good enough to be worked at all in a major league uniform, let alone one representing a team in contention. Any workload for Kerry Wood comes with question marks since his next trip to the DL could come at any moment. As for Marmol, he threw over 100 innings last year between Iowa and Chicago. He's currently 4th in MLB at 79 innings. Consider me not worried one damned bit about the workload for Marmol. It's pretty hard to argue that a pitcher's workload is greater when it's the opposite. Bob Howry is 27th in innings pitched among relievers (only relievers with no games started in 2008), but that's only a problem because he should be tied in innings pitched with me. Who cares if he's overworked? He's sucked all year long anyway so good luck trying to find when he didn't suck. The Cubs top 3 relievers in WXRL rank 19th (tied for 19th with 2 other teams) in MLB innings pitched. Granted, Samardzija is included in that, but Wood is nowhere close to being overworked so it's not an issue at all. They rank 21st in pitches thrown. I chose 3 relievers because all teams, especially ones in contention, are going to rely on their best relievers and teams seem to have a set 7th, 8th and 9th inning man anymore. So there's obviously no issues with Wood, other than the fact he could break down at any moment simply because he is who he is. There's no issue with Samardzija. Marmol has been worked hard, but he threw over 100 innings last year so I'm just not at all concerned about him thrown 85 or 90 innings this year in relief. I don't even know what Carroll meant as I said earlier. Is he talking about Zambrano? The same pitcher he's been predicting injury to for 4 or 5 years now? He's got tendinitis. If this player's name were any other, it wouldn't even be an issue with Carroll. I don't know what Zambrano did to Carroll, but this is yet another example of how far BP has fallen over the last few years. If you keep throwing darts, sooner or later you'll hit bullseye. You'll also probably get tendinitis in the shoulder too. I'm sick of paying for this shit and getting virtually nothing in return. It's been nearly a year since I read something at BP and though, "wow, that's some impressive work." It seems as if every time I read it now, I'm left with something like fear being a way to measure rotations, the Cubs are cheating at home and here's some numbers to prove it, but I'm not really saying the Cubs are cheating at home, someone else said it, here's some more numbers to prove they're cheating at home, this didn't come from me, but somewhere else and a few more numbers to prove they're cheating at home. I'm sure if I knew half as much about other teams as I do the Cubs I'd be pissed off about some other shit too. This is just fucking absurd. If you're going to write something on a sabermetric site, provide evidence. If you're not that into stats, don't make statements that would require you to look at the stats. If you're going to charge people to read the stuff, put out stuff worth reading. That's all I ask. Until then, I'm done. That place isn't worth one second of my time anymore.