and not just questions?
What Dan does today is typical. He points out the obvious (there is no history to the Rockies and nobody knows who they are) and fails to offer any insight or enlightenment.
Dan laments the lack of history behind the Rockies, noting how young and undistinguished the team is. Yet this simple narrative ignores the unique history of the team and the many different ways management has tried to craft a winning team in a difficult environment. There were the slugging teams that made it to the playoffs in 1995. They brought in high priced free-agent pitching. They emphasized defense. Nothing raising them out of mediocrity.
Now they seem to have figured something out, but Dan is too lazy to tell us what it could be. He simply states the obvious fact that most Boston (and baseball) fans don't know much about the team. It would have been a much more interesting column if he talked about how the Rockies have fashioned this team with groundball pitchers, good infield defense, and young, cheap bats. Dan could have used his prominent position to erase some of the ignorance that he complains about. That would have required some work, though. It is much easier to revel in your ignorance.
Theo and His Minions Watch
Sixth paragraph.
Excellent analysis of Shanks work.
ReplyDeleteMaybe when you grow up you can be a big-time newspaper columnist and write columns that feature all the jock-sniffing nuance of the rosters of World Series teams. Perhaps even with the widely proclaimed decline of the print medium, someone will give you money to rehash statistics available on-line to an audience that can just point, click and look if that's what they want from a newspaper.
ReplyDeleteBut when and if you do, there will still be someone writing color pieces, such as this one on lack of respect and notoriety afforded the Rockies, the least-likely of the playoff teams to make the World Series, and certainly among the least likely to make the playoffs of the 15 teams that were less than 7 games out of contention on Sept. 1.
So Bruce you are in FAVOR of Dan doing absolutely no work whatsoever in order to earn his paycheck. And what's with all the vitriol from you lately. Are you starting to crack?
ReplyDeleteThanks, Bruce, for echoing what I thought. Without Dan's highly-skilled and award-winning insight, I might never have known that the Rockies aren't very famous. That's the kind of penetrating analysis you just can't get anywhere else.
ReplyDeleteOb,
ReplyDeleteThat is great logic. Because it is so easy to find out about the team, Dan should just state the obvious without putting any work into it. It has been repeated ad nauueum that the Rockies came back and won 21 of 22. How about telling us how it happened? Or putting it into historical context? Dan does nothing of the sort. He takes the most banal and superficial look at the story.
I wasn't looking for a rehashing of the statistics. I was looking for an interesting piece about the team the Red Sox were to face.
OB, maybe Shank could have done some analysis to see how this Rockies team that had won 21 of its most recent 22 games could be so outclassed against the Red Sox.
ReplyDeleteCould it be that the Rockies fattened up on weak opposition and thus were not suited to beating an AL team in the playoffs?
Maybe yourself as well as Shank should consider something like that, and maybe you both could do some honest analysis.
OB,
ReplyDeleteStill waiting for the post admitting you were wrong.