More on Blyleven

Rich Lederer does what he does so well in ripping apart Jon Heyman and making the case for Blyleven yet again.

On a side note, I recently moved (again), and I now get to watch a 42" HDTV that doesn't belong to me. One benefit of that is the cable provider carries the MLB network, which allows me to see old games that I'm strangely interested in, but I have to put up with the studio show that includes Heyman as their "insider," along with Harold Reynolds, Joe Magrane, and others. During their HOF discussion over the weekend, where they spouted roughly the same BS that Lederer takes Heyman to task for above, the only thing that kept me from chucking the remote at the brand new TV was that I couldn't decide which idiot at which to aim it.

There has to be a breaking point with this ridiculous stand-off between the sabermetrically-inclined and the "old school" writers, right? How many more times do I have to read Dan Shaughnessy call really intelligent people like Rob Neyer, Keith Law, Tom Tango (and many, many others) "basement dwellers" simply because he disagrees with their conlcusions that are based on statistical evidence instead of anecdotes and hyperbole?

I find it moderately compelling that Jim Rice finished in the Top 5 in MVP voting six different times, and that Blyleven never won a Cy Young and only made two All-Star teams. Why? Because those points are based on actual evidence. Unfortunately, when you look deeper at what actually happened and not someone's opinion of what happened, Rice's candidacy doesn't really hold up, and Blyleven's looks a lot better.

I get the desire to fantasize the game a bit. Baseball is a beautiful and enduring sport that's just as much a part of the last 150 years of this country's history as anything else, but when you start having conversations about who the best players are, given the fact that those players played in different times, different stadia, and against different competition, you had better start looking at the numbers to be able to figure things out with at least some objectivity.