The Cubs completed a four-game sweep of a team that by all accounts will be lucky to win 65 games. Soriano has feasted on subpar pitching and it seems that he has broken out of the career long slump that he was mired in.

Great, now do it against Philly.

Look, I’m encouraged by a few things, the explosive offense of the last game, the pen buckling down in games 1-3 (especially game 3), Lou finally managing, but I want to see it again, not just for a fleeting moment against the worst team in the majors.

Again, they still have wins, so a sweep is something to be happy about, but I’m by no means satisfied. Tomorrow we’ll look at what the Cubs need to do to win this thing, which all surprisingly falls into Lou’s lap.

Think about this, Carlos Zambrano walks 3 men in one inning, throws close to 40 pitches in that inning, has all sorts of control problems, has a misplayed ball (sorta) behind him, the ump is squeezing him a little, and the Cubs blew a chance at scoring runs in the first inning.

You’re saying meltdown?

I’m saying Nationals.

They are bad, and these two wins have been more about bad Natty pitching instead of clutch Cub hitting. These guys are as bad as Natty Ice, and about as well-marketed too.

I don’t know what to take from these two games, but, hey, a win is a win.

• Babe Ruth
• Ted Williams
• Barry Bonds
• Lou Gerhig
• Rogers Hornsby
• Mickey Mantle

This is the company that Albert Pujols keeps atop the career OPS+ stat for a career. The comparisons at this point aren’t with his peers. They are with the greatest players spanning 4 different epochs of baseball history. The debate isn’t whether there is another active player better than Pujols.

It’s whether anyone was better.

We are talking about a man who can hit .360, mash 50 HRs, walk 100+ times, and strike out less than 50 times a season. Through his age-27 season, Baseball-reference.com says that he compares to Joe DiMaggio, and his age-28 season looked just like Jimmie Foxx’s. Perhaps Pujols is the culmination of baseball evolution, the combination of the best players rolled into one. The only things he is missing are Willie Mays’ legs, but he is among the best base runners in the game today. More on that tomorrow.

For now, let us focus on the swing.

Here is an excellent break down of his swing. Pujols has an extremely well-balanced swing, he doesn’t move his head, and his weight is always evenly distributed. He doesn’t waste any movement; every single muscle twitch is with the intent of crushing that little white spherical object that is coming at him.

The swing is marvelous, but even more marvelous are the results. We’ve all no doubt seen the slobberfest going on for the man right now, and while it’s done in a way that only the ever annoying ESPN can do it, it’s all well-deserved praise. The question does deserve to be raised about his place in baseball history.

Afterall, his career line of .334/.427/.630 would be good for 23rd/12th/4th all-time in baseball history. His career OPS of 1.057 is also good for 4th all-time, and he is well on his way to making some serious dents in the counting statistics career standings as well.

We may have reached the midpoint of his career, one where he can combine raw ability with veteran savvy. He has, to this point, suceeded in that regard. There is no player alive today that is better than Albert Pujols. Not Hank Aaron, not Barry Bonds, and certainly not Ichiro.

Things can still go wrong, I remember Frank Thomas in these talks before a strange drop in production—during what should have been his peak years—stopped all that, but given the comps for Pujols, I doubt he will suddenly drop off the face of the earth and fail to hit.

No, I fully expect Pujols to carry on being the best hitter in the world, and while I won’t do anything silly like try to extrapolate his career line, given that he has good legs, is a smart runner and has a genuine gold glove, I doubt that anything short of an injury will stop his meteoric rise to the forefront of baseball’s Mt. Rushmore.

In a sport full of stars, Pujols’ has the potential to be the brightest of them all.

Once again, the American League has claimed home field advantage in this year’s World Series based on the smallest of sample sizes. Rather than take the data accumulated during a 162 game season, baseball would rather take one meaningless game and try to draw some meaning out of it.

It was the most epic of overreactions to one game baseball has ever seen. Ever since that shameful tie in Milwaukee we have been subjected to this crap way of determining home field.

Fine, it’s never going to change, even if it is epically stupid, just like the WBC.

Things need to change with the exhibition formerly known as an exhibition. If this game is supposed to mean something, take it out of the hands of the fans. Fan voting got us Soriano in fourth place, one spot away from an outfield spot. Fans are stupid. Red Sox fans just vote for all the Red Sox, Cubs fans are drunken frat boys who if they are lucky enough to not piss all over the ballot, piss on it anyway with stupid write in votes like ANDRES BLANCO MAN! FTW!, and everyone else doesn’t know enough about baseball to vote for Shane Victorino over Alfonso Soriano.

You need to…shudder…hand the responsibilities to the BBWAA. I know they are righteous and holier than thou, but for the most part their hearts are in the right place. Secondly, cut the damn roster to 25, and get rid of that stupid “every team needs a rep” rule. That is by far the dumbest rule in American sports, I don’t know of another sports league that does it. Put the best players in and let them go at it.

Lastly, stop treating it like pageantry and treat it like an actual game. I know it’s a big deal, but honestly, that crap is distracting with the parade and the whole thing that goes on. Just let them play.

Of course, you can keep everything as is if you do the smart thing Selig and make it not matter. Treat it like it is an All Star game. No one will get mad at you if it doesn’t matter anymore, and for the most part, everyone remains happy.

We all know the best way to determine home field is by utilizing the data that you collected over 162 games rather than just one. It should belong to the best record, and that should really be that.

It is my belief that baseball knowledge should neither be limited to insiders nor to baseball writers. I don’t think that numbers are for nerds, that you should tell someone how to enjoy the game of baseball, or that numbers are everything.

Numbers are just what I make educated baseball opinions on, and something I want my team to heavily consider when they make major baseball decisions.

The point of this blog isn’t to scare you with numbers, or say that you are in fact, stupid, regardless of what my sig says.

The point of this blog is to free you from the shackles of a media that is driven towards laziness, instead of facing up to cold, hard analytical fact. I love the poetry of baseball, the beauty of it. I just also understand that small sample sizes are not the way to evaluate talent.

You should understand too. Baseball fans are too quick to fall in love with the mediocre, to anoint ESPN’s flavor of the week as baseball royalty. We are all guilty of it, I was when I almost wanted to give Andres Blanco the gold glove over Orlando Hudson at the midway point.

So with all that said, remember these few rules.

1. Small sample sizes suck!

We’ve all seen them, most of all the Cubs. The Cubs overreacted to a 6 game sample, hit the panic button, and said that they needed to get more left handed…with Milton Bradley. More on that in a different rule.

Small sample sizes just don’t cut it when it comes to evaluating baseball. They play 162 games a year, and there will be some bad spells in that time. Players will play poorly and they will play greatly, but players are not the streaks, they are the sum of those streaks at the end of a long season. Just because Sam Fuld had a .500 OBP for 3 games does not mean that he is the greatest lead off hitter ever.

2. Context is king in the world of baseball

Player A hits .314 Player B hits .357. Who is better? A, B, or I don’t know?

If you answered “I don’t know,” go get yourself a cookie. because you don’t know without the proper context. I hate it when people say that when seriously discussing baseball talent. (BTW, Player A is Albert Pujols in 2002, Player B is Ivan Cruz, same year. Cruz only played 17 games).

Context is the most important part of baseball analysis, and it will be a huge part of this blog. We all look at averages and HRs from Coors differently than we would from Petco. That is an example of context. The more context the better.

3. No one stat is perfect, nor is one stat the be-all, end-all

This goes along with context in a way but needs to be separate. Look, I grew up with baseball cards, and when I was really, really young, I could tell that batting average wasn’t everything. I could tell that HRs don’t tell the whole story.

You can too, it’s just that our minds have been pre programmed to follow along with stats that haven’t really been updated since 1880. There is no one stat, not even VORP or WARP, that should be the only stat people use. We are speaking a language when we talk baseball, and we should treat it as such, with stats being the words.

4. Intangibles are overrated, but sometimes they carry merit in rare cases

Clutch. God I hate that word. It’s a cliche used by lazy sports writers when they don’t have anything better to say most of the time. Other times it applies. For example, there are clutch situations, but there are far less clutch players than people think.

Derek Jeter hits .316/.387/.458 During the Regular Season, but hits .309/.377/.469 in the Playoffs. Which looks exactly the same. Derek Jeter does not become some sort of superhuman hit machine in the playoffs, he just becomes…well, Derek Jeter.

Caveat, Bob Gibson was clutch, and Don Drysdale was a damn choker. But those are outliers, exceptions that prove the rule.

5. Until the new technology takes a firm foothold, defense will always be near impossible to truly measure

UZR had Alfonso Soriano rated as a plus LFer last year. I know he throws out a ton of guys, but he is not a plus LFer. Not at all, not even a little bit. That’s the last frontier, folks, and it’s about to get explored.

6. Scouting will always have a place in baseball

I love numbers, I love looking at them and I love that baseball is starting to accept them.

They are not the only thing, though. Good scouting still has a place in baseball, and it always will.

7. There are team dependent stats in the individual stat numbers

The most famous being Wins, RBI, and RS. Wins are team dependent, a team wins a game, not a pitcher. We all know this, its just that our brains shut off the logic part whenever it comes to baseball. In football the QB is far more important than an SP in baseball, but no one really cares about QB wins honestly. They care about performance. The same should hold true in baseball.

RBI and RS are different though, RBIs are overrated while RSes are a tad underrated. You can learn more from Runs scored than you can from Runs Batted In, i.e. you can grasp how good a base runner someone is with RSes. Both are team dependent however.


So there you have it.

This Magna Carta is an introductory set of rules to remember whenever you do baseball analysis. Don’t be duped by simplistic analysis from either the broadcast booth, the newspaper or the talking heads on various sports channels. They often appeal to the simple rather than get into the meat of baseball.

Remember, don’t end up like Joe Morgan.