Quote of the Day
Michael Kay, as you may or may not know, is a television broadcaster for the New York Yankees on the YES Network (baseball’s Al-Jazeera). Kay is known for his high degree of professionalism and objectivity. I swear, you can’t even tell he’s a Yankee broadcaster when listening to him. He’s that objective.
Sure enough, during yesterday’s game, Kay graces his viewers with this beauty of a quote describing the record of the Boston Red Sox. Paraphrasing:
“The Red Sox have a record of 17-10. But, that record is skewed by their 11 game winning streak.”
Skewed. SKEWED! This is the level of analysis I strive to one day achieve. A winning streak skews a team’s record. Boston’s 11 game win streak is just an aberration, a bastardized blip on the far corner of a scatter plot. It shouldn’t count. Those games should be stricken from any type of Pythagorean record calculation. If Bill James were analyzing the 2009 Red Sox, he would probably subtract all 11 of those wins, because they simply skew the team’s true record.
In the Michael Kay School of Quantitative Analysis, Joe DiMaggio’s true batting average in 1941 is something like .275, because that 56 game streak is skewing the rest of his numbers. Rocky Marciano’s entire career is one giant sample error. Ect.
Your Boston Red Sox. 17-10 (but they should be 6-10).
Postscript: Kay did pick a Player Of The Game from last night’s contest. Which player do you think he picked for this award? If you guessed “the starter who gave up 4 runs in 5+ innings, leaving the game before 6 relief pitchers were needed to finish the loss” you would be correct!
If you guessed “the starter who gave up 4 runs in 5+ innings
In fairness, he did hit a batter. And he had to be feeling pretty depressed about that. Maybe the player of the game award cheered him up.
Joba’s mom cheered him up.
She sent some of her home-made, Oklahoma meth right to the Yankee club house. You can’t get the down home goodness of Oklahoma meth in New York. That’s just crazy talk.
And Michael Kay is STILL talking about Joba’s performance in that game. STILL.
I remember yankee fans criticizing Sox fans two years ago after Beckett was given an ovation after settling in from a rough start. No self-criticsm now?