Sheldon Ocker - Why do I bother?
Maybe a fanpost but I didn't want to give it too much weight. I made the mistake of reading Ocker tonight. Instead of otherwise enjoying my evening, I got all bent out of shape and fired off the letter to him below=>
Sheldon,
I stopped reading your stuff years ago because besides not really adding much value, you’re kind of bitter and well, mean. I caught a headline out of the corner of my eye on Ohio.com today and unfortunately got sucked in. The headline said "Garko finds few fans in front office". Now this I had to see because, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out who it was that loved this guy so damn much and kept playing him. Ryan Garko is and was a very, very average major league baseball player who was just about to get expensive. As far as first baseman go, he was okay at getting on base, was below average as a power hitter and was a complete butcher with a glove. He was the poster boy for a replaceable asset. In spite of this Wedgie kept trotting him out there and even tried him in the outfield; an unmitigated disaster. Playing Ryan Garko for 7 of the first 12 starts of fly-ball prone rookie pitcher David Huff alone should have been grounds for Eric’s dismissal. So your argument was that he should have played more? What?! Are you watching the same player and why are you getting paid to do so? That was stupefying enough but you went beyond that and used the ultimate idiot stat - RBI’s to justify it. Sheldon, if you put enough people in base in front of a blind monkey, RBI's result. I’m not even sure why I am even trying to explain this to you so I will just use one prime exhibit. Joe Carter hit .232 in 1990 with a .290 OBP and a .391 SLG average. Add the OBP and the SLG. as I’m sure Pluto will explain to you, leads to a .681 OPS. Admittedly ignoring historical context is, this mark is roughly over a hundred points below what Jamey Carrol (Jamey Carrol!) is producing for the Indians today. In that year of 1990, Joe drove in 115 runs and therefore probably got your MVP vote. Here’s the rub Shellie, Jamey Carrol might have driven more runs that year if he would have replaced Joe and he would have gotten your MVP vote. Why? Plain and simple - because he had a surfeit of runners on when he came to the plate. Hitting ahead of him that year with there OBP’s were Bip Roberts .375, Roberto Alomar .340 and Tony Gwynn .357. Joe was the proverbial blind squirrel who found the nut but you would have been lauding him.
Shellie, if you are not going to know anything about the game that you are paid to know something about, please just go home and yell at the neighborhood kids and please stay there.
PS Good point about Marte playing out of position but you miss the bigger point which is why is Marte playing every other game? If you want to find out if he’s real, do you do so by sitting him and playing Giminez ad-absurdum?
over 2 years ago
stuart dean
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Regardless of their rationale, Garko was the guy who would instantly fall out of favor if he went into a slump, made a couple of errors or had a dirt smudge on his hat.
Huh. And I thought Jhonny was the whipping boy.
On the other hand, maybe this explains Garko’s negative comments about Wedge (hearsay).
Makes perfect sense to me. If you’re a one tool player, a slump makes you a no tool player, and you’re bound to be out of favor.
This was always the definitive problem with Garko.
My advice to him would be to lobby hard for a return to part-time catching in the offseason. If he’s a backup catcher in addition to mediocre first baseman, at that point he’s a poor man’s Victor Martinez. At this point, he’s a poor man’s Lyle Overbay.
Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
I wrote to Bill Livingston after his baseball by the idiots, for the idiots piece on the Cliff Lee trade. Sadly, he didn’t seem interested in beginning a dialogue.
Your tone was somewhat less approachable than that of a baseball missionary out to enlighten the masses. It seemed to me that you knew he wasn’t going to be receptive so you took out on him some of your frustration.
Everybody should get ice cream every day.
Guilty as charged. If I had had any hope of a quasi-thoughtful response, I would have sat it down in drafts overnight and sent it today with less catharsis and attitude.
I wrote a much more thoughtful letter to Patrick McManamon some time back when he made fun of VORP. I told him that in the choice between being Bud Shaw or Terry Pluto that he had chosen unwisely. I also told him that if he wished to fix his error that he should call Keith Woolner and gave him Keith’s phone number. He wrote back that he had received similar missives and would interview Keith. He then wrote a pretty decent follow-up piece.
Stuart Dean
For what it’s worth I was addressing Brad’s little message to Bill Livingston, but you are right it pointing out that my observation fits your piece as well. I think you are also right in assuming you could write the Magna Carta of sabermetric baseball and this guy would be impacted, so I’m certainly not adverse to your writing something a little self-indulgent.
Everybody should get ice cream every day.
I sent an email to ol’ Bill and he responded. Said something like, “you need to drag your Cowboy lovin’ fat ass back to Texas”. He said I should calm down. What a penetrating insight.
Resident LGT results-oriented boob.
Consternation likely remains high in the staff rooms of the PD and Beacon Journal, and all the local papers that re-print his balderdash, that readers just “don’t get it”. What we’ve discovered in the past dozen or so years is that, la voila, great writers came out of the woodwork when given the opportunity to show their stuff. And we don’t have to steam-under-the collar when the Sheldon’s of the newspaper world write their nonsense. Though irritating that he has a platform when so many more worthy deserve it, it does make you wonder about all the news choices coming down from these papers. Don’t just cast aspersions at the local fishwraps…try making sense of the NY Times, WSJ or Washington Post editorial pages. What you notice living overseas is the absurd level of foolishness allowed to fester as acceptable dialogue in the US mass media market…alongside some amazingly good stuff.
by Bogalusa Bomber on Aug 11, 2009 4:30 AM EDT reply actions
I don’t read any of these guys anymore either.
Think of the gig realistically … you watch a ballgame, eat the free food, get a few innocuous quotes from the skipper and players without asking hard questions, bang out your column inches and go home.
If the team is playing well, you shake the pom-poms; if they’re playing poorly, you shovel some dirt on the grave.
To top it off, you resist change in this modern media age, and watch your readers defect to a variety of different sites and writers who can do the job just as well … or better.
Then, newspapers scratch their heads about why revenues and subscriptions drop.
With all respect, FTF, this seems less than rigorous. It strikes me as the accepted story about newspaper sports: Newspapers lazy and bad, blogs ambitious and wonderful.
How does this explain Terry Pluto or someone similarly good?
No, I’m not casting the net that wide.
There are many, many excellent newspaper reporters, and they do public service better than any other media.
It’s more of an old school/new school way of arguing. All I’m saying is that newspapers have to watch getting too long in the tooth and resistant to change and new ideas.
Take Windhorst, a younger writer. He’s really, really, good, and a huge asset to the PD. He also knows that there are alternate ways of delivering content beyond the daily column.
And I’m not saying bloggers are the answer either. There are some that are very good at what they do … but most are pretty bad.
My absolute point is this … there’s nothing Ocker, Hoynes, Pluto, or Livingston offer me that makes me want to pay money for the ABJ or the PD.
by FallsTribeFan on Aug 11, 2009 10:40 AM EDT up reply actions
I read Windhurst and I don’t even like basketball
Differ strongly with you on Pluto
Stuart Dean
by stuart dean on Aug 11, 2009 11:15 AM EDT up reply actions
Pluto is coming around to more modern ways of thinking and working, I’ll say that much.
I’ve never been as much of a Pluto fan as some others, outside of Loose Balls.
by FallsTribeFan on Aug 11, 2009 11:26 AM EDT up reply actions
Pluto gets it and more importantly doesn’t stop questioning/learning. As n aside. his brother Tom is/was an instructor at IMG Baseball Academy which is run by Cleveland native and ex-Indian 3b coach Ken Bolek.
Stuart Dean
by stuart dean on Aug 11, 2009 11:46 AM EDT up reply actions
Pluto already came around to a lot of those ways of thinking. Pluto reads or has read LGT, I know that much.
Steel Nick
Yeah, ya’ll are right. Strike Pluto from my post.
by FallsTribeFan on Aug 11, 2009 12:03 PM EDT up reply actions
Also! Pluto’s responded to every one of the few e-mails I’ve sent him.
by JulioBernazard on Aug 11, 2009 12:19 PM EDT up reply actions
There’s some “value-added” with Pluto, in that he actually provides insightful analysis that a layperson reading the paper wouldn’t often get. That is never the case with Hoynes or Ocker.
Hoynes is at least a very nice guy. The only thing keeping Ocker out of Dickipedia is his unimportance.
Stuart Dean
by stuart dean on Aug 11, 2009 12:55 PM EDT up reply actions
Ever work at a newspaper before? Yeah, they are lazy. And the TV guys too, especially the TV guys. At least intellectually so. Sure, they put in the hours, but look at the product? FTF captures just about exactly what a beat reporter does. The deadlines can be overwhelming, as can the daily grind. But just READ the stuff that is produced about the Indians in a local newspaper. Try reading Chris Assenheimer in the Chronicle. I mean, just try it! Barely makes sense, it’s the director’s cut of comments from cleveland.com.
Here educational an exercise (I used to do this for a living, mind you, for the NBC evening news). Transcribe what the local sports guy says in his segment on the 6 or 11 news. Then read it back to yourself. It’s about 5th grade English, not including the cliches.
Then you’ll think twice about the talking heads who are informing you every day. And be thrilled for the love and care of LGT and Lastoria and Castrovince.
by Bogalusa Bomber on Aug 13, 2009 8:26 AM EDT up reply actions
If the news guy is fifth grade (which sounds about right), then Lastoria is a seventh grade guidance counselor advising you to join the armed serices.
by odradek on Aug 15, 2009 2:14 AM EDT up reply actions 1 recs
if you wanted him to read this, you should have hand-written it and mailed it to him, starting with “I’m a long time subscriber to the newspaper.”
by Brick. on Aug 11, 2009 10:40 AM EDT reply actions 3 recs
i learned so much about genetics in that other thread. Reading the Ocker article and its comments is like watching VH1
by I'd give my legs for Wegz on Aug 11, 2009 3:47 PM EDT reply actions
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