I enjoy Bill Simmons.  I don't feel I have to apologize...I think the guy was remarkably fresh when his columns first popped up, and I still enjoy his point of view, even if I disagree with his insane love of the NBA and his extreme Boston homerism. Anyway, with that out of the way, I was reading through his archive and came across this wonderful bit that really spoke to me.  I thought I would share it with the community... 

What I came across an exchange he had with writer Malcolm Gladwell about a variety of topics.  (LINKY HERE TO THE RELEVENT SECTION)  Gladwell has what seems to me a brilliant bit of writing in this exhange about why he would make a better GM than Isiah Thomas...it's because he actually knows LESS, and therefore would make painfully obvious moves and not outsmart himself.  He says it much prettier than I, because he's a bajillion times smarter.  This got the old wheels-a-turnin' in my head. 

I find this idea wonderfully applicable to baseball too.  Moneyball, which Billy Beane wrote to prove how smart he was (or not), deals a lot with the cloistered old boys club that Lewis saw in baseball, and how certain ideas that seem stale and tired at best and patently crazy at worst, at least to those who stop and think from an objective P.O.V., are or were considered conventional wisdom within baseball.  Examples:

• The strong chin
• Guys with physical tools make the best players, even if those tools never seem to translate to performance
• How teamwork and toughness and grit and fortitude overwhelms talent

I am sure that we can all think of many such examples we have encountered in our lives of baseball fandom.  As Baseball got smarter, it started to challenge these ideas and look at baseball in new and interesting ways.  To me, it is no surprise that some of the most dynamic, intelligent, and influential people within both Baseball and baseball analysis did not come from baseball backgrounds.  Bill James was a student of literature who loved to write and think, and first began doing so as a security guard at a pork-and-beans factory.  Keith Law, who is a bit prickly in my mind but has an exceedingly sharp baseball mind, holds undergraduate degrees from Harvard (sociology and econ.) and is a Carnegie Mellon MBA.  Paul De Podesta, who I think got a raw deal in LA no thanks to Bill "I AM the idiot" Plaschke, was a college athlete at Harvard but also got a degree from there in economics.  Theo Epstein studied American (American studies degree from Yale) and is a J.D.  

My point is this, and this ties back into what Gladwell was saying in his exchange with Mr. Simmons, is that sometimes a fresh, outside perspective is what is necessary.  In Gladwell's hypothetical GM of the Knicks scenario, he would use something of a KISS approach and make seemingly obvious decisions based on not-overthinking things.  In baseball's case, some of the most successful writers and franchises of recent years have been successful largely because of an outside perspective, because they let a smart person run things and said smart person was not corrupted by Baseball's collective conventional wisdom.  I am not one of those who finds that The Old Baseball Man and the Steely-Eyed/Copenhagen-chewing scout do not have a place in the game...their understanding of the minutae of actually playing the game is key and the collaboration of smart outsiders and experienced insiders can create a perfect storm of baseball awesome...however this is no prerequisite.  I reference you all to lboros's post from 2007 regarding the concept of Moneyball 2.0.  The teams may not be great, but the sentiment of drawing from both scouting and intellectual perspectives is.  

To conclude, I think this thought has some connection to our very own Cardinals and their endlessly comment-provoking manager Tony La Russa.  La Russa is someone who can be viewed as either conventional or radical, or perhaps even both simultaneously.  He is the man who hits his pitcher 8th regularly, who designed the modern bullpen as much as anyone could have (whether this is a good thing or not, I leave for another discussion), who juggles his lineups like a madman in pursuit of 9 perfect matchups, and so on.  He is also the man who refuses to hit Albert anywhere but second, who seems to have an affinity for known mediocrities over unproven talent (see the playing time handed to Miguel Cairo and Mike Gallego, for no apparent reason), the man who at times is prickly and unkind to anyone who dares broach the subject of advanced sabermetric analysis, and so on.  Many of his decisions leave us scratching our heads (cough13 man pencough).  To me he is a wonderfully thought-provoking character, and for the most part a very good manager.  I think within the person of Tony La Russa we see both a man willing to try anything and a man unwilling to try anything.  At any rate, he is ceaselessly interesting to those who love baseball and love the Cardinals.

I think all Cardinals fans can say that they were excited by Jason Motte's debut last season with the Birds on Bat.  It is not every day that you see such raw cheese being tossed by a pitcher, let alone one that suits up for Dave Duncan's Pitch to Contact Army.  He and Chris Perez look like they could be a two-headed relief monster for years.  However, the biggest knock on Mr. Motte has always been the fact that he really only throws one pitch: that upper-90's fastball. 

While watching the Rays dramatic rise through the playoffs, one figure in their bullpen really caught my eye: Grant Balfour.  Balfour is sort of a wiry bloke from the Land Down-Under (I wonder if that is his warm up song? Maybe it should be!) who has the arm that allows him to throw a strawberry through a freight train and the brain that makes him try to do it on every single pitch.  Fun guy to watch, for sure. 

I know I can't be the only person who saw similarities between these two...so let's take a look...

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Today, Cardinal Nation lost one of its icons.  George Kissell, a man known as "The Professor," died this morning in Florida as a result of an automobile accident.  Kissell, 88, dedicated his life to the Cardinals, spending nearly seven decades wearing the Birds on Bat.  He appeared at spring training 68 of the past 69 years, teaching and inspiring countless Redbirds along the way.  In his article over this topic, Derrick Goold notes that Kissell was forced to cut back on his role over the past few years due to his wife's health problems, however he still made his appearances, working with young players on various aspects of the game. 

Some other Kissell tidbits:

• He was on Tony La Russa's staff for the 2005 All-Star Game in Detroit.
• He won the King of Baseball Award in 1993 for his contributions to minor league baseball.
• He is commemorated with a plaque in Jupiter, which was unveiled in 2005.
• He was a mentor to Sparky Anderson, Tony La Russa, and Joe Torre, men with thousands of combined wins and more than a handful of World Series rings.
• He is credited with turning Ken Boyer into an MVP award-winning 3rd baseman

The list goes on and on...I don't have the time, nor does anyone, to fully list what this man has meant to the St. Louis Cardinals organization.

Kissell's passing is a great tragedy, one that I am sure will be covered more eloquently by others in the coming days, probably on this very blog.  However, as a lifelong Cardinals fan, I feel greatly saddened by this loss and felt I had to express my sadness to a group of people who would understand.

R.I.P. George Kissell...you will be missed by this fan of 33 years. 

Sources: Derrick Goold, The AP

About a week and a half ago, I made a post regarding the MVP, Cy Young, and Rookie of the Year Awards for the Senior Circuit.  A decent number of people responded, so I thought an AL version may be a good idea.  I went ahead and named two in each category: a should win, as in who really deserves the award, and a will win, as in who the writers are most likely to pick.  Once again, if you feel I am a contemptible moron, please feel free to say so!

Oh, here is the NL version if you're curious. 

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