Hear ye, hear ye, Landers of the Lookout, for I have come to tell you a story. A story of woe and loss, of anger and betrayal, of the foolish pride of a foolish man, and the curse he brought forth to many a fan. Now sit yourself, grab a beer, and listen with your best reading ear, for the time has come to regale you with a sad tale, a tale of how the Seattle Mariners abandoned the man with a wondrous bat that went wammy, and found themselves stuck, with the Curse of the Cammy.

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So this has been a pretty crazy 24 hours for Mariners fans (yeah its been crazier for many other teams, but who cares about them). The news of Anaheim signing Pujols (and Wilson) has caused many Mariners fans to believe the Mayans were predicting specifically for them when they decided the world was ending in 2012. It is natural, to feel disheartened, when your chief rival (sorry Padres) signs the best player alive. However, after the initial shock, I have felt something different, excitement.

Somehow, the Angels signing Pujols, has brought me to the unequivocal belief that the Mariner’s are going to be better than the Halos in the long run. I even called it, stating (on Facebook, but whatever, it leads somewhere) that over the lifetime of the Pujols contract, the M’s will win more games than the Angels. My friend decided to call me out on that and bet me a week’s worth of beard growth (or a six pack) for every win difference between the two teams. After some quick google docs work to see if the M’s had ever actually won more than the halos over a recent 10 year period, I accepted his bet. Why? Because I believed! It felt awesome, and I realized that sometimes, we all need to leave rationality behind, and just believe!

That led me to the idea for this fan post (it started out as a comment, but I realized I had more that I wanted to say and to hear). Where do we all draw that line between reviewing the facts, the playoff odds, the predictions, and simply saying ’Fuck It! I sincerely think that the M’s are going to win it all this year, because damn it, they’ve got the heart!’

As a group of sabermetrically inclined fans of a recently bad team, it’s easy to become despondent. We see our team get out of the race early, and then all that’s left is trying to find some reason to pay attention. We’re Mariner’s addicts (or at least I am) but by July we’re left rooting for the next year’s championship because there’s no chance in hell we’re winning this year’s one. I know for me, I didn’t always used to be this way. I used to be an ignorant M’s fan that believed in things like heart, grit, and that chemistry would take us to the top. In some ways I miss it.

I am going to share my story, of how I came into the fold of the analytical baseball community. Where I feel my balance between analytics and irrationality takes me as a sports fan, and I would love to hear other’s stories as well.

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So, I have to admit that I am a newcomer to defensive metrics, so I don't have the full experience to appropriately comment on this article. However, I had to point out that ESPN has some guy named Nyjer Morgan being vastly better in center field than our man Gut.

http://insider.espn.go.com/mlb/hotstove09/insider/columns/story?id=4898304

Its Insider only so I'll try to sum up what it says.

Basically it says that since morgan had significantly less innings than gut we can take his UZR and multiply it out to UZR/150, and show that he had a UZR/150 of 40.5 to gut's 27.1 thus making morgan the apocalypse to flying things. Is this okay? Is there a small sample size problem? Do we have to destroy this writer for blasphemy against one of the deities here at LL? 

Essentially I want wiser souls to tell me if my world view should be crumbling, because if Guti had one of the best defensive center fielding seasons of all time, what does this mean for the other guy? Also would it then make sense for the Nats to stick him in right center and have him cover both right and center and then make Adam Dunn into the first NL DH?

Well that was my first post, I sincerely hope I did not break any faux pas here at LL.