Today's world of baseball news has a major problem. The writers and reporters that are entrusted with the job of relaying information about the sport are, quite simply, uninformed. Multiple facets of their knowledge foundation are based on archaic concepts that are not at all rooted in fact. Examples of these are found daily papers around the United States, with some of the more popular ones being the True Leadoff Hitter™, win-loss record as a good indicator of a pitcher’s effectiveness, and high strikeout totals denoting poor hitters.

At the same time, the vast majority of reporters will conjure an idea in their heads, and then look for supporting evidence to “back up” their assertions. Once the memo on a certain player is out, the player has almost zero chance to reverse it [regardless of what the truth actually is]. Media types around the country buy into these ideas because they help them write a column, or make an intriguing soundbite on the evening news shows, but they don’t actually fact check them. Why? Well, because as long as everyone believes they are true, and they help them make their point, then why mess with success? Much of the time these guys and gals probably [know] that something is off with the theories that they base their articles on, yet they go along with them anyway so that they can write or report the piece from the angle that they ignorantly birthed. Which leads us to perhaps the most egregious offender of them all: Bill Simmons, AKA ESPN’s The Sports Guy.

Simmons is an unabashed Sox fan, and there is really no problem with that. He started out as The Boston Sports Guy, but when he went national with The Worldwide Leader his name was truncated. He was a refreshing breath of air on the sports writing scene at the time his columns started gaining steam in the late 90’s and early 00’s, as his humor was right on the level with that of you and your college buddies. He riddled his pieces with 80’s and 90’s pop culture references, and wrote columns with actual fan emotion. There really wasn’t anyone else out there doing it quite like he was, and his columns were greatly anticipated when they were released.

When he wrote about hatred he had for players, or reasons why he supported a team, he always did so from the standpoint of a rational discourse. Even if he said that Roger Clemens was the anti-christ, and that he hated him immensely, he went into great detail about the reasons surrounding the hate. His emotion may have been exaggerated due to his team allegiance, but he would run out an entire column’s worth of facts to support his vitriol.
 

Somewhere along the way Simmons got lost, though. He took a wrong turn and decided to become one of the fools in the media who just buys into the imbecilic group-think that permeates sports reporting. He just might have become the biggest jackass of them all, too; bigger than Lupica, worse than the Sutcliffe/Brantley/Kruk trinity, and more dishonest than Gammons. Quite a bold statement, huh? How could he possibly be worse than those guys? Well in the coming paragraphs we’ll take a closer look at some of Simmons’ idiocy, but the point that needs to be made clear is that Simmons has no excuse for his following the herd. Lupica has done it his whole whiney career, ESPN’s three stooges are former players, and as such are some of the most ignorant baseball people around, and Gammons has long since jumped the shark and become a shill for the Boston front office and Yankee haters everywhere. Simmons, though, was known for taking a unique perspective on things and challenging the accepted theories out there regarding sports. He does so to this very day with his NBA columns, which are fantastic reads. As someone who takes pride in being one of nineteen remaining True NBA Fans left (RIP Road Dog), he is not willing to accept the foolishness that masquerades as truth when it comes to the NBA. In fact, he frequently rages against it, as he did recently with his column about Steve Nash’s MVP awards, and his constant mention of Chad Ford’s Torre/Sturtze love affair with European prospects riding the pine in smoky Siberian gyms. However, when it comes to baseball, and specifically the Yankees, Simmons willingly throws all of his intellect and rationality out the window and buys into the mass ramblings of fanboys and ESPN, simply to take shots at the team and attempt to be funny. Here’s the thing: there are enough valid reasons to rip the Yankees and their players, yet The Sports Guy, an educated and intelligent man, voluntarily accepts the brainwashed sludge that is bandied about, and harps on it like it actually has merit. This is what makes him the worst; the guy should know better. Given his NBA stylings, he’s actually proven that he does.

Before we go any further, it needs to be said again that Simmons’ problem isn’t that he is a Red Sox fan. Being from Boston and writing entertainment pieces for one of the largest national sports media outlets in the country is a rightful excuse to be biased. Given the antipathy that Red Sox fans have for everything pinstripes, the fact that he dislikes the Yankees and is vocal about it surprises no one. When he repeatedly calls Jorge Posada “The Wuss,” it comes across as a personal Rival Fan Vendetta against a specific player. We see this type of accusation for what it is, I mean, everyone knows that the catcher on his favorite team just so happened to “forget” to take his catcher’s mask off, an act that catchers perform instinctively nearly every time they move out from behind the plate, before escalating a fight into physicality. Criticizing the intestinal fortitude of Jorge Posada is obviously the result of a personal dislike of the team he is on, but it is an opinion, however right or wrong it may be. There may be evidence to back up or refute his claims, but questioning a player’s personality is something that can almost never be proven, and as such, Simmons is entitled to say whatever he wants about the personalities of Posada or any other Yankees. Red Sox fans are going to hate the Yankees. It’s expected, and although one would hope to see a bit more rationality out of a guy who has proven to be astute at analyzing sports, it is not at all upsetting to see him taking silly and unfounded personal digs at Yankee players in his entertainment pieces; they’re part and parcel.

There are times that Simmons even goes out of his way to praise certain Yankees, like his recent piece on Mariano Rivera being one of his favorite things about sports. This doesn’t really merit much mention though, because considering the subject, Simmons would have to be an absolute moron to be publicly critical about anything. Rivera is the greatest closer of all-time, has been absolutely dominant for over a decade, obliterated postseason records, is polite, respectable, unassuming, and even willing to concede victory when it is earned, as was seen in his debut at Fenway in 2005. Pointing out the obvious, that he is one of the greatest things that sports has going for it, doesn’t warrant credit. Especially when you consider he wrote the following in April of 2005:
 

But if I had to pick one thing that gives the Red Sox their biggest advantage over the Yankees heading into the 2005 season, I'm going with Keith Foulke – partly because of rumors that Rivera is breaking down, partly because he's the only closer who uses Danzig as his entrance music, partly because Foulke's gritty October performance vaulted him past Rivera as the premier money reliever in baseball.

Speaking the Sports Guy’s language, writing that mea culpa about Mo after producing the above drivel about Foulke is akin to Fredo seeking Michael’s love and affection after selling him out to Hyman Roth. Put it this way- I wouldn’t be surprised if Simmons drank banana daiquiris. In the end though, the Foulke debacle, much like the Roth incident, is merely a product of weakness, and that isn’t an overtly malicious offense. It’s also not the crux of The Sport’s Guy’s problems.
 

The true issue with Simmons lies within his blatant disregard of factual evidence when discussing the Yankees, particularly his ADHD takes on Alex Rodriguez and the ill-conceived reputation that media types around the country have falsely branded him with. Before we go any further though, we need to establish a couple of parameters:

1) There is no argument that Alex Rodriguez doesn’t press in high pressure situations; he does.

2) There is no argument that Alex Rodriguez isn’t programmed when speaking with the media; he is.

3) There is no argument that Alex Rodriguez doesn’t make a lot of money; he does.

Ok, glad that’s out of the way. Here’s the thing though: There’s more to the story than those three points. Much more, especially with the first one, and the evidence suggests that despite what Simmons giddily peddles, the above points tell us very little about the actual on-field results that have been produced.

To begin with it needs to be established that Simmons willfully and spitefully ignores fact and truth in favor of sensationalism. As was pointed out earlier earlier, it’s one thing to take shots at a player’s personality or character, amplifying meaningless incidents or traits for the sake of a laugh. It’s quite another to actively seek the continuation of a patently false stigma. As I wrote in an article published on NoMaas.org a couple of months ago, one of the biggest advantages of statistics is that they help overcome the inability of the human mind to rationally catalogue everything that it sees over the course of an entire season. The reputation that Alex Rodriguez has from the national media is entirely a result of this factor. SportsCenter controls the highlights we see, writers control the emotions we have about games afterwards, and we ourselves forget things that happen in the earlier innings if something changes in the later ones.

It has already been stated that Simmons is an intelligent guy who doesn’t buy into this idiocy when it comes to other sports, and the crazy thing is that he even speaks about this flaw in one of his columns about the 2005 AL MVP decision:
 

Based upon this quote it is quite clear that The Sports Guy knows how fleeting and impressionable the human memory is. It’s too bad that you’re about to see how a smart and entertaining writer willingly disregards that concept when he has a chance to perpetuate lies about a team and player that he hates.
 

As a starting point, you can see how hypocritical Simmons is when speaking about A-rod. Hypocrisy is generally the result of either simple stupidity or a bias that allows an individual to circumvent rules that he usually adheres to. Since it is perfectly obvious from reading the majority of his columns that Simmons is not stupid, one has to assume that he is choosing to ignore the rules that he uses to govern his opinions of the rest of the players in Major League baseball when he makes contradictory statements involving similar situations, but different players. For example, in a recent column he calls A-Rod “Mr. March,” implying that he does doesn’t produce when the heat is on in the fall months. In fact, his moniker is extra funny because it suggests that A-Rod doesn’t produce at all during the regular season, instead doing all of his production in Spring Training. Heh. While that is uproariously comical, what’s even funnier is that Simmons doesn’t really believe that, and has previously stated that he believes hits that come before the summer starts to be a fantastic indicator of a player’s ability to perform under pressure:
 

Back in May, I remember [Big Papi] slamming a B.J. Ryan pitch into Fenway's center-field bleachers to win a game -- an afternoon game, against a lefty, no less -- and thinking to myself, "This is the greatest clutch hitter I have ever watched.

“Back in May,” Bill? Surely you know by now that hits in May don’t count towards a player’s ICBTSGSSI (It’s Clutch Because the Sports Guy Said So Index. Incidentally, on the 0-100 scale, Ortiz currently sports a 122.7 career figure, while A-Rod is mired at -439.1). Although by definition of the statistic, I suppose we can make the exception Because The Sports Guy Said So. In either case, you can’t have it both ways, Simmons. Either early months count, or they don’t.

The shots at Rodriguez’s supposed inability to perform under pressure are even more comical considering the following career postseason numbers:
 

	BA	OBP	SLG	OPS
Ortiz	.301	.383	.552	.935
Matsui	.319	.377	.556	.933
Rodriguez	.305	.393	.534	.927
Manny	.257	.353	.492	.845
Sheffield	.262	.421	.423	.844
Jeter	.307	.379	.463	.842

This is where The Sports Guy really would his expose his anti A-Rod mania, for he would probably say something like “it all happened when he was with Seattle,” or “those numbers were put up when the games were out of hand!” What Simmons either already knows, or has selectively forgotten, is that this is patently false. Everyone remembers the 2004 ALCS where the Red Sox made history by storming back from a three games to none deficit, so why is it so difficult to remember what happened just days prior?

Here, Sports Guy, let me refresh your memory:

(Source)
 

NEW YORK -- Until the bottom of the 12th inning, it appeared as if Alex Rodriguez's first breakout postseason game as a Yankee would be overshadowed by an anchor-like 2-0 deficit. The Yankees were trailing, 6-5, entering the bottom of the 12th and facing impeccable closer Joe Nathan. But that scenario just generated another opportunity for Rodriguez to produce in the clutch. Nathan had thrown two dominant innings, but Minnesota manager Ron Gardenhire was asking his gifted right-hander to enter uncharted territory and pitch three innings. The velocity was there, but the command was gone. Ahead one run, he walked Miguel Cairo and Derek Jeter with one out, bringing up A-Rod. Rodriguez admitted he looked pretty foolish bouncing back to Nathan in the 10th inning, as he reached out for an outside fastball. So this time, he was going to make Nathan -- who was on fumes -- work harder. With his uncanny ability to reach across the strike zone, Rodriguez smashed a 1-1 slider deep to left field. Shannon Stewart could have tried for an acrobatic catch but instead allowed it to bounce over the fence, knowing full well Jeter would have scored if the ball stayed in the park. Hideki Matsui then lined J.C. Romero's first pitch to right field and Jeter scored just ahead of the throw home to seal a 7-6, Game 2 win to even the series. Rodriguez's tying double galvanized the 56,354 that sulked after Torii Hunter put the Twins ahead, 6-5, with a solo home run off Tanyon Sturtze in the top of the 12th, and it also capped a masterful night for the newest Yankees star. Rodriguez was 4-for-6 with a home run, double and three RBIs.

(Source)
 

MINNEAPOLIS -- Alex Rodriguez has heard 252 million times about his contract and some question whether any player is worth that amount of money. Rodriguez is no doubt one of the more gifted players of his generation with his combination of power, athleticism and grace. Very little of what he did in the 11th inning of Game 4 of the ALDS, however, was powerful or graceful. Rodriguez put on a clinic on how to manufacture a run, single-handedly leading the Bombers to a 6-5, series-clinching win over the Minnesota Twins in front of 52,498 at the Metrodome.

Alex Rodriguez is clearly incapable of producing when it counts. What’s even more funny is that Alex Rodriguez has played in THREE postseason series as a Yankee. He has been very good in one and a half of them. In his last series, despite what everyone in the public was led to believe, he was by FAR not the worst performer on the team, an honor that was shared heartily by Gary Sheffield and Hideki Matsui.

To expand on the point even further, here are some more postseason performances to look at:
 

	BA	OBP	SLG	OPS
Player A	.120	.241	.160	.401
Player B	.118	.250	.176	.426
Player C	.200	.333	.200	.533
Player D	.125	.222	.125	.347
Player E	.095	.174	.143	.317
Player F	.133	.381	.200	.581

The lesson here, and what Simmons already knows, is that baseball is a game of failure by nature. You are taught as a little kid that even the best baseball players fail to get a hit seven out of ten times. Because of this, if you go looking for failure in the game of baseball, you’re going to find it. For ANYONE. Here are the identities for the players cited above:

Player A - Mickey Mantle, 1962 World Series
Player B - Babe Ruth, 1922 World Series
Player C - Ted Williams, 1946 World Series
Player D - Reggie Jackson ,1977 ALCS
Player E - David Ortiz, 2003 ALDS
Player F - Alex Rodriguez, 2005 ALDS

So he’s produced game winning/series defining hits in the postseason, and had comparable failures to the greats of the game and his peers. What’s scary is that none of this has stopped Bill Simmons from continuing the ridiculous notion that A-Rod’s performance becomes that of a Little Leaguer when pressure rears its head. Yes, I keep saying that Simmons already either knows these things and/or willfully purges them from his mind, with the supporting evidence being his intelligent NBA columns. Well, there’s also the fact that he is a member, and has been for a while now, of the Boston Red Sox fan website Sons of Sam Horn, where the discussion of baseball is maintained on a level higher than the hacks in the press. Bill Simmons is completely aware of just how incredibly stupid his anti A-Rod infatuation is, yet he disregards reason in order to ingratiate himself with the national media.
 

Sadly, even when he tries, The Sports Guy can’t force himself to put together a reasonable argument about Rodriguez and the 2005 AL MVP race. In a piece about the results, he says,
 

Congratulations to Alex Rodriguez, your 2005 American League MVP. Even though I wanted Big Papi to win, it was nice to see the sheer joy on the faces of Yankee fans Monday when…oh, wait, there wasn't any joy whatsoever. Good choice, though.

Ah, projection at it’s finest. Red Sox fans hate A-Rod, so they want Yankee fans to as well. The problem is, not one informed fan I know hates the guy. He’s a Yankee, one of the top three players in the entire sport, and well-mannered. To hate him would be the product of either immense stupidity and/or jealousy.
 

I'm torn on this one. As I wrote six weeks ago, you really had to follow the 2005 Red Sox to understand Big Papi's impact on the team -- they would have won about 12 to 15 fewer games if you replaced him with a mediocre DH.

Ah, to be a writer with national exposure and the power to make baseless claims that sound authoritative due to the usage of specific numbers. What the Sports Guy already knows is that there are statistical measures that look at a player’s contributions relative to his positional peers. One such measure is Baseball Prospectus’ Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP). What the statistic does is boil down a player’s contributions, offensively and defensively, to reveal how many more wins they were worth over a replacement level player at their position. For 2005, WARP numbers for A-Rod and Ortiz were as follows:
 

	2005 WARP
A-Rod	10.5
Ortiz	8.1

Ah, to have real, factual numbers instead of those that are heavily influenced by the ICBTSGSSI. Rodriguez was 10.5 wins better than a replacement third baseman, and Ortiz was 8.1 wins better than a replacement DH.
 

On the other hand, I'm the same guy who argued last April that Steve Nash shouldn't win the NBA MVP because he couldn't guard anyone. And when you consider that A-Rod is an above-average defensive third baseman, his hitting stats and Big Papi's hitting stats were relatively equal, and most of the 28 voters didn't have the luxury of watching Papi's overall impact at the plate and in the dugout, the vote seemed like a forgone conclusion.

Baseball Prospectus’ defensive numbers used in the calculation of WARP are certainly spotty, but the big picture is still apparent. Nevertheless, if we remove defensive considerations from the argument, and focus solely on their offensive contributions, A-Rod still wins. He had a higher batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage. Delving a bit further into the statistics, we can measure their offensive contributions relative to their positions with Value Over Replacement Player (VORP). This figure, expressed in runs, doesn’t take into consideration any defensive contributions. For 2005 the two produced the following results:
 

	2005 VORP
A-Rod	91.0
Ortiz	75.6

It will vary between 9 and 11 from year to year, but generally speaking, every 10 runs or so is equal to 1 win. Going strictly by their offensive numbers, A-Rod was still well over one full win better than Ortiz when they were both compared to their positional peers. Isn’t it a shame that sports writers can make up numbers whenever they want to support their arguments? Shouldn’t there be some sort of licensing process to prevent these guys from writing complete and total falsehoods? Oh, and no one cares about any stupid jokes you want to make about the statistics’ acronyms (DORK, SLORP, etc.) simply because you aren’t willing to take the time to understand them.
 

We now arrive at one of my favorite Sports Guy lines of all time:
 

Has there been a sports-related commercial that provoked more barbs and sarcastic comments in the last 25 years than A-Rod and Vlad having that HR contest for Pepsi? I giggle every time it comes on -- the only thing it's missing is a scoreboard that has A-Rod's team up by eight runs

This is the quote that makes you just sit back and laugh at what Simmons has become. The man tries so hard to perpetuate the image of A-Rod as a stat-padder that he doesn’t realize that in his attempts to exaggerate this perceived flaw (homering in blowouts to inflate his numbers), he glosses over the fact that there is no actual evidence to support the flaw even existing in the first place. Taking a quick look through all of the homeruns hit by Rodriguez and Vlad in 2005, we can see the following information:
 

	HR	Take Lead	Tie or Take Lead	5 Run Spread	Avg. Spread
Vlad	32	37.50% (12)	40.63% (13)	15.63% (5)	2.1563
A-Rod	48	33.33% (16)	39.58% (19)	16.67% (8)	2.3125

Not as big a discrepancy as Simmons has led everyone to believe, huh? Vlad had a larger percentage of his homeruns that gave the Angels the lead outright, but they were fairly equal in homeruns hit to tie or take the lead in the game. Additionally, when there was a 5 run spread or greater, they also hit a very similar percentage of their homeruns. Finally, the average run spread in the game at the time of their homeruns shows a decent gap between the two, but not one that should cause the entire sports world to crucify Rodriguez for notoriously producing in blowouts.

Just for giggles, lets see how A-Rod stands up to Simmons’ goomah:
 

	HR	Take Lead	Tie or Take Lead	5 Run Spread	Avg. Spread
A-Rod	48	33.33% (16)	39.58% (19)	16.67% (8)	2.3125
Ortiz	47	29.79% (14)	40.43% (19)	17.02% (8)	2.3191

Ironically enough, I wrote “just for giggles” above, and I’m giggling right now. I don’t even need to say anything about this.
 

The conclusion to draw from all of this is that Bill Simmons baseball commentary, even when he feigns seriousness, is a complete disaster. He makes concerted efforts to harp on stereotypes conjured by the morons in sports media (especially the NY and Boston contingents) that he has proven smart enough to recognize as untruths. Covering baseball as the Sports Guy, he went from a breath of fresh air to a mouthful of kitty litter. The change began when A-Rod came to the Yankees and the Red Sox won the World Series, and he will now support anything that can malign the Yankees and their players, even if it means doing so in blind faith. His attempts at humor through these means fall flat with people who have even half a clue when it comes to the sport, and it is very disappointing to see such a talented sports writer waste himself by regurgitating the absurdities of morons like Mike Lupica. In the end though, Simmons needs to be held responsible for the crap that he churns out, and the evidence that has been covered here is only the tip of the iceberg.
 

In 2005 Alex Rodriguez hit one grandslam, which came when the Yankees were in the lead by 4 runs. That didn’t stop Simmons from writing this in his running diary of opening day:
 

And if you don't think we're in "Cheap Grand Slam" territory for A-Rod right now, you obviously don't know the man very well. Is there any way I can wager on this?

Never mind the fact that the Yankees were up only 3-0 in the second inning against Barry Zito, apparently Simmons also forgets that in 2005 David Ortiz hit two grandslams, one with his team in an identical situation, up 3 runs, and this one.

So, Simmons: either change your name to The Boston Fanboy, or start producing the kind of baseball writings that we all know you’re capable of. The trash that you are publishing recently, even though it is entertainment, is quite simply the worst that the sport has to offer. As was said earlier- there are plenty of real reasons to ridicule the Yankees and their players, so stop going to the Idiot’s Well of Lies for your columns. You’re better than that, you know better than that, and your readers expect more from you. Contrary to your own confessions, the lesson here, as you have proven sometimes, is that you are not an idiot.

E-mail Lane: lanemeyer.nomaas@gmail.com