Baseball knowledge is a constantly changing thing. It's like any other form of information: some of it is uniform, and some of it is constantly fluid, changing based on era, culture, and shared experiences. There is, though, one piece of baseball knowledge that pretty much spans the masses. It is this: having better talent is a good thing.
Andruw Jones has experienced one of the steepest, most dramatic career drop-offs ... well, I was going to say "in recent years," but that seems like an understatement. Jones appeared to be a first-ballot Hall of Famer as recently as 2006, before his OPS+ that year, 126, dropped off a cliff to 88 in 2007. His split stats followed suit. Things got ugly.
Have you heard about the economy? It's bad. You've seen this? You've heard about this? (Adjusts tie, looks around, does headlines, steals Conan's thunder.) Anyway, yes, the economy is bad, and sports are not recession-proof. People are going broke. Baseball tends to not be the highest priority when your primary concern is making sure your checking account has enough to pay for utilities each month.
So baseball is expecting a downturn. The question is not whether it will happen, but how bad it will be, and how the teams worst affected will be able to absorb it. According to Peter Gammons, the initial numbers are already coming in. They're not good:
In the halcyon days of winter, when Jake Peavy trade rumors were flying to and fro, it was widely accepted information that Peavy had a limited number of teams he would lift his no-trade clause for. Those teams included the Braves and the Cubs in the NL, and the Angels and Yankees in the AL. Those limitations hamstrung the Padres in a variety of ways, and the closest the team ever got to unloading Peavy was a harebrained hypothetical three-way trade with the Cubs that never panned out.
By now, on-base percentage is one of the more widely accepted, non-controversial advanced baseball statistics us Interweb-dwellers like to cling to. Actually, it almost seems incorrect to call OBP "advanced." It's really about as simple as it gets: it's the percentage of at-bats in which a hitter reaches base. I mean, that's simple. Really, incredibly simple.
Brandon Phillips apparently disagrees. It's not exactly surprising -- baseball players aren't required to read Bill James from the womb, or something. Their primary function is to do baseball, not think about it. But it is funny to point and laugh at the dummy in the corner. From John Fay at the Cinci Enquirer:
When Alex Rodriguez did his big "I'm sorry for cheating" presser, he made repeated mention of working with someone named "Don" and "Don's foundation." A-Rod was talking about steroids activist Don Hooten, whose 17-year-old son's suicide was related to his steroid use. Hooten has long partnered with Major League Baseball to fight PEDs. A-Rod's admission and references to Hooten gave Hooten the opportunity to get the sort of exposure he could never get on the strength of his story alone.
Alex Rodriguez did steroids and now everybody has an opinion about it. I'm just a lowly blogger, and I have my opinion (it's sort of a big deal but probably not as big a deal as everyone is saying), so of course professional baseball players and analysts -- people renowned for their playing ability and/or analytical insights -- are going to want to share their views, too, even if at this point it's utterly impossible to say anything interesting about the topic.
Steroids are bad. If there is anything the hackneyed newspaper columnists of the world would like get across to you, the fan, it's that: Steroids are bad, the people who took them are evil (rather than flawed but ultimately normal people), and everyone who allowed them to pollute the previously incorruptible national pastime deserves to, I don't know, be flogged or something. Steroid anger is a particularly silly, and yet finely distilled, brand.
Last year, the Mets "choked." But what does that mean? What is a choke? We say these words, and we think we know what they mean, but what are they, exactly? The confusion here -- it's existential. I don't want to live in a world that can't properly identify when one sports team has sufficiently screwed the pooch (there's another one of these sports phrases) to qualify as a "choke."
Andy Pettitte and Roger Clemens are, by all accounts, best friends. BFFs. Besties. They probably even have the same color Trapper-Keepers. They're just that tight, which makes their different approaches to their use of steroids/HGH a little, well, awkward. Pettitte admits what he did. Clemens maintains his innocence. That could be coming back to bite them.
Baseball knowledge is a constantly changing thing. It's like any other form of information: some of it is uniform, and some of it is constantly fluid, changing based on era, culture, and shared experiences. There is, though, one piece of baseball knowledge that pretty much spans the masses. It is this: having better talent is a good thing. 
Have you heard about the economy? It's bad. You've seen this? You've heard about this? (Adjusts tie, looks around, does headlines, 
In the halcyon days of winter, when 
By now, on-base percentage is one of the more widely accepted, non-controversial advanced baseball statistics us Interweb-dwellers like to cling to. Actually, it almost seems incorrect to call OBP "advanced." It's really about as simple as it gets: it's the percentage of at-bats in which a hitter reaches base. I mean, that's simple. Really, incredibly simple. 
When 
Steroids are bad. If there is anything the hackneyed newspaper columnists of the world would like get across to you, the fan, it's that: Steroids are bad, the people who took them are evil (rather than flawed but ultimately normal people), and everyone who allowed them to pollute the previously incorruptible national pastime deserves to, I don't know, be flogged or something. Steroid anger is a particularly silly, and yet finely distilled, brand.
Last year, the Mets "choked." But what does that mean? What is a choke? We say these words, and we think we know what they mean, but what are they, exactly? The confusion here -- it's existential. I don't want to live in a world that can't properly identify when one sports team has sufficiently screwed the pooch (there's another one of these sports phrases) to qualify as a "choke." 
