Back from my Very Important Trip Further West.
(1) Little quirky, unimportant things one notices about hosts: Gordon mispronounces "insurance." He puts the emphasis on the first syllable. Without exception.
WAIT: I see some folks say that "INsurance," is an acceptable variation, especially in the South. Oh dear, what will the language descriptivists and relativists be permitting next?
Well . . . that's just wrong and anyone who is pronouncing it that way should stop immediately. Especially the erudite Gordon.
WAIT MORE: I've heard two people say INsurance today out on the plains.
Okay, okay, Gordon, I apologize.
(2) I like The Shake Joint's "Sports 303" or whatever their sabremetrics segment is called. I was an early adopter of Bill James's Baseball Abstract, back when you had to buy it in a book with pages and glued bindings and covers. Fascinating. And, of course, there's the Moneyball stuff.
But I was puzzled by something I heard on the segment a couple of weeks back. Jake and especially Sean were talking about the meaninglessness of the "win" in baseball as applied to pitchers' records. Noting, correctly, that sometimes pitchers get wins even if they pitch lousily.
But it got me thinking: In the long run -- couple three seasons, let's say, or the average term of a pitcher with a single team -- what pitchers are incorrectly judged based on their W/L records? Which ones overrated, which ones underrated?
Let's take a longer run, a career: Are there pitchers out there in the Hall of Fame who don't belong, or those who aren't there who should be, based on a mistaken emphasis on W/L records? Are there pitchers who are undervalued in trades or free-agent salaries for the same reason? Do modern-day general managers overvalue that statistic in building their teams?
Isn't it the case that in the mid-to-long run, undeserved losses and undeserved wins, under the current way of scoring these things, will even out, and that the W/L record of a pitcher will give a reasonably accurate measure of a pitcher's merit against others measured the same way?
But, as I say, I like sabremetrics and I think they're valuable, and I like the segment. Heck, I like pretty much all of the The Shake Joint except for the current events stuff, which I can generally take or leave.
(3) And while we're on the subject: Can anyone think of any presentation in any medium whatsoever whose name contains two separate drug references -- and a pun? I'll take one with two separate drug references. (Before you ask: The pun is "joint," which can refer to a marijahooster cigarette, or a destination of some kind -- like Spike Lee referring to his movies as "a Spike Lee joint.")
(4) I'm trying to figure out the deal with the Whiskey War. I thought maybe Gentleman Jack and Woodford Reserve were manufactured by the same whiskey conglomerate, but can't find any evidence of that. (At the end of one of their ads, Danny states the name of some entity -- maybe a distributor -- that might tie them together. I'll try to pick it up next time I hear one of the ads.) One of you smart Confessors knows the answer to why these apparent competitors have commissioned a joint advertising campaign. What's strange is that I find no other such campaign referenced on the authoritative Internets, nor really any particular pairing of these two products.
EXCEPT that I do see promotions where you can get a bottle of either of these products personally engraved. But I can't find any other connection between the two UNLESS it's that they're both in kinda flattish bottles that can be easily engraved.
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| Confessor calling Danny to find out whether Jack Daniels Tennessee Honey counts as a volley favoring Gentleman Jack |
