RIP Joe Morgan

[Beau Vine 54617]

You said that he didn't care who wrote Moneyball, I pointed out that he clearly did using his own words, and I'm not bringing you new information?

[Go Pokes 979]

22 minutes ago, Beau Vine said:

You said that he didn't care who wrote Moneyball, I pointed out that he clearly did using his own words, and I'm not bringing you new information?

Believe me, when it comes to Joe Morgan and his anti-analytics stance, you could sit here and bring me new information every 15 minutes for the next two days.  That point has been conceded.  It still doesn't explain why people think he was a shitty announcer.  Actually, everything you've brought to my attention explained it perfectly.  So I'm all good here.  Thanks for the help.  

[Hate 20157]

Just assume that any former player or executive that predated analytics but has not embraced it is a moron.

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

1 hour ago, Go Pokes said:

If you don't think those are two of the most idiotic paragraphs you've ever read, I don't know what to tell you.  

I don’t get it You’re acting like you’re bringing me new information. Joe hated the analytics. To a fault. It still doesn’t make him any less of an announcer or change the fact that his baseball IQ was as high as anyone ever involved in the game. It just proves he’s a stubborn ass old schooler who wasn’t interested in fancy new technologies and approached. Oh shit! Alert the press! Old man is resistant to technology and change!

Get the fuck outta town ... an old dude resistant to change ?? !!

[Beau Vine 54617]

1 hour ago, Hate said:

Just assume that any former player or executive that predated analytics but has not embraced it is a moron.

Wouldn't go that far, but for a guy who was paid to talk about baseball during a period where analytics was taking over, not even bothering to learn about analytics means he's not doing his job.  

[Beau Vine 54617]

1 hour ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

Get the fuck outta town ... an old dude resistant to change ?? !!

Plenty of old guys in the business changed when analytics took off.  Brian Cashman, Clint Hurdle, Joe Maddon, Buck Showalter.  Shit, go back and read a Gammons column from 20 years ago and it sounds nothing like Gammons.  

[Go Pokes 979]

Wouldn't go that far, but for a guy who was paid to talk about baseball during a period where analytics was taking over, not even bothering to learn about analytics means he's not doing his job.  

That’s probably why he was out of the announcing biz by 2010. The game changed and didn’t change with it. Doesn’t make him a shitty announcer any more than the end of his career made Tom Landry a shitty football coach.

[Beau Vine 54617]

7 minutes ago, Go Pokes said:

That’s probably why he was out of the announcing biz by 2010. The game changed and didn’t change with it. Doesn’t make him a shitty announcer any more than the end of his career made Tom Landry a shitty football coach.

The game has always been changing.  Analytics were brought into the game by Branch Rickey and Earl Weaver.  

But Joe couldn't/wouldn't learn anything from Earl Weaver because Earl never played MLB, and Rickey barely did.  

[Go Pokes 979]

48 minutes ago, Beau Vine said:

The game has always been changing.  Analytics were brought into the game by Branch Rickey and Earl Weaver.  

But Joe couldn't/wouldn't learn anything from Earl Weaver because Earl never played MLB, and Rickey barely did.  

Well now you're just being argumentative.  Baseball has always been changing?  Jesus Christ.  It's barely changed at all since the 1920s.  Better equipment, nutrition, training, and all that changed.  What went on between the lines barely budged and what movement there was wasn't very hard to keep up with.  The introduction of analytics to baseball was the most earth shaking change to how the game is played that's ever happened to baseball.  If you're going to try to tell me Ricky & Weaver's dedication to analytics was even a fraction of what we are seeing now, you're just being a contrarian for the sake of fun.  At best, they dipped their toes in it.  Hell, the didn't have access to computers in those days, so I don't even know how that would work.  Lots of nights bent over a poorly lit desk with scorecards and a handful of #2 pencils is the best I could imagine.  

Earl liked to play small ball, but it helped to have a pitching staff of Palmer, Cueller, McNally, and one other guy I can't recall (Dobson maybe?).  Just like the A's of Hudson, Zito, and one other guy I can't recall right now (Mulder maybe?) was why money ball was successful.  By the way, I guarantee Joe respected Earl and Ricky's baseball knowledge.  They're baseball men and not "computer nerds" who never played the game.  In other words, your entire post was full of bullshit and cheap unfounded shots.  Be fair at least and don't stretch the truth.  

[Beau Vine 54617]

The use of relief pitchers, platooning, and minor league development systems are all massive between-the-lines changes that occurred between 1920 and 1980, but that's just answering your strawman.    

And "Earl liked to play small ball" is Helobius-level uninformed.

[clapclapclap 9000]

Greinke and Dusty with a nice tribute to Joe Morgan just now....

[BonzoMontreaux 1114]

Loved the Reds growing up.  I played second base in Little League and wanted to be him.  Even did the arm flap during at bats.  

 

[Underdog 28855]

^ Negged and Reported. 

[wood 11371]

I liked Joe as an announcer. You're rarely gonna find anyone who's going to impart more real baseball knowledge during a broadcast. I liked him in the same way I like Moreland and Swindell in the booth for the Horns.

[troph 24916]

On 10/17/2020 at 9:23 AM, wood said:

I liked Joe as an announcer. You're rarely gonna find anyone who's going to impart more real baseball knowledge during a broadcast. I liked him in the same way I like Moreland and Swindell in the booth for the Horns.

I’m with you, I loved him in the booth.

[EuroHorn 3276]

9 hours ago, troph said:

I’m with you, I loved him in the booth.

That’s what she said...

[PittsburghTiger 6239]

On 10/12/2020 at 10:45 AM, Surly Bevo said:

Damn dude was an unbelievable player and a fantastic broadcaster.  Been a rough few weeks for baseball legends.

RIP

I remember him as a player, somewhat, and he was special on a great team. But as an announcer he was very, very good.

[Wulaw Horn 19157]

It’s cool if you don’t dig analytics. Joe instead decided to get aggressively stupid fighting against them. It was a really dumb thing to do and he’s been shown to be laughably wrong by history. It was dumb in the moment and even worse now in hindsight. 

[troph 24916]

He can be a great color guy and wrong about math, it’s ok. 

[shadow_operative 15932]

^^^ super racist. 

[Wulaw Horn 19157]

23 hours ago, troph said:

He can be a great color guy and wrong about math, it’s ok. 

You can’t be a great color guy in my opinion if you are strenuously arguing for stuff that’s clearly wrong. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what wins baseball games. 
that doesn’t mean a color guy has to be into analytics to be enjoyable, he just can’t be demonstratively wrong about every strategic thing that comes up in the course of a game, imo. 

[troph 24916]

38 minutes ago, Wulaw Horn said:

You can’t be a great color guy in my opinion if you are strenuously arguing for stuff that’s clearly wrong. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what wins baseball games. 
that doesn’t mean a color guy has to be into analytics to be enjoyable, he just can’t be demonstratively wrong about every strategic thing that comes up in the course of a game, imo. 

Dude I don’t have any interest in winning this so you can have it. I enjoyed watching games he called for most of his broadcasting career.  

[Wulaw Horn 19157]

9 minutes ago, troph said:

Dude I don’t have any interest in winning this so you can have it. I enjoyed watching games he called for most of his broadcasting career.  

I did too. Until the analytic revolution came along and he went out of his way to rage against it at every turn. He turned himself into a caricature arguing on the wrong side of things. 
not did give us one of the all time great websites in the early internet though, in www.firejoemorgan.com. 

[Beau Vine 54617]

On 12/26/2020 at 5:04 PM, Wulaw Horn said:

You can’t be a great color guy in my opinion if you are strenuously arguing for stuff that’s clearly wrong. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what wins baseball games. 
that doesn’t mean a color guy has to be into analytics to be enjoyable, he just can’t be demonstratively wrong about every strategic thing that comes up in the course of a game, imo. 

Joe Morgan was basically Fox News before Fox News became Fox News -- aggressively denying the reality of what he was supposed to cover in favor of his alternative facts, while being as anti-intellectual and condescending as possible.  Joe Morgan was a great announcer like Tucker Carlson is a great newsman.  

[Hank Chinaski 6324]

And again, the great irony of it all is that he was underrated and underappreciated for a chunk of his career (particularly his first several seasons with the Astros) because it predated the analytics era. In a sense, his pre-Cincinnati career is the perfect case study in exactly why advanced analytics result in more accurate valuations of players.

(His final season in Houston, for example - in 1971 you would see that he hit .256 with 13 HR and 40 SB. Not bad, but not special. What nobody noticed back then was that he walked 13% of the time, so he had a .351 OBP. He played half his games in an extreme pitcher's park too, and adjusting for that painted a more accurate picture of his actual ability. By WAR, he was a consistent all-star level performer in Houston. But he was underappreciated by the Astros (and baseball in general) and they made the franchise-altering decision to trade him.)

And even in his prime with the Reds, even with the 2 MVP awards, he was still underrated because nobody cared that he walked 100 times every year and had OBPs in the mid-.400s. 

The analytics revolution revealed that he was not just a run-of-the-mill Hall-of-Famer, but an inner-circle HOFer. And yeah, his railing against sabermetrics was cringey in an anti-intellectualism kind of way.

He wasn't the only one, but it's not a good look when your criticism of something reveals how little you actually understand what you're criticizing. 

[VolenteHawk 495]

11 minutes ago, Hank Chinaski said:

And again, the great irony of it all is that he was underrated and underappreciated for a chunk of his career (particularly his first several seasons with the Astros) because it predated the analytics era. In a sense, his pre-Cincinnati career is the perfect case study in exactly why advanced analytics result in more accurate valuations of players.

(His final season in Houston, for example - in 1971 you would see that he hit .256 with 13 HR and 40 SB. Not bad, but not special. What nobody noticed back then was that he walked 13% of the time, so he had a .351 OBP. He played half his games in an extreme pitcher's park too, and adjusting for that painted a more accurate picture of his actual ability. By WAR, he was a consistent all-star level performer in Houston. But he was underappreciated by the Astros (and baseball in general) and they made the franchise-altering decision to trade him.)

And even in his prime with the Reds, even with the 2 MVP awards, he was still underrated because nobody cared that he walked 100 times every year and had OBPs in the mid-.400s. 

The analytics revolution revealed that he was not just a run-of-the-mill Hall-of-Famer, but an inner-circle HOFer. And yeah, his railing against sabermetrics was cringey in an anti-intellectualism kind of way.

He wasn't the only one, but it's not a good look when your criticism of something reveals how little you actually understand what you're criticizing. 

Yep, he was plainly uninformed at the time, he’s hilariously wrong as time goes on, and ironically...the stuff he hated cleanly explained how much better he was than previously thought. A perfect triple crown of stupidity...and he was emphatic enough about it that it will stick to his legacy forever.

Edited December 28, 2020 by VolenteHawk