I am going to crib this from ac.com (so Buck, you may start laughing at me, hehe) but this is just sooooooooooooo funny that everyone has to see it... http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/sports/1373978 ---- Historians crunch the numbers of players from different eras; Dierker has a simple formula. He takes a player's slugging percentage, adds it to his on-base percentage and comes up with a raw number. "I think that's the best way to judge the quality of a hitter," he said. "That tells you about his power and how often he's on base to give others a chance. If you take other things, like home runs and RBIs, the totals can be skewed by the people around him and his place in the batting order." Using the Dierker formula, Bonds is one of eight players in history with a total score of more than 1,000. Babe Ruth is the all-time leader with an on-base percentage of .469 and a slugging percentage of .690 for a Dierker total of 1,159. The unintentional comedy in this piece is, to quote Bill Simmons, simply off the charts. Who knew that Dierker was such a visionary?
Nice timing Dylan. I haven't been over there yet today, I'm sure they're having a field day w/ ol' Richard.
Damn...Dierker never should have been fired. Imagine the genius he must have to just invent such an amazingly useful and original stat. All praise Larry. The weird thing about this is, the writer acts as if this is a stat Larry came up with...but LARRY had to know that it was really called OPS. So either Larry mentioned the real name to this writer, and the moron writer decided not to acknowledge that Dierker is not really a genius, or Larry kind of misrepresented the stat to look as if it was his own. Either way, someone is being a jackass.
Just read the thread over there; I missed the "raw number" thing when I read the article. It's so sad that this is what passes for baseball acumen in the 4th largest city in America. Like somebody over there said, why can't McClain cover baseball too? Wishful thinking, I know, but he's the only descent sports writer they've got.
