The Rays Tank: Mike Fast Moving Behind Closed Doors

It takes a lot of work and creativity to do what Mike’s done. Especially these days, as he’s tackled some really difficult subjects recently — the pitch framing and hit-and-run research jump out.

He was definitely able to apply his professional experience into what started as a hobby and now became a career.

Two guys that I’ve know through fantasy baseball for 6+ years now work for my two favorite teams within 2 months of one another. Silly hobby, indeed

i’m just surprised no well-off baseball statistics lover has organized this sort of thing. I think it would be beneficial for the community as a whole to organize and somewhat standardize sabermetrics. Of course, that requires agreement, and the existence of n types of WAR shows that there isn’t yet the amount of agreement you’d expect of something wanting to be considered scientific.

i guess the biggest barrier to this concept is the fact that the discipline is just too fractured at this point, with many different formulas claiming to give the same quantitative information.

But the differentiator with Mike was his ability to explain it. He is gifted in that regard.

Probably has a broader appeal. But the other guys are great too.

the 503rd anniversary of Giovanni Morone, Italian theologist/diplomat/cardinal/“heretic”

And nobody called him a racist. It’s called context, and unfortunately it’s hard to pick up on the written page.

So it can be deleted by a mod. I’m not trying to be inflammatory myself, but unfortunately way too many people interpret it that way when you describe someone else’s inflammatory actions.

In my opinion, a lot of people are just too damn sensitive these days. Sometimes that also applies to the people who are causing it – don’t dish it out if you can’t take it. But there are appropriate times to be offensive, and just because something is both offensive and has some kind of racial overtone, it doesn’t mean it’s racist. Sometimes it can just be descriptive.

One example is when certain individuals got a lot of crap for calling Colin Powell an Uncle Tom. While it’s inflammatory (and was intentionally inflammatory) and has a racial component, it also turns a concept that would take about 20 words to describe into a 2 word concept, and you know exactly what the speaker means by it. And since it’s America, everyone has the right to publicly disagree with that opinion.

There are probably a hundred other words in American vernacular that have the same effect, which can be racist or not depending on the context in which they are used. I’m not going to repeat a long list of them here (although Clerks 2 had a particularly funny bit about one of those terms), as it’s just not socially acceptable to do so, but maybe people should start to reevaluate whether there’s actually a valid reason for eliminating these terms completely just because some people misuse them.