The Polish Prince

I suppose I’ve never disclosed which writers I look up to. Hockey writers like Allan Mitchell, Gabe Desjardins, and Tyler Dellow* are my first three searches in the morning. They are who I learned balderdash like PDO, Fenwick, and zone starts from.

*Dellow is the Toronto lawyer who broke the Colin Campbell email story. I started reading him several years before and it turned into a source of personal pride when he got his break. I guess that’s how Kings of Leon fans felt before Your Sex Is On Fire.

My absolute favourite, however, is a fella by the name of Joe Posnanski. Unlike Mitchell, Desjardins and Dellow, Posnanski is paid to write full-time. Also unlike Mitchell, Desjardins, and Dellow, I’ve never seen him write about hockey. No doubt he’s talented though, Sports Illustrated is his employer and he has the rare ability to write captivating prose alongside a string of statistics. It’s quite the remarkable feat – believe me. Most stats-based guys are drier than a fig.

Posnanski writes about baseball first and foremost and uses glorious terms like WAR, DIPS, and OPS+. If you are unfamiliar with a lot of advanced baseball statistics and want to learn something today that may make you change the way you look at the game, check out his recent blog post here.

I wanted to highlight one thing from it primarily. A lot of people believe in the concept of clutch. I don’t and that’s okay if you feel differently. I’m not trying step on toes. I’m merely trying to create an outlet to communicate my point of view because I feel it’s a bit of a radical one compared to most.

Anyhow, in precisely one paragraph, Posnanski dispels more logic about the clutch debate than I could in 100:

“The baseball community has long celebrated players for their ability to lift their game when the chips are down, when the moment is bleak, when the game is on the line. And the sabermetric community has for a while now scoffed at the notion that players CAN consistently lift their games in the clutch moments. The baseball community builds its case on waves of emotion and selective memory. The sabermetric community builds its case on the fact that so far nothing has been found in the numbers to suggest that players, no matter how good, no matter how celebrated for their heroics, are capable of predictably and reliably being better in the biggest moments.”

God bless you, Joe. Keep fighting the good fight.