…it’s over? It’s over. Kane put the game winner through Leighton’s legs and nobody noticed, except Kane, and me apparently, because as soon as 88 puts the puck on net I leap to my feet and shout, then play continues and Quick, who has joined me upstairs, looks at me like I’m retarded. But fuck him! I was right! The Flyers are stunned, the Hawks celebrate, looking out of place among the sea of disappointment. It’s over.

Niemi, with his boyish grin, lifts the Cup and hollers. Keith, Kane, big Dustin Byfuglin, they all get the chance of a lifetime. The Cup looks weightless.

I want to feel satisfied, having rooted for the Blackhawks in this series, but there is something of an empty feeling rising in my chest. Good God, have I grown to respect these villians in orange? Does the sight of Leino, and Briere, and the goalie-with-movie-star-good-looks Brian Bouche, looking devestated actually bum me out, a little? Yes, I suppose they’ve deserved my respect. The empty feeling isn’t helped when Jeremy Roenick, at the sight of his former team winning the cup, breaks down in to tears Live, on the air. I have to wonder whether or not that will be a commerical next year either.

The Blackhawks have won a hard fought, well deserved Stanley Cup. Now, next season can’t come fast enough

Galarraga walking away in disbelief that the MLB can accept such malarkey as reasonable functionality

The history of a game between the Indians and Tigers that occurred June 2nd, 2010 could be read a whole lot differently and with better spirits than it will be written. Two men will forever go into the record books with blemishes on their record, one much more egregious than the other.

A single play at a base isn’t always reason to completely rethink the approach to integrating technologies into a game whose professional history runs deep into the 19th century. I just don’t think it’s correct to accept the idea that human error is a part of the game when it comes to the rules that govern that game. We have the ability to implement these technologies, they merely need expansion.

Armando Galarraga pitched 8.2 innings of perfect baseball before Jim Joyce ruled that Jason Donald was safe at first when Miguel Cabrera threw to his pitcher covering the bag. The fans at the stadium, the home audience, and Jason Donald himself knew that Galarraga had beat him with the baseball to first, but Joyce had seen otherwise. Instant replay, a technology used for television broadcasts and large-scale stadium displays for decades, was able to show the fans at home the play again from multiple angles in slow motion, furthering the idea that Donald was out.

After the game had ended and Galarraga finished with a complete game shutout having given up one hit, Joyce eventually apologized to the pitcher whom he had robbed of a historic outing. He said that he was sure he’d made the right call until he saw the video replay. That quote alone should tell Major League Baseball that there’s a problem with this situation; the umpire was able to see that he had made a terrible mistake, a monumental error, through his obviously incorrect call. The real problem is that it wasn’t even close at the base, and the ramifications are enormous.

Had some larger-scale instant replay system been in place, this uproar could have been avoided. Jim Leyland or Manny Acta could have come out of their dugouts and approached the officiating staff asking for a review of the play. 10 seconds of watching the recording of the play at 1st, even at full speed, could have salvaged the perfect game. We could have stopped having this dreaded conversation, been unaware of Jim Joyce’s existence, and moved on with our lives.

Instead, Jim Joyce has to feel remorse that he blew an obvious call and, in his own words, “cost that kid a perfect game.” Joyce will now have that hanging over his head for the rest of his life. Galarraga was unable to throw a perfect game, which would have made it the 2nd in less than a week’s time, and the 3rd in less than a month. I’m concerned because this could have been monumental, there hasn’t been two perfect games in the same season since 1880 before this season, and this could have been the third in the same season. Such feats will most likely never been achieved again, which is why this ordeal strikes me as offensive.

Rather than having a realistic outcome to this situation, we have to wonder when the MLB is going to stop rejecting technology like a bastard child. They need to accept the fact that it is unreasonable that someone watching the game from hundreds (if not thousands) of miles away can better judge a play at first base. I find it outright disrespectful to the players in professional baseball, as well as the owners and especially the fans, that Galarraga’s perfect game can be shrugged off with the notion that “nobody’s perfect.” Considering what was up for grabs here, that’s downright despicable.

Completely improper use of a Venn Diagram

Baseball is a thinking man’s game. Presumably it’s been labeled as such not only because mental defectives make poor base runners, but because there’s a great deal of thought that goes into the actions of a single player. Fielders need to make decisions regarding where they’re throwing the ball depending on whether or not they can get the runner out, pitchers and catchers need to be on the same page about pitch locations and what to throw to beat the man at the dish, and the manager pulls it all together like an orchestral conductor who likes touching his ears, nose, and chin with his index finger.

But in reality, I think baseball was invented for one group of people – statisticians. Someone in a basement emerged one day, taking off his glasses, declaring that he figured out which team was best and would win the pennant, boldly shouting the word, “SCIENCE!”

Statistics are an ever present reality in all sports nowadays. Save, slugging, and down-conversion percentages; points, assists, and yards per game; batting average, all purpose yards, sacks, minutes on ice, you get the picture. Omnipresent panels and scrolling bottom bars bombard you with every number you could ever dream of having, most of it very useful. Which brings me to my least favorite stat ever.

OPS

This is a very simple number to compute, and its name says it all: On-Base plus Slugging . It combines the two percentages into a single, super statistic. Each of these two original stats stands on their own to feet and are quite useful. Slugging Percentage is a measure of how many total bases a hitter gets per at bat, with a maximum number of 4.000 (something Barry Bonds aimed for and went to great lengths to attempt). On-base Percentage is a self-explanatory statistic, it gives a percentage of the number of times a player would reach base per at bat, with a maximum number of 1.000 (again, Barry Bonds couldn’t find enough juice at a Tropicana distribution warehouse to make this happen). The digs at Bonds come from the fact that with a little help from some doctors, he achieved the highest slugging percentage ever recorded, and that offends me.

I wonder who came up with the idea of combining these two stats, because realistically it’s measuring the same thing twice more often than not. If a player reaches base safely, that ups his on-base percentage, and ups his slugging percentage, so naturally that’s reflected in his OPS from both sides of the equation. Naturally, these people must be enormous fans of the old adage “measure twice, cut once.” I’ve grown to be more of a fan of “never measure, cut with your mind” because it’s more fun to be dangerous than careful when dealing with woodworking.

Most everything I’ve read says that OPS is more of a measure of how well a hitter is doing rather than telling you hard-nosed facts that are based on science and mathematics. Instead, you’re supposed to judge a player’s OPS against other players and use it as a comparison. The wonderful people that have popularized this number have neglected the fact that on every panel that pops up under your favorite hitter when they come to the plate, they list a bevy of numbers for you already, and they can help you judge that person’s performance just fine: BAA, HR, RBI, and even SLG and OBP. Those have worked for years, why bother adding something else that merely combines two numbers you’re already throwing up there?

If ESPN, Fox, and the MLB want to combine SLG and OBP, why not take it all a few steps further? Let’s say we present a new number that gives a better, well-rounded measure of a player’s performance?

BAAHRRBI

As the heading says, we’ll be creating a new number called “Barbie,” read it quickly and it’ll make sense. It’s the perfect, quintessential number in all of sports. We’ll take the batting average and multiply it by 200 and round it to the nearest whole number, then add that to the hitter’s home run total, then add that to their runs batted in. Who needs to know the particulars of each of these antiquated statistics when you can have one number that conveys how your favorite player’s really doing in one easy-to-understand number? Jeter’s got an 86 Barbie, he’s having a horrendous year at the plate by his standards. Andre Ethier has a 127 Barbie and he’s going out of his mind on the DL because he can’t keep growing that tremendous Barbie number. Those numbers are clear cut measures of how a player is doing, just as relevant and silly as OPS, and I look forward to using it from here out as my one and only super stat.

It’s a crazy sport.

This is where Loudville lives, the upper deck of any sports complex in the country, where the real fans sit.

If Loudville were an app, it might be called “beta.” If it were a structure or road, it would be “under construction.” The site is very much under development.

Loudville is on twitter, we’re working on figuring out smooth facebook integration, getting a podcast going and making things generally more social around here. The theme, the graphics and things like that aren’t really set in stone. We’re still adding contributors and getting things set up. But you can call the Loudville hotline now, and things are growing. The site has been up for about six months and has had two relaunches. It’s coming together slowly but surely.

I want to say thanks to the readers and the people behind the blog. Couldn’t do it without you guys. By the way, right now the Canucks are absolutely destroying the Blackhawks right now on VS. Heck of a game.