Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
July 23, 2002
Sour Grapes:

In the Red Sox game 1 recap, there is the following:


Garciaparra, 29, became the first major leaguer to have a three home-run game on his birthday, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, baseball's statistician.

Now, Elias replaced STATS in supplying baseball statistics for ESPN in 2000, ending my work at ESPN. But my dislike for Elias goes back to the 80's, when I twice picked up their Analyst book because Bill James was late with his, only to put it down after the first two articles. This is a really good piece of trivia. But it's also an obvious piece of trivia. It's a question that would have been asked of me before the third HR landed in the stands. And it's a question that is answerable without Elias. I have the HR encyclopedia, which lists all dates of 3-HR games. David Vincent, who is the keeper of the HR database for SABR, has a mandate to answer any question posed by the media about HR. In other words, there are multiple sources for this answer. If I had slogged through the data and found this fact, you can bet the ESPN recap would not have said, "according to STATS, Inc." But Elias is very good at making themselves look like the only people who can come up with this stuff.

And they do come up with trivia. But sometimes I think that's all they are interested in. Who's the last guy to do this? What was the last team to do that? Partially, it's what their customers want. But they never challenge, never try to educate fans or media clients about the game. I've heard Steve Hirdt is a smart guy, but I'd like to see some evidence of that in their customers' broadcasts. For example, last year, there were 22 three-homer games, or one every 110.4 games. Nomar's was the 5th this year, 1 every 295.8 games. So three-run homer games are way down this year. Do you think the people at Elias are pointing this out to the press? Do you think they'll put it in their game notes? No, it's not trivia, it's just interesting.

Or how about since the offensive explosion in 1993, only the Rockies (9) and the Indians (8) have more individual 3-HR games than the Red Sox (7)? The Mariners, Blue Jays and Cubs also have 7. Or over that same period, Sammy Sosa leads the majors with 5? See, so many interesting things. We'll see how many end up on BBTN.


Posted by David Pinto at 08:50 PM | Baseball