Gotta say I always thought Joe was a nice guy, but his hatred for all things sabermetric is very strange. I mean some guys just aren't happy with change and are more comfortable with what they grew up using to analyze baseball, but Joe Morgan seems to want to attack anybody with a new idea. He gives off this image of himself as the grand poobah and all knowing master of baseball that is incapable of being taught anything new.

I wish he would just take the time to sit down and actually read Moneyball and a Bill James book or two to see what they are all about.

Why is Morgan so hateful toward Ryne Sandburg? This year is the first yeah he'll be missing the HOF enduction. It just so happens to be the year Ryno is inducted.

The weird thing about Morgan being so anti-sabermetric is that Morgan's career was the epitome of a great "sabermetric" player.

Joe Morgan goes into more of the details I want to hear
about, that enhance the game, than most other guys. Overall, I really enjoy him. I've never heard him use the word "hate" or "hatred" or show any of that emotion in his speech whatsoever.

If Morgan has a personal grudge against sabermetrics and the Moneyball movement, then the grudge Tommy Craggs has against Morgan (hoping for the day when he's institutionalized, for God's sake) is just as personal, if not more so.

Morgan may be a nice man but he most certainly is a HOF moron as a broadcaster - Before his "I am a baseball Zeus" rants became fodder for guys like Craggs - you simply had to turn off the sound and dial up a radio broadcast to listen to the game....he interferes with the entertainment a la Joe 'I Will NOt Shut Up' Buck (who maybe worse than Morgan at making baseball miserable.).

While I can deal with it - think about tomorrows baseball loving youth. The MLB broadcast braintrust should implement a top level 'Misery Mouth' task force to figure out how to keep guys like this from clouding the subtle and deep joys of the sport for the uninitiated minds of the future.

Correct me if I'm misreading this, but doesn't Craggs ironically pull a Morgan by attributing "Three Nights in August" to LaRussa? Maybe I'm missing something, but to me this discredits the rest of the article. Clearly, as James points out Craggs has a serious problem with Morgan, and I have a hard time taking this article as objective. Morgan's faults are well-known to most people who read this site, but such an article makes me want to defend Morgan, a flawed but not idiotic announcer.

hehe... great point! I guess he should have said "book about Larussa" as opposed to "Larussa's book". Larussa did get paid for being the central subject of the book, essentially having a camera follow him, which is different from Beane and Moneyball. Nonetheless, great point!

I can tolerate an ex-jock broadcaster who declaims an ironclad opinion about each and every thing that occurs during the progress of a ballgame. I can even tolerate an ex-jock broadcaster who uses his mic as a bully pulpit to air what appears to be personal grievances towards other players (current or former) or other people within the game.

But I cannot tolerate an ex-jock broadcaster who simply makes up crap off of the top of his head, and does so in the same "I am baseball Zeus" tone with which he delivers everything else.

Example: A few weeks ago ESPN was doing a game at Wrigley Field between the Cubs and the Red Sox. Joe Morgan declared that the basket lining the ivy-covered outfield wall at the Friendly Confines was known as "Banks Boulevard", a not-so-subtle dig at Ernie Banks' reputation as a slugger.

Just one problem with that Morgan factoid: The outfield basket was constructed prior to the 1970 season. The last two seasons that Banks played in the majors were 1970 and 1971. He hit 15 homers combined in those final two years of his career, nine of them at Wrigley Field. Every Cubs fan has seen footage of his 500th (hit in '70 at Wrigley) about ten thousand times during rain delays, and that milestone dinger landed at least ten rows up in the left-field bleachers. That leaves eight possible cheapie homers that Banks could've hit into the basket. And we're supposed to believe that this "Banks Boulevard" nickname, of which nobody apart from Joe Morgan has apparently ever heard, arose from those eight (or fewer) homers at the tail end of the career of the great Cubs slugger?

This story perfectly illustrates the Morgan oeuvre: Petty sniping at fellow ex-superstars combined with a predilection to pull stuff out of his ass at the drop of a hat that can easily be exposed as fraudulent.

In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, whatta maroon.

I fail to see devastation. I am always fascinated with the jihad against Joe Morgan. Unlkess I am mistaken, the central facet of Sabermetrics is that one can use the past statistics of players in order to gain some insight into thir future performance. A number of people, not named Joe Morgan, realize (1) that it doesn't take a computer to do this (2) that no team, including the A's, Jays, Sox and Dodgers, utilize a pure Sabermetrics analysis when making personnel decisions.

Most importantly, virtually no one uses sabermetrics to predict anything, at least not accurately. What is typically done is that someone who wants to make a particular case cites increasingly meaningless statistics in order to justify thier conclusion. Yes, I realize that the Ken Griffey trade was a bad deal for Cincinatti. I don't need a computer model that demonstrates that his road OPS is 150 points lower than when he was in Seattle, after ballpark adjustments are calculated. I can see that without a farking computer.

When sabermetrics are used to construct a team that is successful, I will bow before its "predictive" powers. Until then, it remains what it is, a tool to justify decisions, after the fact. Hardly anything worthy of serious discussion.

will someone please shut joe morgan up so i can enjoy these playoff games----i am not impressed with all that he says and find a "know it all" hard to listen and watch please someone contact espn and tell them to cancel/buy out that man please