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Marcus Hayes is the Philadelphia Phillies beat writer for the Daily News. He apparently also doesn’t like statistics like on base percentage and on base percentage plus slugging.
Over on Phillies blog The Good Phight, a blogger emailed Marcus Hayes about some story Hayes wrote in the DN. The blogger, one “jonk,” intros his post with this piece of unintentional hilarity:
We have the word “Phight” in our name, but I find that we aren’t putting up much of a fight at all. We run parallel instead of perpendicular. At least for me, that is going to change. Philadelphia is known for it’s hard hitting sports “journalism” and being tough on the players. The problem is that the “journalists” get a free pass. Well, not from me and not any longer. I am tired of the animosity and disdain that the sports writers have for the general fan and for analytical thought.
Anyway, jonk doesn’t post what story it was, but he did send Hayes a critical email, which we can all assume it was as reasonable as the paragraph above. Here’s some of Hayes’ response:
OBP and OPS are geek numbers, especially for run-producers. I’d rather have my 3-4-5 guys drive the best strike they see rather than wait for the perfect pitch and jog down the baseline.
Sabremetrics are the bastion of wannabes who never could quite figure out which hand the mitt went on, a false industry created and fueled by people whose association with the game always will be vicarious, and, frankly, pathetic.
As opposed to sports writers, who are clearly… former… major league… baseball… players? Ha ha, remember when the Phillies were short in the bullpen and they got Marcus Hayes to close that one night? Man, that was awesome.
Fighting the good phight [The Good Phight]
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