Not only is it speculative that McAnulty could have put up the same numbers, but RBI is possibly one of the least telling statistics by which you could compare two players, especially when there are statistics designed to do just that (e.g., VORP, WARP, etc.).

Let’s look at this again:

Whenever they need a big hit, Giles looks at 4 pitches and lumbers down to 1b. What a joke.

This “line of reasoning” is stupid on a number of levels, including:

(1) The notion of Giles looking at 4 pitches and lumbering down to 1B in a clutch situation is a literary tool known as imagery. This imagery may reflect real-world events or it may not. We don’t know without statistics. In either case, it is imagery and not argumentation.

(2) It sounds as though Giles is being criticized for taking a walk. I’m guessing that this is a bad thing because high OBP inevitably leads to clogging the base-paths. Alternatively, Bosnia’s gripe could be with the fact that Giles only walked on 4 pitches, and thus deprived the rest of the batting order of seeing more pitches. Between the two options, it’s absolutely unbelievable that the second one makes more sense the first.

Jbox and I are probably meaner to our community than other bloggers are, so maybe Paul will be cool with it.

However, the big thing that I see coming from DePodesta’s blog is the fact that we have this terrific source of information and potential for a great dialogue and if people use his comments section to bicker with each other, it’s a distraction that I have to believe DePodesta will make less and less time for.

I have a bad habit of not finishing the titles of posts for the sake of brevity. Really, the title should be something like, “Why DePodesta’s blog will probably not last as a form of conversation between the fan and the Padres front office in a form that would facilitate the best questions being answered or not”.

If it were up to me, and obviously it’s not, I’d much rather the dialogue on It Might Be Dangerous be between Paul and the fans. When just three posts in, we’re seeing a debate between fans about semantics in a question that hasn’t been answered yet, then I feel like the purpose is being defeated. There are plenty of places for fans to debate amongst themselves. Selfishly, I’d love it if it Gaslamp Ball were one of those places for most Padres fans.

Also selfishly, I see the big differentiator on DePodesta’s blog being the fact that he’s writing it. If I want to snipe annoyingly or see annoying sniping, then I’ll come to a blog like this one.

And no need to apologize for cursing, your curse words were definitely more expressive than I was in my original post. I guess we could meet in the middle. :)

I think Dex summed it up pretty nicely above, but here’s my experience – I managed a blog – completely unrelated to sports but similar in that discussion on the particular subject was the main source of interaction. The blog grew exponentially in a really short period of time and as such, new folks would show up on a daily basis and wouldn’t take the time to figure out how the community worked. I wanted to ignore the arguments I described above – didn’t want to even deal with them, as you suggested – but it got to the point where I felt like the point of anything that was posted would be undermined by arguments that weren’t relevant, that had already been discussed ad nauseum and that did a disservice to the folks who were genuinely interested in what was attempting to be discussed. The bickering was just incredibly petty and pointless and to my eye, it overshadowed everything else we were trying to do. I shut it down because it got to the point where it wasn’t worth it. It absolutely sucked the purpose out of the place.