The game of baseball has been around for approximately 150 years and throughout its history there have been different genres used to discuss or write about the sport. The two genres are a blog post and a news article about win-loss projections for teams. Each genre will look at the sport and write about the projections in a different way because they have different authors, audiences, and purposes. The two different genres will also differ in the style and context because they have different reasons and goals for their writings. The blog post will attempt to prove how the preseason predictions made by the news article are unreliable. On the other hand, the news article will attempt to show how the predictions are still trustworthy. The genres …show more content…
For example, the authors write that multiple teams beat there preseason predictions by “double digits”. The use of these numbers and logic in the blog shows that the purpose of the blog was the authors attempt to convince the reader through statistics to convince that a growing randomness in teams’ performance in the MLB is occurring due to the increase in skilled young players. Since the preseason predictions were way off, the authors show just how off the predictions were for all the teams in the league. Also, the advanced formulas used in the blog also boost the authors’ ethos in that their complexity means that the authors have a high understanding of both math and baseball. This terminology also helps their ethos in that the reader is going to trust what they are saying. The article also includes links to other blogs and articles about the projections further establishing their ethos. The audience for the blog is people that pay attention and follow professional baseball as to anybody else the numbers and facts would not mean anything to them. The blog is successful in using logos and ethos as rhetorical appeals and using the conventions of the blog genre to prove to audience that the preseason predictions have become progressively unreliable in a way that the audience finds easy to understand and interesting to …show more content…
Following genre conventions, the use of “NJ math whiz” is an exciting and attention seeking way to say a math professor (Casey). Casey uses this phrase in order to entice readers to click on his article. The first sentence also draws readers in as it tells readers that Yankee and Red Sox fans “won’t be happy to hear” what the math professor predicted for their teams (Casey). Then, he describes the background behind the article that a math professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology uses mathematical formulas before every season to estimate the records of the MLB teams. The professor, Bruce Bukiet, uses models that “he developed in the 1980s” and these formulas usually rank in the “top 15%” of preseason predictions when compared to sports writers (Casey). Last year, Casey explains that the professor successfully projected four of the six division winners to make the playoffs. However, even the mathematical models cannot foresee the randomness that is included in the game of baseball. The author’s purpose for writing about the professors preseason predictions is to share his interests in statistics through his journalism. The author’s tone in the article comes from the fact that it seems Casey is fascinated with not only baseball but also with the professors’
Qualitative research plays a huge role in this article because of Rizzo’s decision making this season. This method explains Rizzo’s decision and makes him look a little better than the people persuaded him. He did this simply for security for the future, which makes total sense but most fans live for the now and professional baseball managers have to worry about winning now, but also later in the future and in the nationals situation setting an inning limit on Strasburg was the smart thing to do.
Baseball statistics are meant to be a representation of a player’s talent. Since baseball’s inception around the mid-19th century, statistics have been used to interpret the talent level of any given player, however, the statistics that have been traditionally used to define talent are often times misleading. At a fundamental level, baseball, like any game, is about winning. To win games, teams have to score runs; to score runs, players have to get on base any way they can. All the while, the pitcher and the defense are supposed to prevent runs from scoring. As simplistic as this view sounds, the statistics being used to evaluate individual players were extremely flawed. In an attempt to develop more
Has the question of how analytics is used by MLB front offices and coaches ever gone through your mind? MLB teams have thought of new, and very innovative way to use these new set of statistics. They have developed the new concept of defensive shifting, and the coaches have now been able to access many more different resources. These stats have given teams help to evaluate the level current players are playing at. The new wave of analytics gives teams a much different perspective of how to scout and manage the game. The groundbreaking wave of analytics has lead to the defensive shift, the different way of evaluating players, resources for coaches, sabermetrics, and the predicting of player injuries.
In The Interior Stadium, author Roger Angell provides a riveting account of the history of baseball. He writes about the magic and timelessness of the game, and the all-time great moments. Angell makes baseball sound like a magical thing, and he does it so beautifully. WhileIn spinning his tale of baseball wonder, the author uses nostalgia, pathos, and description to transform his words into reality. One major device used by Angell in his essay was nostalgia.
Batting average was the norm adopted by other baseball teams. But training for Oakland was focused on the player’s ability to obtain on-base scoring. The team relied more on selecting players by their on-base percentages. According to Sabermetrics model, teams always win with players having attained high on-base percentages.
This project investigates how salary and performance of offensive players in Major League Baseball are linked. We believe this is an interesting problem because it is traditionally believed that professional athletes play with hopes of earning a high salary, yet it often seems a batter’s performance is not linked to their salary (Jensen). Therefore, it seems as if the link between a player’s performance and their salary is different than their true performance. Performing a statistical analysis of this conundrum will give us great insight as to if it is accurate to say that performance changes salary drastically. Studies that prior statisticians have done differ from this study because their studies focus on salary and team performance rather than on the performance of individual players (Jane). Our study focuses on salary and individual performance in the current season. While there is extensive data on both game performances in the MLB and salaries, we can contribute to the statistical community by comparing how salaries are affected by different performance indicators for randomly selected individual players. Essentially, our hypothesis is an examination into how a batter 's game performance affects salary. We expect that the better a player’s statistics are, the higher their salary will be.
"Baseball as America." Academic Search Premier. Spec. issue of USA Today Magazine 1 Apr. 2002: n. pag. EBSCO. Web. 1 Dec. 2015. The Baseball Hall of Fame is an iconic American landmark, which houses thousands of artifacts from baseball's crude beginnings to its current day glory. This piece is simple, yet it demonstrates what an important aspect of American culture baseball has become. The artifacts demonstrate how far baseball has come, among its highlights are Jackie Robinson's uniform, articles from the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, and even "Shoeless" Joe Jackson's cleats. Pictures accompany the article which adds the needed bit of glamour to illustrate how greatly baseball has influenced American
In Lou Gehrig’s, “Farewell to Baseball”, he is addressing not only his loved ones, his fans, but the American people who are witnessing his disease take it’s course. Although Gehrig was suffering from the terrible affects of Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (later coined “Lou Gehrig’s Disease”), his speech sounds more comforting than it does fearful. Gehrig uses rhetorical devices such as the emotional appeal pathos in order to convey a positive connotation despite the “bad break” he is addressing. Lou Gehrig is most recognized for his achievements in baseball. He was the first baseman to play 17 consecutive seasons for the New York Yankees and really made a name for himself in the world of baseball.
The book Moneyball by Michael Lewis is about a former major league baseball player who became the manager of the Oakland A’s. It tells the story of how he led the team to success despite their low budget by using computer based analytics to draft players. With the help of Bill James, the Oakland A’s came up with a new plan based on statistics to draft players. He went after players nobody wanted due to their low budget and his new plan. Billy led the Oakland Athletics to a successive win seasons by changing the way he measured players. He abandoned the traditional 5 “tool” the other scouts used and adopted empirical analytics. The abandonment of the traditional assessment of
I hope that we can all agree that Baseball is a sport. We can? Great! Now let’s analyze something very similar between the two sports, Baseball and Golf, and that is the swing. Now, what does a good batter’s stance look like? It looks like knees, bent at a 25 degree angle. It looks like a firm grasp on the bat’s handle, gaze permanently affixed on the ball. And the swing, careful, calculated, with a practiced turn at the hips to deliver power in order to send the ball flying. Let’s compare to a good golf stance. It looks like knees, bent at a 25 degree angle. It looks like a firm grasp on the clubs’s handle, gaze permanently affixed on the ball. And the swing, careful, calculated, with a practiced turn at the hips to deliver power in order to send the ball flying. It’s almost as if Baseball is just Air Golfing. Now, let’s look at some numbers, because numbers are fun talk about. “But these two events have no numbers in common,” one might say and to that I say poppycock! Why we can compare the accuracy of the athletes for the respective candidates! But for this comparison we need some subjects, so let's pull two gentleman from history. And of course, they have to be the best in their field, and they are, by the numbers, the best. The two gentlemen being referred to are Tiger Woods and Babe Ruth. If neither of those names ring a bell in your mind, stop reading here, google them and then come back and continue reading. Of course the resource list at the end of the paper might be helpful for that task. Now, Golf is the easy one, they give a percentage staight up, Between the number of fairways hit to the number possible. Tiger wood’s Driving Accuracy Percentage is 55.75% (Tiger). Now Baseball is a bit harder, as a player’s batting average is a decimal. Babe
Sabermetrics is a systematic statistical approach in evaluating teams and players. Based on this science it was found out that this basis for judging the performance of the player should be on-base percentage. The Oakland A’s recruitment would prioritize college players rather than high school players. This was due to the fact that college players have already played more games against better competition. Beane was convinced with the fact that “a young player” is not what he looks like, or what he might become, but what he has done. The bottom line is what the player has produced in college. Beane and DePodesta believed that they could forecast future performance of college players more efficiently than high school ones.
In Gordimers story “Once upon a time” uses the genre of a children’s story to articulate monsters in a suburban family by using the theme of a fairytale that clashes with the theme of a childrens story so he can use “monsters” in a suburban family. Gordimer uses phrases that kind of gives him the excuse to go in and articulate the monsters into the genre of a children’s story. Gordimer knew how to put everything in place to make it be called a “children’s story” Also, she the setting of the story in a good neighborhood, just people
It was a nice and sunny day, with birds chirping and the smell of freshly cut grass. I felt the leather on my baseball glove and the delicious taste of cereal. I’m ready to play some baseball.
and analyzing vast amounts of baseball data. Then came the boom in baseball players’ salaries: this dramatically
Major League Baseball is known as America’s favorite pastime, and MLB teams spend an extensive amount of money in the excess of a billion dollars with the ultimate goal to win the World Series. This learning team’s focus throughout this descriptive statistics paper is the MLB players’ performances, salaries, salary caps, and winning percentages. Though salaries will by no means be a trade for wins, the goal is to use the less experienced players and pay them a lower salary. Research has been done on whether or not player’s salaries and wins are connected.