“Intangibles” are valuable ONLY if they ultimately lead to some kind of tangible, measurable benefit.

Hard work is a good thing- but I’d rather have a couch potato who hits 40 homers than a guy who spends hours in the weight room and hit 8 homers.

Desire and love of the game are wonderful things- but I’d rather have a .350 hitter who thinks of baseball as “just a job” than a .225 hitter whose whole life revolves around baseball.

Think of the movie “Amadeus.” Salieri had a passionate desire to make great music, and worked at it night and day. Mozart was more interested in drinking and gambling than in music, and dashed off symphonies in a few hours.

The end result? Salieri is forgotten and Mozart is still widely considered the greatest composer of all time. Salieri worked harder than Mozart and wanted much more to create great art, but it didn’t matter: Mozart just had a lot more talent.

It’s the same in baseball.

Thing is, intangibles DO matter. They just aren’t a replacement for statistics.

Suppose we have two young relief pitchers in the minor leagues. Both are tall, strong guys with 98 mph fastballs. But one has a lot less confidence and swagger than the other. One obsesses over every hit he yields, while the other just shrugs off his bad outings, sure that he’ll be unhittable next time.

Confidence is an intangible. And scouts MAY be right to believe that it’s an extremely valuable asset for a relief pitcher. But IF confidence really makes one pitcher better than the other, we should see that in their stats. IF confidence is truly important, the confident guy should post better numbers than the nervous guy. IF confidence is important, the confident guy should have a lower ERA, more strikeouts, fewer walks, and fewer blown saves.

If, on the other hand, the stats show that the nervous guy is actually performing much BETTER than the cocky, swaggering guy, the proper response is to admit “I judged wrongly,” not to insist that “You can’t judge these guys by their numbers.”

What little I know about Joe Morgan as a person suggests he’s very similar in terms of personality to Frank Robinson (my boyhood hero). If anything, Morgan might be less cranky than FRobby. They really do respect baseball guys like themselves and disdain people who never played the game. FRobby was notable in Washington for his disdain of sabermetrics. His attitude was, I’ve been in the game for 50 years, what can someone who never played the game teach me? And there’s a truth in that.

Morgan’s behavior in that airport stop was entirely typical of black men of that age and era. You work hard, you achieve wealth and station in society, you like to think that you no longer have to “step to” just because some white cop says so (if you can’t tell, I’m black; my dad and his friends would have acted entirely the same way — leave me alone, I’m doing nothing wrong, just because you have a badge doesn’t give you the right to ignore my rights). I think it speaks volumes that a LA jury in the early 90s returned a verdict that favored the cop, even when that verdict could not reasonably be seen as supported by the evidence. One thing for sure: while I never had much use for Morgan the announcer, I have a lot more tolerance for Morgan the person.

Baseball thrives on tradition, That’s why we can compare Babe Ruth to Hank Aaron with a fair amount of continuity. Maybe you oughta look the meaning of Luddite up. Believing a change is not good does not automatically qualify one as a luddite. It could mean I’m prescient and intelligent.

How bout looking at it like this? “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Joe Morgan knows more about baseball than this entire pile of bloggers.

You may walk on my lawn now, just don’t kill the grass or pick the flowers. In other words, be respectful.

One guy here sez baseball is an easy game to learn; wroing. Learning and executing fundamentals at razor quick speeds while running and looking around for a little ball, positioning correctly on defense, reacting to the change in personel on the field, all these are mental aspects of the game belittled by such a comment. Any body who’s played this game knows it takes a long time to understand, and even longer to get smart at.

As for the farmer/weather analogy, nice analogy but completely off ;point. A more pertinent one would be choosing whose \weather forecast to trust, some old weather beaten farmer who’s spent years working outside versus a inner city condo dweller, who gets in his car in the garage and drives to the garage at work and parks inside. I take Farmer Joe over City Boy anytime.

Show me anywhere in the stats sheets. all you stat freaks, where it has a category for smarts, or heart, or desire, or intuitiveness. Or even toughness.

Major league baseball is played by thoroughbred athletes with incredible hand=eye coordination.and sharp reflexes. Joe talks about the game at that level, and clearly it goes over a lot of peoples’ heads.

He is considered one of the smartest players of all time. He may have a pedantic tone in his speech, but when you listen to him, you can get inside the game. And that’s why ESPN loves him too..

Joe Morgan is pretty good as a commentator. Anyone who talks live for hours at a time in front of millions of people WILL say stupid things and be wrong from time to time. I defy you to find one person who doesn’t say dumb things in that situation. It’s a very hard job. It’s so vastly different from writing, it shouldn’t be compared, and it’s always unfair to take something blurted out in the spur of the moment and turn it into writing on a page to mock it. Granted, it’s fun to do that sometimes, and can be hilarious, but it gets a little old after a while. Fish in a barrell, basically.

Morgan saying dumb things sometimes doesn’t bother me. He does give a lot of insight into how the game is played, which is valuable.

He doesn’t talk about stats at all, which is fine. Numbers don’t translate that well to the spoken word anyway. A commentator going on and on about stats would get really annoying, and would inform hardly anyone of anything important to them that they didn’t already know. Most of the audience wouldn’t care, and the ones who do care about the numbers most definitely don’t need a TV commentator to point them out, they already know them or know how to instantly get them.

Most people who hate Morgan take him way too seriously, and I think he enjoys that certain people hate him so much, as Joe P. pointed out. Morgan is arrogant, but he should be; he does know a lot more about how the game is played than most of his critics. (Most of them know a lot more about analyzing what has happened in baseball than he does, but that’s a different thing and not what he’s usually talking about anyway. When he does get into analysis and ranking players, etc. is when he’s at his worst.) And I believe that he says some things just to tweak his critics and set them off.

He’s mostly talking about what it’s like to play the game. He does say dumb things sometimes about which players he thinks are better than others, but everyone who talks about baseball does that, period. The guy has pretty solid chemistry with Miller, who is good. He does shut up and keep quiet once in a while, unlike McCarver. He adds some insight sometimes. True he says dumb things, but everyone in that job does.

My personal preference would be for as few people in a TV broadcast booth as possible, saying as little as possible. But that’s not going to happen, so we’re going to have at least 2 or 3 people on the broadcast, all trying to get their voices heard enough so the producer doesn’t say “that guy hardly talked last night, maybe we need someone else to take his place who will talk more.” Given all that, Morgan’s not too bad of a commentator as far as I’m concerned.

If he give up one run, but his team gets shut out? He sucks balls. The guy who gave up 6 when his team scores 8? Great pitcher.

I gave up on him then.