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Bill James, Red Sox consultant, catches heat for comments
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Post by adiospaydro2005 on Nov 8, 2018 13:34:48 GMT -5
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Post by jimed14 on Nov 8, 2018 13:37:26 GMT -5
Oooh, so outrageous. Light the pitchforks on fire. I cannot roll my eyes enough.
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Post by adiospaydro2005 on Nov 8, 2018 13:45:43 GMT -5
Sure, it may be true for many players, but why say it? He comes across as an a-hole and making the news more about him. The timing, right after the Red Sox won the World Series and right before the free agent signing period, makes it even worse.
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Post by James Dunne on Nov 8, 2018 13:50:15 GMT -5
My day job is working against powerful POS's who think labor is "replaceable" and "lucky to have a job" or whatever nonsense. F him.
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Post by pedrofanforever45 on Nov 8, 2018 13:57:41 GMT -5
Yeah just a insane tweet. Him and Peter Gammons seem to be making a lot of these insane tweets nowadays.
I wouldn't watch the product if it was any less of a quality. I go to a minor league game every once in a while for the experience and to see a young prospect I like, but I watch the MLB to see the best of the best. Definitely not replaceable.
People are crazy these days on Twitter.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Nov 8, 2018 14:06:09 GMT -5
You know who’s entirely replaceable? Bill James.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Nov 8, 2018 14:08:42 GMT -5
Yeah just a insane tweet. Him and Peter Gammons seem to be making a lot of these insane tweets nowadays. I wouldn't watch the product if it was any less of a quality. I go to a minor league game every once in a while for the experience and to see a young prospect I like, but I watch the MLB to see the best of the best. Definitely not replaceable. People are crazy these days on Twitter. Bill James is a contrarian who’s run out of good things to be contrary about.
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Post by pedrofanforever45 on Nov 8, 2018 14:19:12 GMT -5
You know who’s entirely replaceable? Bill James. It's like he's asking to get fired from his consulting job for the Red Sox. Maybe the money isn't good from the Sox consulting job? So stupid. My god, I can't believe how stupid people can be.
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Post by jimed14 on Nov 8, 2018 16:08:30 GMT -5
Why does absolutely every dumb thing said deserve outrage? Twitter is making people so damn stupid. Words hurt millionaires' feelings! News at 11.
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Post by jerrygarciaparra on Nov 8, 2018 16:11:22 GMT -5
This is hilarious. Kudos to the Sox for distancing themselves. It is farcical to the extreme, and should be derided....with extreme prejudice.
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Post by James Dunne on Nov 8, 2018 16:29:22 GMT -5
Why does absolutely every dumb thing said deserve outrage? Twitter is making people so damn stupid. Words hurt millionaires' feelings! News at 11. I mean, an employee of one of the best baseball teams you'll ever see just called all of the players replaceable on like day 10 of the offseason. Might want to put out that fire quickly. Has nothing to do with Twitter. I'd accept it was a more nuanced off-the-cuff dumb thing to say if his explanations for it weren't making it worse.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Nov 8, 2018 16:45:13 GMT -5
All true. It certainly isn't lost on the players who employs him. This is about damage control given that the young core that helped drive that championship are up for free agency in rapid succession.
Ignore me liking myself. My fingers betrayed me...
Just as Ebay is the global flea market, and Amazon the global emporium, Twitter is a global megaphone for stuff that used to fly over back fences, what we used to call the rumor mill. The operative word is global. The communications staff has to respond before that turns into viral.
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Post by bluechip on Nov 8, 2018 17:34:33 GMT -5
If he means that the game is bigger than individual players, that is a sentiment I can agree with...
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Post by umassgrad2005 on Nov 8, 2018 17:39:58 GMT -5
If he means that the game is bigger than individual players, that is a sentiment I can agree with... I have to believe that is what he meant. Take away every guy in the majors and the game will go. Which it would. That being said it comes across as something else.
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Post by jimed14 on Nov 8, 2018 17:54:42 GMT -5
Why does absolutely every dumb thing said deserve outrage? Twitter is making people so damn stupid. Words hurt millionaires' feelings! News at 11. I mean, an employee of one of the best baseball teams you'll ever see just called all of the players replaceable on like day 10 of the offseason. Might want to put out that fire quickly. Has nothing to do with Twitter. I'd accept it was a more nuanced off-the-cuff dumb thing to say if his explanations for it weren't making it worse. It's completely about Twitter. It was a dumb Twitter argument taken out of context and now it's taken as some decree chiseled in stone by James. Twitter is one of the worst things that has happened to humanity, making it so that people's attentions spans cannot last longer than 160 characters at a time, yet it also marks a permanent record of every dumb thing everyone has ever said, with most people being unable to forgive anything that hurt someone's feelings. James wasn't so eloquent in his argument, which was likely that fans root for teams and not players which is absolutely true. But the outrage is just plain stupid and we're talking about multi-millionaires, not blue collar labor who live with the stress of being able to feed their family at all times of their lives. I mean hell, if players are not replaceable, baseball would have ended a century ago when the first players died.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Nov 8, 2018 18:32:22 GMT -5
If he means that the game is bigger than individual players, that is a sentiment I can agree with... I have to believe that is what he meant. Take away every guy in the majors and the game will go. Which it would. That being said it comes across as something else. That was my interpretation of his comments as well. I don’t think he meant that talent like Mookie and Sale can be replaced by some guy off the street, but rather that if every player in the game quit and never came back, the game would repair itself in time with new players. It wasn’t a smart thing to say, but there may be some truth to it. I don’t love the Red Sox because they have Mookie Betts. I love Mookie Betts because he plays for the Red Sox. If he signs elsewhere as a FA, my interest drops off. I don’t tune in to Cubs games to see how Jon Lester is doing.
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Post by James Dunne on Nov 8, 2018 19:08:38 GMT -5
He meant it in the context of players make too much money and if they don't like it they are replaceable. He was clear about it. There's no need to give him the benefit of the doubtwhen he didn't leave any.
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Post by philsbosoxfan on Nov 8, 2018 19:11:44 GMT -5
Twitter, you get roasted for speaking the truth. It's difficult but it's the truth. If there was a baseball strike, the owners would replace the players, the game would go on.
“If the players all retired tomorrow, we would replace them, the game would go on; in three years it would make no difference whatsoever. The players are NOT the game, any more than the beer vendors are.”
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Post by sdiaz1 on Nov 8, 2018 19:29:55 GMT -5
Dude is crazy. Who wants to go to the ballgame and not drink beer? Totally absurd.
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Post by adiospaydro2005 on Nov 8, 2018 21:22:20 GMT -5
All true. It certainly isn't lost on the players who employs him. This is about damage control given that the young core that helped drive that championship are up for free agency in rapid succession. Ignore me liking myself. My fingers betrayed me... Just as Ebay is the global flea market, and Amazon the global emporium, Twitter is a global megaphone for stuff that used to fly over back fences, what we used to call the rumor mill. The operative word is global. The communications staff has to respond before that turns into viral. Most companies have social media policies that apply to their employees and their contractors. At some point the Red Sox have to cut ties with James whose takes about Paterno, Spacey,etc reflect poorly on him and therefore on those associated with him (e.g. Red,Sox). It reflects poorly on the Red Sox if they continue to associate themselves with James whose act appears to have jumped the shark.
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Post by Don Caballero on Nov 8, 2018 22:35:59 GMT -5
If he means that the game is bigger than individual players, that is a sentiment I can agree with... Yeah. He meant it in the context of players make too much money and if they don't like it they are replaceable. He was clear about it. There's no need to give him the benefit of the doubtwhen he didn't leave any. I mean the whole thing is moot from the start and it was stupid that he posted it, but the core idea of what he meant isn't wrong. The game is bigger than the players. I bet you anything a lot of the average viewers can't name like 5 stars from the 90s. Or 00s. The last 5 NL MVP winners. Heck, who won the MVP in the NL last season. You don't tune in to watch Mookie Betts hit a ball, you tune in to watch the Red Sox. More people tune in because they're good and they're good because Mookie Betts is good. I get that this is a circular nightmare and it's only solved in hypothetic. If there is an infinite amount of parallel universes, there's certainly one where Mookie Betts doesn't exist and another player named Dude McDuderson is also pretty good. You know what is common in those universes? People watching the Red Sox. Or that universe equivalent of the Red Sox. I don't think he meant to take players for granted or anything, it's just that the game is way older than like Jim Leyland and he's pretty old. It endured all sorts of crazy and/or terrible things and people still care. It will continue to do so. Again, like I said, he shouldn't have posted anything because nobody likes having to deal with life's cruel indifference, but it doesn't mean we should shut our eyes, cover our ears and scream until those feelings go away.
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Post by marrcus on Nov 8, 2018 22:50:57 GMT -5
Bill is an iconoclast and I'm quite sure he understands he needs to keep his more questionable opinions silenced. But now and then they come out (both sports and nonsports).
I think it will only become a big deal if people want to use James to hurt the RS. There are areas you can't delve into no matter who you are and James should keep that in mind.
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Post by James Dunne on Nov 8, 2018 22:57:25 GMT -5
Of course the game is bigger than any individual player. Baseball will go on without Mookie Betts, and masonry will go one when the best bricklayer you ever met is gone. But his statement was in direct reference to players asking for money. This wasn't some conversation about the existential place of baseball and base ball men in the universe. It was "I don't think baseball players should ask for more money because the game will go on without them because no player is indispensible."
That's why unionization was so important, not just in baseball, but in general: Because while no individual is bigger than the industry he works in, the players - the labor - are the game. And Bill James works for the team that has the best players. For him to pull the lucky-to-have-a-job baloney when he's on the same payroll of this group of players, the best assemblage of players in the 21st century, that's especially daft.
And anyway they tried replacement players that time in 1995 and it was REALLY unpopular and they got together and settled things and it took three years and a lot of steroids to get the fans all the way back. So yeah, if literally every player in the union was pushed out tomorrow there would be a pretty huge fallout and baseball would suffer for a long time.
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Post by FenwayFanatic on Nov 8, 2018 23:19:02 GMT -5
Why does absolutely every dumb thing said deserve outrage? Twitter is making people so damn stupid. Words hurt millionaires' feelings! News at 11. Welcome to 2018
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Post by redsox04071318champs on Nov 8, 2018 23:19:18 GMT -5
I grew up a Bill James fan and devoured all of his baseball abstracts and kept reading his books beyond that.
I was thrilled when he joined the Red Sox organization.
That said, what he said was utterly ridiculous. Yeah, all players at one point or another in the career become replaceable. That's stating the obvious, although David Ortiz at the end of his career was a noteworthy exception.
But James didn't state it that way. He harped on their salaries. Again, most people, myself included, don't bleed for multi-millionaires or billionaires, but that's not really the point.
His comments are totally tone deaf.
You have a ballclub that just won with the sum greater than its parts. It wound up being a team effort where everybody contributed and the efforts were herculean and the spirit and tenacity of the club meant everything, and James, who is associated with said team, just talked about players as if they're chess pieces or pawns rather than real life players, with special skills that few possess, putting in the work to become the best players in the world and taking risks with their bodies....just a dumb tone deaf thing to say.
At this point I think Bill James is replaceable as much as it pains me to say it. He was certainly a trailblazer but while he's more my speed from a stats perspective, he's been surpassed in this day and age.
And his comments are an embarrassment and really unnecessary.
And from my perspective I'll take the players over the beer vendors any day of the week. Horrors of horror, I rarely drink and cannot stand the taste of beer. I love baseball. I hate beer. I'll come to watch Mookie Betts any day of the week. Couldn't give a rat's behind about the beer vendors selling beer. They're not who I spend money to see and if I wanted beer that bad, which I dont, I'd get it cheaper elsewhere. I don't go to a ballgame to drink and I certainly have no desire to share a road with somebody who's had way too many beers to drink.
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