David Wadler’s Assorted Thoughts

Brown University is the 3rd happiest university in the country, according to the Princeton Review. I miss life in that particular cocoon.

Since Al Jaffe seems to be asleep at the wheel on the mispronunciation front, allow me to point out a very public mistake made by one of his employees. Josh Elliott is doing commercials for his new show on ESPN classic and references Honus Wagner. At least I think it was “The Flying Dutchman,” because Elliott actually invokes a name that sounds like hah’niss wăg’nur. The great shortstop’s name is pronounced hō’nŭs wăg’nur.

The New York Post’s Phil Mushnick has a pretty interesting job; he berates the sports media establishment for a living. Although always sanctimonious, his articles are sporadically entertaining. However, if one makes a career of ripping others in one’s profession, one must be extra careful not to invite similar scrutiny. In today’s column, Mushnick takes ESPN’s Matt Winer to task for mispronouncing “Wheeling.” (And we all know from that Al Jaffe is not particularly tolerant of mispronunciations.)

After leveling his criticism, Mushnick follows with this sentence:

While we understand that the NHL is in no position to push any TV network around, this latest deal, with the Outdoor Life Network, ain’t gonna make the NHL rich yet gives OLN a lot of exclusivity, the kind that will shut fans who care most out of games they most want to watch.

Wow! That’s an impressive exercise in obfuscation. I had to re-read that one sentence four times just to understand it.

Finally, Mushnick veers off course and offers a compliment:

Adam Shein, who talks football on Sirius and is fluent in several sports when weekending on WFAN, Saturday was chatting with White Sox GM Ken Williams when Williams said he’d been ripped for trading Carlos Lee to Milwaukee for Scott Podsednik. Shein told him that he was among those who had ripped him. Not that Williams knew or cared, but that kind of honesty is rarely heard on FAN.

That seems nice enough. The problem is that the broadcaster he mentions doesn’t exist…at least not with that spelling. The person who merited what practically amounts to effusive praise is not Adam Shein, but rather Adam Schein.

Nike contact lenses? They’re coming to stores near you in a matter of time. And odds are that they will improve your chances of hitting a major league fastball as much as the old Nike pumps improved your ability to dunk. What’s interesting is that, according to ESPN’s Darren Rovell, Nike is making Brian Roberts, who remains largely obscure despite enjoying a career year, a centerpiece of its campaign.

From “Nike hopes contacts will be big business“:

The best thing that happened to the MaxSight project was Baltimore Orioles second baseman Brian Roberts. In the 384 games Roberts played in his major-league career heading into this season, the 27-year-old hit 16 home runs. In his 110-game 2005 season, he’s smacked 17 homers. Before this year, he had a .264 batting average. This year, he’s batting .321 and started in his first All-Star Game.

Although Roberts doesn’t wear the lenses at night, he partly credits his improvement to MaxSight.

While Roberts may see a bump in his bank account, the campaign diminishes his efforts to improve himself as a baseball player. I don’t know anything about his offseason routing, but if one can draw any conclusions from the numbers, it’s that the contact lenses have impeded his progress. At this point, I don’t think there is a statistically significant sample to validate such an assertion, but Nike’s decision to build a campaign around Roberts has more to do with perceived marketability than it does data that the MaxSight lenses improved his performance. But hey, what is marketing other the creating a perception?

Here are the triple crown stats (for you traditionalists) as well as OBP, SLG, and OPS for the sabermetrically/sabremetrically inclined.

Brian Roberts Day/Night Splits 2002-2004
Day:    411 AB   4 HR  43 RBI  .280 AVG .340 OBP  .414 SLG  .754 OPS
Night:  818 AB   6 HR  62 RBI  .260 AVG	.336 OBP  .340 SLG  .676 OPS

Brian Roberts Day/Night Splits 2005 (through August 15, 2005)
Day:    148 AB   6 HR  19 RBI  .311 AVG	.383 OBP  .500 SLG  .883 OPS
Night:  292 AB  11 HR  41 RBI  .329 AVG	.396 OBP  .555 SLG  .951 OPS

OPS % improvement
Day:   17.1%
Night: 40.7%