Ok, we need to talk about Keith Law...

[baltfan]

I love how guys won't even admit that a 162 game season is sufficient to tell who is the best team. Why even keep track of who won and who lost?

[rmt64]

Semi-grunching, but Law hasn't always been an Orioles hater. At least not "fully".

He was the biggest Matt Wieters fanboy out of everyone when he was coming through the system. I know it means next to nothing, but he hasn't always just hated to hate.

[Can_of_corn]

Semi-grunching, but Law hasn't always been an Orioles hater. At least not "fully".

He was the biggest Matt Wieters fanboy out of everyone when he was coming through the system. I know it means next to nothing, but he hasn't always just hated to hate.

He is a fan of Machado and Bundy as well.

He still seems to go out of his way to rip the Franchise as a whole.

[OFFNY]

Exactly. It sounds personal to me. I don't know much about this guy, but he sounds ridiculously arrogant, and he has a despicable attitude toward the Orioles.

Kick his ass, Earl.

[El Gordo]

Just listened to this. It's not so much what Law says, it's how he says it. He comes off like a grumpy old man. Does he actually enjoy baseball?

Grumpy old man. Walter Mathau was a grumpy old man. Sounds more like a snarky adnoidal adolescent to me, Eddie Haskell comes to mind..

[allquixotic]

I had to stop listening. I agree with most of what has been said in this thread slamming Law so I'm not going to restate it or rehash it. This man has absolutely no redeeming qualities and his opinions and thoughts do not deserve my time. He's just an ornery pick-with-an-r.

[Can_of_corn]

I had to stop listening. I agree with most of what has been said in this thread slamming Law so I'm not going to restate it or rehash it. This man has absolutely no redeeming qualities and his opinions and thoughts do not deserve my time. He's just an ornery pick-with-an-r.

Not true, he is a foodie that blogs about the dinning establishments he visits on the road. He is also big into board-gaming which I think is an underrated pastime. (that I don't participate in)

[allquixotic]

Deconstructing Keith Law's statements using predicate logic:

Premise:

"Team quality and who makes the playoffs are two different things."

Analysis: This is a classic logical divorce of distinct concepts, which if taken in full force means that you're comparing apples and oranges. That is, a statement about one of the things does not allow you to draw implications about the other thing. Breaking it down into logic:

Functor P(x) takes a team as parameter 'x' and returns "The probability that team 'x' makes the playoffs". The probability is a real number from 0.0 to 1.0 as in elementary descriptive statistics.

Functor B(x) takes a team as parameter 'x' and returns the "quality" of that team as an arbitrary comparable value that is assumed to be reflexive, symmetric and transitive (similar to the set of real integers), in particular implying that comparison operators '>', '<' and '=' on the return value of B(x) means the same thing as they do in the mathematics of real integers.

So the premise boils down to two halves, using generic particular values for 'a' and 'b':

(i) ~ (B(a) > B(b) -> P(a) > P(b)). This premise can be stated in English as "It is not the case that, if a team, 'a', is of higher quality than team 'b', THEN the probability that team 'a' makes the playoffs is greater than the probability that team 'b' makes the playoffs".

(ii) ~ (P(a) > P(b) -> B(a) > B(b)). This premise can be stated in English as "It is not the case that, if a team, 'a', has a greater probability of making the playoffs than team 'b', THEN team 'a' is of higher quality than team 'b'.

Combined together, the premise is

(iii) (~ (B(a) > B(b) -> P(a) > P(b))) ^ (~ (P(a) > P(b) -> B(a) > B(b))). This is the conjunction (^ symbol, meaning AND) of both halves. He is essentially saying that one thing doesn't imply the other.

Then, moments later, he says this:

"I think they're inferior to all those other teams I just listed. And when in doubt, I'm going to pick the better team."

So now he changes his argument to this, using the same definition for P(x) and B(x) as above:

(iv) (B(a) > B(b) -> P(a) > P(b)). This can be stated in English as "It is the case that, if a team, 'a', is of higher quality than team 'b', THEN the probability that team 'a' makes the playoffs is greater than the probability that team 'b' makes the playoffs".

However, in his reference to the Cardinals and the Padres, he clearly believes that the following is true:

(v) ~ (P(a) > P(b) -> B(a) > B(b)). This can be stated in English as "It is not the case that, if a team, 'a', has a greater probability of making the playoffs than team 'b', THEN team 'a' is of higher quality than team 'b'.

His statement in (iv) contradicts (iii), which can trivially be proven by the absence of the negation symbol (~) in (iv), while it is present in (iii), or more relevantly, in in (i). The statement in (v) is consistent with (iii). He seems to go back and forth between these two positions just for the purpose of sounding smart and creating clever-sounding rhetoric. He also uses this to effectively give the Yankees the benefit of the doubt, while giving the Orioles plain old doubt.

Even if you remove his contradictory premise and just take that he is advancing (iv) and (v) on their own, this is still pretty dubious. I actually agree with (iv), but I see no reason to accept (v). In fact, we can sit here and argue until we're blue in the face that there are valid reasons for believing (v), but Keith Law will never believe it. So even if his argument were logically valid (which I don't believe it was; see (i) and (iv)), he's basically taking a very hedgy bet that a team with a lot of proven superstars like the Yankees is going to be able to beat a young upstart, unproven team that has little success on the whole outside of 2012 and which has many statistical anomalies even within 2012. But when you think about it, nothing about these logical statements is really substantiated in the sense that there is actually a logical basis for believing them. They fall more along the lines of assumptions, which is another word for "premise" in logical reasoning, but the term "assumptions" sounds more appropriate in context. Basically he has not made an effort to tell us why these assumptions should be used as a basis for reasoning, aside from the fact that they happen to favor the Yankees and deprecate the Orioles.

[Can_of_corn]

He is saying some nice things about Britton tonight.

It isn't the players he has a problem with (mostly) its the FO and the ownership.

[CA-ORIOLE]

He is saying some nice things about Britton tonight.

It isn't the players he has a problem with (mostly) its the FO and the ownership.

Britton has looked good for three starts prior to this one. If it's his job to criticise he should open his eyes up to what's been going on.

[Can_of_corn]

Britton has looked good for three starts prior to this one. If it's his job to criticise he should open his eyes up to what's been going on.

He has been high on Britton for years. Not super high but #2 ceiling high.

[baltfan]

Orioles are taking it to the Jays to get their run differential up so KLaw might give them some love.:rofl:

[byrdz]

Orioles are taking it to the Jays to get their run differential up so KLaw might give them some love.:rofl:

Actually they are doing it to give his ego a swift kick in the teeth. At least that's what I tell myself. I would hope they don't give a damn what he thinks.

[Orioles4Life21]

Looks like we're trying to break even tonight!

[bluedog]

The Orioles have been relatively healthy compared to NY, Boston and Toronto. Tampa has been much healthier than us, but they did miss their best player for about half the season.

At present, New York has 9 players on the DL, the Orioles and Jays have 8, Boston has 7 and Tampa has 3. Those numbers don't tell the whole story of who was hurt earlier in the season, and how important those players were to their teams. I will do a run-down in the "Injuries Happen" thread once the season is over.

I'm not sure I agree that the O's have been relatively healthy compared to the Yankees. We lost our starting LF and 2b for the entire season and our #1 SP for 40% of the season. The Yanks have had a bad stretch recently with Tex, ARod and Granderson, but they were healthy when they built up their big lead while the O's were missing all of the above plus Markakis and Lindstrom to boot.

Am I missing something? Are there key players the Yanks have been missing all season other than Rivera?