...........

Most underrated Mariner of 2011?  That one guy who played shortstop.  I literally forget his name at the moment.  Sandy can look it up for me, right after he links us to the latest Jose Reyes buzz.  Only three years, San-man!

Most underrated AL player?  Ben Zobrist, maybe.  Except by my roto teams. ... did you know Alex Avila had 5.8 WAR?

Most underrated AL pitcher?  Well, it was Doug Fister, right, but then he got a lot of pub and became an overrated-underrated pitcher ... don't say Brandon League.  You don't want to experience Dr. D going off on you, especially when you're right.

Most underrated M's TV highlight?  Maybe when Randy Johnson hit the dove with a 95 fastball?  PC convention required that we pronounce it a tragedy and say Amen.  Me personally, there were 94,392,348,293,002 birds who died that year from various causes, and none that did so with the honor that TV Dove atained.

Most underrated Seattle blogger?  Maybe Arne Christensen, who ran 1995Mariners.com.  He's got a kewl article in the Hardball Times today.

He posts an interview with Bryan Johnson, who was one of the first boots-on-the-ground on Sabermetric D-Day.  Johnson gives a colorful personal account of what it was like to be in the middle of the early-80's firefights.

Bryan Johnson is evidently a pretty feisty guy himself, and fought fire with fire.  Old school boyz wanted to sneer at him, he'd scoff right back.  They'd surround him with four guys in the press box, diamond-formation mocking, he'd respond with grenades of derision right back in their faces...

Johnson remembers James warmly, being "very, very generous with his time and ideas, and generous also, with giving credit to others."  James, almost uniquely, wasn't competing with others.  His love for baseball overrode such petty considerations.  One time James said that "once in a while I might be in a movie and not think about baseball for a few minutes, but it has to be a really good movie..."

We wonder sometimes what would have transpired, if Bill James had had (say) Mike Gimbel's personality.

........

Bryan Johnson had an odd view of Sabermetric D-Day:  he himself looked down on "baseball journalism" as such, and wanted to be viewed as a writer on more serious topics.  

And yet, despite baseball not being his specialty, Johnson was so sharp that he was on the cutting edge of baseball insight .... so on the one hand, he would spend a few hours fighting for sabermetrics' honor and prestige ... and then he'd put his journalist's cap on, and wave off the entire convention as not worthy of serious scholarship, in the first place. 

;- )

.

=== Much Ado About Nothing, Dept. ===

Dr. D's reaction to that?  Is a serious thinker "slumming" when he analyzes baseball?

Any field whatever -- music, chess, baseball, poetry, bird-watching -- can provide the platform for the most extreme, most profound achievements of the human mind.  You guys who analyze baseball, after already being done with school, are continuing to train yourselves in logic and you are continuing to develop your minds.  It certainly beats Vampire Diaries.

And in sports, there are opportunities for human virtue -- courage, loyalty, discipline, heroism.

There's no need to apologize for thinking about baseball.  Is that so much worse than what other adults do with their leisure time?

........

Great interview, Arne.  ::cpoints::