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Hmmmmm.  At the Bakery, our man Geoffy was pounding ants with sledgehammers, devoting 1500 words or so to the question of the 2012 Giants' lack of home runs.  Somethin' seemed slightly wacky about the implied dialogue.

Oh!  It was 'cause the biggest blog has been doing its usual moral duty, overcoming emotion with intelligence.  Guess we better re-read Geoffy's line of thought, this time with a little traction... oh.  Nice job.  He gets right to the point:  the 2012 Giants did have marquee hitting, if not a lot of team HR's.

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Q.  The 2012 Giants won it all.  They had no home runs.  What do you grok from that?

A.  In 1989, Jeff Hostetler quarterbacked the Giants to a Super Bowl victory.  What do you grok from that?  Is the takeaway that --- > in the NFL, great quarterbacks don't matter as much as fans think they do?

Doug Williams won a Super Bowl.  Trent Dilfer did.  Dr. D therefore infers that Tom Brady and Peyton Manning are not major competitive advantages.

ANY one component of a sports team, taken in isolation, can be overcome if all the other components are exaggeratedly powerful.  That's just stating the obvious.  You could win the NBA title with nobody taller than 6'7", if they were all Michael Jordan.

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Q.  Maybe the real suggestion was merely that the 2013 Mariners aren't dead yet.

A.  Maybe, in a vacuum.  But the backdrop here is the ongoing 2001-2013 debate:  are marquee MLB players important?  That's what we've really been arguing about.

"The Giants won without home runs," that statement would be fine in a vacuum.  But of course the title of the post was, "Combatting Ignorance With Brilliance."  Or something like that.  Considering the title, the statement "The 2012 Giants won without home runs" feels a little bit like the 1937 curtain coming up to reveal King Kong and ... whoops, sorry, one night and one night only, we have a guy juggling three bowling pins.  

If you believe that Kennedy was killed by one gunman and I believe he was killed by the CIA, we've got a discussion.  Then if you retort, "that's okay, a lot of irrational people get into the JFK debate," our discussion is over.  True, the cognitive premise of our little talk is blown to smithereens, but let's not forget about the affective side of the human condition.  If you tell me that you're willing to combat my irrationality with rationality, I'd call that a teeny bit insulting.  Call me oversensitive.

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Q.  How about the over'arcing point.

A.  But yeah.  The 2013 Mariners aren't dead yet.  It's possible to win without marquee hitters, like it's possible for an NFL team to win with a lousy quarterback.  

It's a pretty nice competitive advantage to have Tom Brady rather than Tarvaris Jackson.  If you're going to spot the other guys their Brady, I hope you realize HOW good you're going to have to be everywhere else.