A competitive team and a nice night at the ballpark
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RESPECT is a feeling of admiration.
It is elicited by another person's achievements, attitudes, or character. Typically it is associated with a certain level of deference. It recognizes the intrinsic worth of another person - almost always, because of the choices they make, and not because of the talents they were born with.
You don't respect blond hair; you respect a bald person using a walker in a courageous fashion (as I witnessed at the gas station the other night, where a young man took several minutes cheerfully folding up his walker to put it into the back of his truck. How many times has he done that?).
You do not respect intelligence; you respect a surgeon who calmly spends 10 hours making sure every single move he makes is precise, however tedious it gets. You respect the woman who spends her Saturday volunteering at the food bank. You don't respect Colin Kaepernick's footspeed, not on a human level; you respect Russell Wilson's determination to help the Seahawks, and not himself.
I can respect the discipline any man uses to become one of the top 1% in his profession, as all MLB(tm) shot-callers are. That doesn't mean that Dan Duquette receives the same overall deference that Pat Gillick receives. You do not respect George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton at exactly the same levels, or even similar levels.
You don't respect Ken Lay of Enron the same way you respect Bill Gates of Microsoft. Once you ask for, and get, the steering wheel, let's see what you do with it.
You don't respect inborn talents. You respect priorities.
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America, today, is about demanding respect. It is about treating respect as a courtesy, something you do as a favor to others. Those two mis-definitions miss the entire point of respect. If you want to talk about courtesy, then use that word. Or sensitivity. Or kindness. Or helpfulness. Or use another word. Some word other than "respect." Because respect can only be earned, not demanded.
Maybe America is re-defining "respect" as a shortcut. We're a drive-thru society, aren't we?
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So the Oakland A's own a 429:301 run differential, halfway through the 2014 season. This projects to a +244 run differential, and that's before any July trades, of course.
By comparison, the last three times the New York Yankees won the World Series (2009, 2000, 1999) their run differentials were +162, +57, and +169, respectively.
So what's the point? Once you're fairly good, what is the point of getting any better? What's the goal? You've already got Soccer Mom in the stands and a better chance of winning than losing. What is Billy Beane thinking? What is "responsible" about a man with Billy Beane's budget trading two young club-controls stars for short-term, expensive players?
He's thinking with his gonads, is what he's doing. It's a testosterone thing. And it is what makes baseball useful. Vicarious war. The battle to be #1, as opposed to being #5, that is what gives the evening's struggle its soul.
The internet is about SAT's, seeing who can be more "clever" in analyzing what is done by men with large muscles, long shin bones and 6th-sigma hand eye coordination. What is going on between the world's most elite athletes, that is about testicles.
If you want to reduce your pastime to an intellectual endeavor, I recommend tournament chess. It's far more intellectually challenging than sabermetrics, and there are absolutely no unmeasurables of any kind.
I do not respect the man who attempts to convert baseball into chess. It isn't the same thing. It isn't close to the same thing.
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Gray, Kazmir, and Chavez are very good. But they aren't Stars & Scrubs. Jeff Samardzija is a difference-maker when they hit the bright lights in October. Gray, Kazmir and Chavez are now the Scrubs to Samardzija's and Hammel's (and Donaldson's and Cespedes') star quality.
My son thinks Moneyball was one of the top 10 movies of any kind, and would dearly love to see Beane hoist a championship trophy, and call himself the best in the world. Beane deserves that moment; not all MLB(tm) shot-callers deserve that moment.
Beane famously said, "my slop doesn't work in the playoffs." He responds to those disappointments by --- > attempting to find some slop that does. That, I can respect.
I wish I were an A's fan,
Dr D