By Jeff Moss
DetroitSportsRag@GMail.com
September 16, 2016
The other day, MLive.com sports columnist, noted horticulturist and convicted felon David Mayo wrote one of the worst baseball articles I have ever read. After perusing the words of this imbecile regarding the Tigers, I felt like my eyes were on fire.
Honestly, the piece was so awful that it was like Dan Shaughnessy, Pat Caputo, Murray Chass and Chris McCosky all jerked off into a test tube and the resulting offspring was this horrific column.
The question at DSR headquarters was what to do with this piece. The hierarchy debated the merits of even responding to this drivel at all with some folks making the case that no one cares about Mayo — many in the area don’t even know who he is — while others argued that this septic tank of the written word deserved a Fire Joe Morgan-esque response.
Well, never being one to pass on an opportunity to obliterate someone — even if it is low-hanging fruit — I decided to give it the FMJ treatment. The premise of the article was this …
The Tigers are struggling this season because Mike Ilitch and Dave Dombrowski “penny-pinched” on the starting rotation over the last couple of years. If Snoop Mayo would have stuck to Ilitch’s foolish and stubborn decision to lowball Max Scherzer back in 2014, that might have been a worthwhile piece.
But Mayo spewed transcribed diarrhea all over this article in a fashion that demonstrated he has no knowledge of baseball, advanced metrics or mathematical properties.
It was the written equivalent of being dopey enough to get busted growing marijuana in your drug den of a residence. So let’s start the dissecting before I get the munchies ….
I will mainly ignore his opening remarks because while I could dropkick Mayo with the return for Rick Porcello and delve into the Doug Fister soap opera, there will be greater opportunities later in this clusterfuck. The most hilarious portion of Mayo’s lede is “we won’t even get into Max Scherzer” because why would one want to address the only salient point you could make in regards to your thesis?
This was the point in Mayo’s article that blood started to come out of my wherever™ (Megyn Kelly). How do I even begin to address the lunacy of these paragraphs?
How the fuck can you complain about the Rick Porcello trade? In return for Porcello, the team received Yoenis Cespedes and Alex Wilson. Wilson, mind you, has been one of the organization’s better relief arms over the last two seasons.
And Cespedes put up MVP-like numbers during the first half of last season which led to the Tigers spinning him for Michael Fulmer and Luis Cessa. They then turned around and acquired Justin Wilson for Cessa. And while Wilson has not been perfect, he has assisted in improving the team’s perennially atrocious bullpen.
So to summarize, the Tigers only have Fulmer and the Wilson Relievers because of the fortuitous Porcello trade. I will address their value vis-a-vis Porcello in a second, but first I have to address Mayo’s absolutely FUCKING MORONIC comment included in that above screenshot ….
Those are substantial pieces, and the Tigers like the players they acquired in those trades. But that’s 32 pitching victories outgoing, and 14 incoming this season.
Uh, yeah. This dipshit went THERE. Pitcher wins. A stat that is so derided in modern baseball that you’d be hard-pressed to even find old school dummies still espousing its validity. I mean, in 2016 the #KillTheWin movement isn’t even necessary any longer.
And yet here is this simpleton, Mr. 12-Step Program (to kick the habit of WEED!!!!! Hahahhaha!!!!!) trying to come up with some convoluted way to figure out how damaged the Tigers are because they don’t have Porcello and Doug Fister any longer.
No, Mayo isn’t talking about Wins Above Replacement; he is actually posting a column stating the Tigers have lost 18 PITCHER wins because of these moves.
But he prefaced the loss of those 18 PITCHER wins by writing this ….
The trades of Porcello and Fister (before the 2014 season) eventually netted today’s No. 2 rotation pitcher Fulmer, center fielder Cameron Maybin, and reliever Shane Greene.
Can someone explain to me how you can evaluate Cameron Maybin in this conversation since …ya know … he is A POSITION PLAYER WHO CANNOT FUCKING GET WINS?!!!?!?!?!
And let’s continue this Fister and Porcello history a little further. The team has Shane Greene because they dealt Robbie Ray for him. Detroit swapped another Fister trade component in Ian Krol for Maybin.
Having established the lineage of the Fister and Porcello deals, let’s examine what the Tigers have received in return for those starting pitchers in 2016 using SABERMETRICS. More specifically, WAR.
For this exercise I will use Baseball-Reference’s WAR instead of Fangraphs’ WAR because B-R‘s is based more on 2016 RESULTS than on predictive factors.
2016 Fangraphs WAR to Date
Rick Porcello: 4.8
Doug Fister .7
Total WAR: 5.5
Michael Fulmer: 5.0
Shane Greene: -.3
Justin Wilson: .3
Alex Wilson: 1.7
Cameron Maybin: 1.4
Total War: 7.1
This is absolutely hysterical. The whole point of this dolt’s article is the Tigers are suffering in 2016 because of the loss of Fister and Porcello when in fact — because of the haul they received in return for those pieces — the franchise is 1.6 “Wins” better off than they would have been otherwise!!!!!!
But here is the kicker. The “Ghost Trainwreck #9” of Mayo’s column ……
“Nothing against the players the Tigers eventually got in return …”
Nothing against the FUCKING players the Tigers eventually got in return?!!?!?!?!!
Hello, moron. Fulmer has ALMOST been better than Fister and Porcello BY HIMSELF this season.
I mean, Fulmer has a better WAR than Porcello. If he was the only god damn piece they “eventually” received for Rick, that trade aftermath would be considered a grand slam. But they also have two high-leverage relievers at their disposal as a result of that prudent deal.
In fact, the Tigers have an ace starter, a pretty damn good centerfielder and three key bullpen pieces thanks to those trades. And by the way, except for Maybin, each of those players is under team control for a long time.
Furthermore, if you took every single player currently in Major League Baseball and assigned him a “Trade Value”, Fulmer would be included in every expert’s top ten list.
He is ALREADY better than Porcello has ever been and is under team control until the year 2022 while making a measly $507,500. The same salary as either John Hicks or Dixon Machado.
Finally, nowhere in Mayo’s article does he mention that a major reason Porcello has those 20 wins is that his run support per nine innings is an incredible 6.96.
Yep, in games Porcello starts, the Red Sox score almost SEVEN runs per game, you fool.
Unbelievable. The abject stupidity we have to deal with in this town.
Like, you could write about 25 different articles on why the Tigers and their “penny-pinching” $200 million payroll has underachieved this season.
You could document the untimely injuries to Jordan Zimmermann, J.D. Martinez and Nick Castellanos.
You could post an article about just how many games Al Avila’s roster construction and Brad Ausmus’ brain dead managerial moves have cost the team.
Or you could focus on the the underperformance of Justin Upton and Anibal Sanchez.
Or the baffling decision to give Mike Pelfrey a two-year contract.
But to lament the fact the Tigers don’t have Porcello and Fister on this roster when the aftermath of those trades has HELPED this ball club in 2016, not to mention both of those pitchers would have been unrestricted free-agents last offseason anyway?
How many brain cells did the cannabis kill, David?
(You can follow the writer of this piece on Twitter @JeffMossDSR. Also, you can join in on the discussion of this article on Facebook by clicking here.)
