Danny Knobler Is Bad At His Job… AGAIN
So Danny Knobler is at it again. It wasn’t even a month ago, that I wrote an
article
(on my personal blog), criticizing an incredibly lazy, and incorrect
article that Mr. Knobler wrote analyzing the way “blogs” were handling the
Houston Astros. That article was merely
a lazy writer choosing an incorrect narrative. This one is worse.
Also for the record, I’m not going link to Mr. Knobler’s
article, because he doesn’t deserve the extra clicks that even a small blog
like this would direct his way. However, in order to not take any of his words
out of context, I will quote his entire article
Wasn't it right around this time last year that Bobby
Valentine was getting booed?
I don’t think it was 4 games into the season, but
regardless, how that is relevant? I have
no idea, but I’m sure Mr. Knobler will illuminate me.
It was, wasn't it?
No, pretty sure they waited a few weeks, but whatever, you’ve
already driven the point home, get to the useless premise of this article
please.
And it was a reminder of everything that was already wrong in
a Red Sox season that wouldn't get any better.
More Red Sox talk.
Get to the point.
So now it's a different year, and a different Red Sox
manager, and John Farrell got booed Friday night for a completely different
reason. And yet, the way and his team reacted to it says everything about how
this Red Sox team and this Red Sox season are off to a different start.
4 games into a season.
Totally not too early to make sweeping proclamations about how “everything
is different”.
Sorry, Blue Jays fans, but you can't hurt John Farrell. You
can hate him all you want, you can boo him all you want, but you can't hurt him.
I think Mr. Knobler might misunderstand the point of
booing. It isn’t to “hurt” the target
that you’ve directing them at, but rather (in this case) its to show him that the
way he treated the fans that paid his paycheque isn’t appreciated.
You can't even get him to admit he doesn't like it."It was electric in here," Farrell said, on a night
when nearly all the electricity was directed at him, more than anyone else who
was involved in the 6-4 Red Sox win over the Blue Jays. "It was a great
crowd. It's a great atmosphere."
First of all, this sentence is horribly constructed. This guy gets paid to write by one of the
biggest media companies in the world and this is the tripe he comes up
with? Just terrible.
It was a different atmosphere, anyway, on a night when the
promotion was basically, "Let's all boo our ex-manager."
Now we get to the point that really set me off about this
terrible article. I’d like Mr. Knobler
to point out any pre-game promotion that mentioned anything about booing the
former manager. It wasn’t necessary. The fans in the southern Ontario market aren’t
sheep that need to be told when to boo.
Frankly, its one of the things they do better than just about any sports
town outside of eastern Pennsylvania.
It wasn’t the team (or any other Rogers conglomerate partners)
who came up with the clever hashtag of #FFF.
That was done by the fans. In
fact, the only pre-game mentions of Farrell I saw on any broadcast as just to
point out that the “former manager was returning”. These fans may not have the longest memories,
but they certainly can remember back to late fall, when Farrell informed people
that he was leaving for his “dream job”.
They can remember the disrespect that he showed to not only his players,
but the fan base as a whole.
Seriously, have you ever heard fans boo the pregame meeting
at home plate? Have you heard fans boo the visiting team's pitching changes?
Have you heard fans mockingly chant the visiting manager's name, over and over,
inning after inning?
No, I personally cant recall any time this has happened at a
baseball game. Though I do recall Mike
Keenan returning to coach in Vancouver, and being booed out of the
building.
Also, I cant recall any time that a manager has asked to
leave, merely because he wanted a job that he viewed as a “better” one. If you can think of a precedent where that
has been the case, please, I’d like to hear it.
The crowd -- and the "Let's boo" promotion
attracted a near sellout -- even booed when Farrell went to check on the health
of rookie shortstop Jose Iglesias (who took a Josh Johnson pitch on the right
forearm and eventually had to leave the game).
1 – Yet again, there was no “Let’s boo” promotion. The sellout was attracted by John Farrell’s
mere presence back in Toronto.
2 – This is a cheap shot.
This implies that the fans were booing him coming out to attend to his
poor injure player. They weren’t. They were going to take every opportunity to
boo the man who told these fans that they were second class citizens in the
baseball world.
It was different, but then it's different for a manager to
ask to leave one team to take over another team in the same division. It's
different for that manager to publicly admit that he had wanted to make the
switch a year earlier, and then to make comments that could be read to suggest
he viewed the first city as just a steppingstone to the job he really wanted.Farrell probably would have been better off not saying some
of the things he did after leaving the Blue Jays for the Red Sox last fall, and
he certainly wasn't going to make the same mistake now. He had nothing but
compliments for this city and its baseball fans Friday.
Really, this is about as close as Knobler comes to
criticizing anything that John Farrell did this past off-season.
Though, don’t worry, he’s going to spend the next two
paragraphs praising all the wonderful changes that Farrell has brought to the “new
look” Boston Red Sox.
"I think history shows Toronto is an outstanding
baseball town," Farrell said.Perhaps it will be again, although the Blue Jays' 1-3 start
isn't doing much to build on the momentum the Jays generated with their big
offseason. It certainly can't help that on the nights with the two biggest
crowds this week, the Blue Jays lost.
Great, now that he has his “dream job” Farrell can throw
ridiculous platitudes at us. I’d much
rather he done what Josh Hamilton did today and stick to his guns. We know that John Farrell doesn’t see an “outstanding
baseball town” when he looks at Toronto, and frankly it probably isn’t.
Fans in Toronto know that it’s a hockey town first and
foremost, but they don’t want someone they are paying to try and change that,
waving that fact in their face.
Perhaps it will be again, although the Blue Jays' 1-3 start
isn't doing much to build on the momentum the Jays generated with their big
offseason. It certainly can't help that on the nights with the two biggest
crowds this week, the Blue Jays lost.
Its four games Danny, Four.
Though, I suppose if its not to early to make sweeping proclamations
about the “dramatic turnaround” in Boston, its not too early to be raising the
white flag above the dome.
That's hardly Farrell's problem now, just as it's hardly
Farrell's problem that he's not the most popular guy in this town, or in the
clubhouse he once ran."We'd rather have him there [in Boston] than have him
here and wishing he was there," Jose Bautista said Friday afternoon.
"We have a manager who wants to be here."
Hmm, so now we have a comment by star Jose Bautista about
the new manager who is in the Toronto dugout.
I’m sure the next few paragraphs will be about how John Gibbons seems to
have this team a lot more happy and cohesive than John Farrell ever did.
Right?
The Red Sox have one, too. They have a manager who seems to
have showed up at the right time (following the unpopular Valentine), and with
the right group of players (in a clubhouse that was rebuilt with team chemistry
and "Boston fit" in mind).
Farrell mentioned Friday night that people who only watch on
television don't realize how much fun the Red Sox are having in their dugout.His team does seem to enjoy being together. It also seems
significantly more ready to win than the team Valentine took over a year ago.
Once again Friday night, the Red Sox were able to show off young talent
(Iglesias made a brilliant play at short, and Jackie Bradley Jr. was on base
three times) and their outstanding bullpen (four innings, one run).
Lets
ignore the fact that Jackie Bradley made two poor plays in the outfield, or
that Junichi Tazawa was rather dreadful out of the pen.
Nope,
its all about having fun in Boston. Who
wants things like facts to get in the way.
The Red Sox were even able to turn the booing into a
positive. They looked to be joking about it at times, although afterwards they
would only admit that they enjoyed seeing people in the stands and hearing them
make some noise."I think our players fed off it a little," Farrell
said.
Projecting body language so it fits my narrative. I thought we’d hit as many lazy journalistic tendencies,
but Mr. Knobler proves that I had underestimated him.
There's no doubt things would have been different if the Red
Sox were still the mess that they were under Valentine. Things may well have
been different if the Blue Jays were the ones off to a fast start.Maybe then the booing would have gotten to
Farrell. Maybe then he wouldn't have so easily been able to say that he enjoyed
it.
And maybe then it would have stung a little when
the fans taunted him about that "dream job" remark.
Right now, this does look like Farrell's dream
job. Right now, it's hard to think he made any kind of mistake by leaving, or
that the Red Sox made any kind of mistake by going to get him.
Right now, the booing won't hurt John Farrell.
It only helps prove how much the Red Sox have
changed.
I’m tired of ripping this line by line, but I promised I’d
include the entire article, so there is the rest of the tripe that Mr. Knobler
closed his article with.
In an semi-related note.
On Baseball Prospectus’ Effectively Wild podcast this week, they’ve been
doing a segment on “confirmation bias week”.
Meaning that this is the week of the baseball season where all the hack journalists,
take what they thought were going to be the narratives coming into the season,
and look for ways to make the facts on the field confirm these pre-established
biases that they already have.
This is exactly what Mr. Knobler has done here. Pre-season he assumed that because Bobby
Valentine was out of the Boston clubhouse, everything would now be hunky dory,
and as a result, he’s taken this largely irrelevant 4 games worth of data
points to prove his point.
These 4 games essentially prove nothing, unless you want to
force them into a pre-existing narrative.
