Defending Bill James on Kirby Puckett

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Defending Bill James on Kirby Puckett
Published 4/5/2008 by Eamonn Brennan at The Postmen // A Sports Blog // Chicago, IL.
... facilitating a steroids culture in his locker rooms, or jokingly guessing with your friends which players were on the juice. Since when is this such a big deal? Why all the outrage? Last time I checked, it was the mainstream baseball media's job to be indignant on command. Us blogs -- we're supposed to have a sense of humor. Getting all frothy about a one-off is a pretty incongruous thing for a blog to do.Permalink |  ...

Lies, Damned Lies: The Age of Suspicion by Nate Silver
Published 4/25/2008 at Baseball Prospectus
... in 1984. Puckett hit no home runs (-16), Gaetti hit only 5 (-19). Suggesting the possibility that the Twins’ two World Championships may have been aided by their team being among the first to discover…well, I’d better not go there. Nor will I point out that Gaetti was bald and had acne and Puckett died young. It has been suggested that this comment was snark, but, if so, I guess I don’t get the joke. I think the steroids controversy has been vastly overplayed by the media–-ironically, perhaps, because of our collective reverence for baseball’s history and statistics--and ...