Distinguished Senators, the Washington Nationals Blog That Is Great

Thursday, May 05, 2005

In Which I Rag on Dayn Some More

I'm proud of you guys. We all gave Dayn Perry a whole bunch of shit in his chat today, to the point that he started getting a little snippy.
Vinny Castilla (RFK): What's your problem with baseball in DC? It seems to be going pretty well to me.

Dayn Perry: See above. As for further Nats-related questions, I'll be glad to schedule a chat on any Nats fan site/blog out there. Just contact me through the site.

Hmm . . . any Nats fan site/blog? Well, I'm not going to do it. Regardless, this is a clear indication that we kicked Baseball Prospectus in the ass with our righteous indignation. It was a disappointing chat, all in all. It started late, one-hand typist Dayn took half an hour between questions, and he certainly didn't answer all our questions. Though I guess we couldn't expect him to respond to advances from Pat O'Brien and queries on what unnatural acts he had to perform to insure his employment. But at one point in the (plodding, insight-free) chat, Dayn answered a question about his dickheaded wish "that things in D.C., generally speaking, go horribly wrong for the Nationals."

Dayn Perry: Nats fans are certainly a mobilized lot. I've received more email about that one sentence (to be pedantic, I suppose it's actually not a sentence) than anything else I've ever written. So let's talk about it ...

First, I don't begrudge Beltway fans joy in finally have baseball return to them. If I were in or around a city deprived of baseball for 30-plus years, I certainly wouldn't give a crap how a team got there. So long as it got there. That's fine.

For external observers, however, the move of the Expos to D.C. can be viewed only as a grave injustice and yet another example of MLB's lamentable corporatist ethic. The orchestrated failure of the Expos in MOntreal and the chicanery it took to make that happen is nothing new, but that doesn't make it acceptable. After all, D.C. lost two iterations of the Senators because of this sort of thing. Bob Short was greedy, and Calvin Griffith was a greedy racist. The whole relocation scheme is predicated on lies and avarice and wholly betrays the concepts of loyalty, history and tradition.

So to support what MLB has done to bring the Expos/Nats to Washington is to tacitly endorse this sort of behavior. Again, I don't hold this against Nats fans from the area, because I wouldn't care were I in their position. But we shouldn't propagate this dynamic by pretending all's glorious about baseball's return to D.C.

If it's any consolation, whatever I wish to happen makes no difference, and, no, I didn't really expect the Nats to fail. So get over it.
Nice, Dayn. You hate Bud Selig so much that you hope thousands of Nationals fans suffer so you can chuckle at his failure. It's terrible reasoning, of course. Suppose the Nats fail and pack up for Vegas or Norfolk. What is that supposed to do to Selig? The man is clearly unembarrassable - just look at him. No conflict of interest, no strike, no tied All-Star Game has brought the man down yet. Everyone hates him except the owners, but the owners have the only opinions that matter. So Dayn hopes that the heart-broken fans of Montreal are avenged by the heart-break of Washington fans. It doesn't add up.

But we shouldn't expect it to. Dayn isn't a great analyst. His opinions on personnel are right of out of the Rob Neyer Songbook (meaning that they're identical to mine), and he does little but spout the most vanilla SABR-lite claptrap. It's Prospectus dogma that Bud Selig=bad, and this is undoubtedly true. So Dayn jerked his knee and said something dumb (he has been known to express forcefully an opinion on a matter about which he knows nothing). Indeed, if Dayn had restricted himself to pointing out that the whole relocation process was awful and that Montreal got hosed, fine - I think we all agree with that. But he went too far and knows it (hence the last two sentences of his response). But he won't back off for some reason, and now he has a thousand enemies. Oh, and by the way:

If it's any consolation, whatever I wish to happen makes no difference . . .
No consolation to me, but I'm sure Scarlett Johansson and Eva Mendes feel better.

If you're in the mood for more Dayn talk and are over 18, check out the comments for the last post. There's some good stuff in there, particularly Yuda's evisceration of Baseball Prospectus.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, I think it's pretty obvious now: Dayn Perry is still a prick, like most of the rest of his BP cohorts (and I subscrbed to the thing, alas). He's got nothing. And those imaginary roofies he slipped to those babes on his imaginary FOX-Sports "dates" are still about the creepiest thing you're gonna read about coming from a sports journo. Man, is he lame.

Ryan said...

Yep. I seriously can't believe Dayn got away with that stuff as long as he did. Unbelievably creepy.

Chris Needham said...

He said he deleted it.

I don't know that point is at this point.

Brian said...

Did you guys read what happened to John? Fired from Nats Pack for his rant earlier this week.

Ryan said...

"I don't know that point is at this point."

Huh?

Brian said...

Ryan - When Dayn made that point about Vinny having to slug over 0.500 to prove Dayn wrong, it got the stathead in me going. I looked at the SLG pct over the last three years. I only included players who had sufficient ABs to qualify for SLG. Over the last 4 years, there were 48 players who had a SLG over 0.500 (Vinny was ranked 82nd). The guys listed are the ones you would expect (Bonds, Pujols, Helton, Manny, etc). There are 10 3B (counting Huff/Chipper as 3B) who have higher 3 year SLG than Vinny:
1. Rolen 0.541
2. Huff 0.524
3. Chipper 0.514
4. Chavez 0.510
5. Lowell 0.500
6. ABeltre 0.495
7. Blalock 0.490
8. Mora 0.487
9. ARamirez 0.477
10. Mueller 0.469
11. Vinny 0.450

The fact that Vinny has never had a SLG > 0.500 outside of Coors. If he would do it this year at age 37 in a ballpark that plays huge, it would be considered amazing. Additionally, outside of Mueller ($2.1M) and Blalock ($0.8M), Vinny is dirt cheap.

God forbid Dayn let the facts get in the way of a half-assed assertion.

Ryan said...

God forbid Dayn let the facts get in the way of a half-assed assertion.
There's got to be a first time for everything, right?

Anonymous said...

The f*ckin' nickel-dime people who turn up in my chats? The motherf*ckers don't even work. That's why they're out on my f*ckin' chat. They oughta go out and get a f*ckin' job and find out what it's like to go out and earn a f*ckin' living. Eighty-five percent of the f*ckin' world is working. The other fifteen percent come out here to my chat.

Brian said...

Lee Elia in the hiz-ouse.

Ryan said...

Hey, Dayn's in the house. How long til we hear from Pat O'Brien and Bodes?

Anonymous said...

Why you play me like that, dog?