In a medium whose format champions concision, I assume blurb writers follow a style mandate: Say as much as one can, in the fewest words possible. They surely must have a Strunk & White guide of their own. Imagine if Strunk & White had Twitter. Imagine their replies. “Gadzooks,” they might say, “I am agog at the critique I posted this evening!” they might say. Those dudes would post grammar rules every day and get roasted. Meanwhile, I find myself flummoxed when facing and critiquing wordy blurbs, as I preach brevity on a pedestal hewn from my own satirically tangled diction. It’s one thing to giggle at the classic, “Do as I say, not as I do.” It’s another thing entirely to throw rocks at a glass house, especially when my glass house follows the architectural logic of the Winchester mystery mansion.
My own writing style can be best described as Captain Beefheart’s signature backwards drums, as evidenced by John French, aka, Drumbo. An untrained Beefheart recorded improvised piano pieces that Drumbo was asked to turn into written music for two guitars, a bass, and drums. The style is simplistically impenetrable, and yet alluring and mystical. I don’t think my style is original. I write the way I write for reasons I can’t explain, and because I’m lucky that Grey, Rudy, Blair, Donkey, and others answered my email last year and asked for a writing sample. I conceived and wrote the first column in one go, as my wife lamented the title in the margins. Style? Style is nothing without substance. Did we learn nothing from Project Runway?
I digress. As I’ve been trying to analyze both how to avoid being stomped by errant blurbs, or even how I have been stomped on in the past, I have remarked that blurbs are trying too hard; they’re trying to become play-by-play announcers, full team box scores, and even wikipedia rap sheet pages. So it goes that today I clicked a blurb on Rotoworld (NBCsportsedge, ahem) and noticed an incomplete blurb. Ninety words into this blurb, the final clause became obscured by bold letters that said: SEE MORE….
I was devastated. Scared. Would it take me to another page? Is this clickbait? Would it vault me over the paywall to join the fantasy baseball country club elite? Is there a dress code? Do I own any penny loafers? Did I even want to read more in the first place?
I clicked and it ended the sentence very plainly. No hyperlink. No ad. Just an arbitrary UI word count threshold. We now know the limits of the modern blurbist: 90 words per section of analysis. Next week we will dive deeper into style and what makes the perfect blurb. Is it the cold robotic precision of a classic boxscore copywriter? The sarcastic, smug bile of the blurbist who thinks he should be the manager? The analytics-obsessed savant whose prose reveals the writer has never shaken his hips at an 80’s dance party?
We’ll find out next week. You’ll have wait and see…
More.
A Blurbstomp Reminder
We will analyze player blurbs from a given evening, knowing that 1-2 writers are usually responsible for all the player write-ups posted within an hour of the game results. We will look at:
- Flowery Diction – how sites juice up descriptions of player performance
- Friendly Reminder – when a blurb insists upon itself
- Q and Q – when a site contradicts a player valuation on back-to-back blurbs
- The Blame Game – a player takes on the fault of the team as a whole
- Stephen A. Smith IMG_4346.jpeg Award – Given to the player blurb that promises the most and delivers the least.
- Bob Nightengale Syndrome – instances of updates that don’t update anything
The hope is that by season’s end, we’ll all feel more confident about our player evaluations when it comes to the waiver wire. We will read blurbs and not be swayed by excessive superlatives, faulty injury reporting, and micro-hype. I will know that I have done my job when Grey posts, and there isn’t a single question about catchers that he did not address in his post. Onward to Roto Wokeness!
Q & Q
Whit Merrifield went 1-for-4 with an RBI in Tuesday’s 7-1 Royals win against the Cardinals.
Whit Merrifield batted in a spot with than 1 or 2 in the order for the first time this season on Tuesday. He responded to being dropped from the top of the order a single and an RBI. Despite the cold start, Merrifield has hits in four of his last five and appears to be getting things going at the plate since moving back into the infield with Adalberto Mondesi’s knee injury. Perhaps the drop in the lineup will further wake up his bat and get him back up to the top of the order soon.
Source: Fantasypros.com
I think there’s a typo in that first sentence of analysis, but beyond that, please let me know where he hit in the lineup. I am an attention-hungry-click-averse-fellow. I do not want to visit another website, click on the game score, click on the boxscore, and then scroll down. I’ll do that right now.
It took me 25 seconds to figure out he batted fifth. 25 seconds I will never get back. You know what else?
Whit Merrifield has all of three extra-base hits after 97 plate appearances, and they’re all doubles. That’s an ISO of .034, coupled with a BABIP that’s so low it does seem that regression to the mean is coming. That said, pitchers are throwing him more sliders and cutters, and he’s an aging veteran (no, that does not mean he’s 25 years old) who relies on his speed to get on base. His profile, as they say, is no longer avocado on toast. I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds bad, and it is something that people could say. That counts.
Q&Q
Houston Astros RF Kyle Tucker went 1-for-4 at the plate knocking in three RBIs with his one hit during Tuesday’s win over the Rangers.
Tucker’s hot streak continued on Tuesday against the Rangers. The veteran smacked a homerun that tallied three RBIs to help the Astros take down the Rangers. Across his last four games, Tucker has gone 7-for-17 from the plate with one homerun, two runs, and four RBIs. If he is on your waiver wire, he is worth about 6-8% of your FAAB budget.
Source: Fantasypros.com
Let’s do some positive framing. I need you to close your eyes. Think about a beautiful blue day, the sky crayon blue, white clouds puffing by. Breathe in deeply through your nostrils. You can hear waves lapping against a beautiful white sand beach. There is birdsong. Kyle Tucker is 25 years old. There is no past, no future. You are present. Kyle Tucker is a veteran MLB player. Kyle Tucker has played one full season and small portions of three others. A beautiful crayon blue sky day, birds singing, less than 300 professional games, and Kyle Tucker is a “veteran.” There is no past, no future, only the present, where someone calls a 25-year-old with four years (again, only one full season) of MLB service a veteran. This blurb makes me the oldest man in the world. Congratulations to me.
Also, that last sentence is satire, yes? It has to be. He’s owned in 99.2% of ESPN ghost leagues. Second of all, only 6-8% of your FAAB?? It may be satire, but it’s got me using multiple question marks. That’s good satire!
Q & Q
Mookie Betts went 2-for-3 with a solo home run, a sacrifice fly and two runs scored in Wednesday’s win over the Giants.
Mookie clocked an Alex Wood offering for a solo homer to lead off the sixth inning of Wednesday’s win. That blast pushed the Dodgers to a 3-1 lead. Betts would come through once more in the seventh inning, this time via a sacrifice fly. On the whole this season, the All-Star outfielder is hitting .247/.350/.412 with four homers, eight RBI, three steals and 23 runs scored across 85 at-bats. A slow start, to be sure, but nothing to panic about at this relatively early juncture.
Source: Rotoedgesportsworld.com
So an outfielder who is top-100 ranked by Razzball’s player rater, who has a slash line of 23/4/8/3/.247, who is literally leading the league in runs scored, is off to a slow start. That is utter poppycock. There is nothing to panic about whatsoever. Last season through March/April, Mookie Betts went 14/2/5/3/.250. Let’s again do a side-by-side comparison:
23/4/8/3/.247
14/2/5/3/.250
What kind of expectations do we have for Mookie at this point? He’s not hitting third or fourth, so like last season, his numbers are going more towards runs than RBI’s. He’s a 25/25 guy, which is rarer than Grey mocking me about benching Taylor Ward in his daily notes post this morning. It’s rare, is my point. Also, Grey hurt my feelings. That’s also my point. My luck on pinch-hit production for my benched bros had been nil. How was I to know, is my point. HOW WAS I TO KNOW!
Anyways, enough with the slow start language. Mookie is no longer starting his season, he’s knee-deep in it. If it was Altuve, they would be fishing his body out of the season’s water. With a noodle strainer. Because he’s small.
Double Take
Max Muncy went 2-for-4 with a two-run home run and two runs scored in Wednesday’s win over the Giants.
Muncy burned Tyler Beede for a two-run homer in the eighth inning to put the exclamation point on the Dodgers’ 9-1 win. On the whole this season, the 31-year-old infielder is hitting an unimpressive .151/.319/.315 with two homers and 11 RBI across 73 at-bats. He had gone 0-for-13 over his previous four games prior to cutting loose a little against the Giants.
Source: Rotoedgesportsworld.com
This is a rare double-take. It was posted one minute before Mookie Betts’s blurb on Rotoworld, and its description of Muncy’s struggles as compared to Betts gives it the somewhat dubious Double Take crown. Despite his shoulder issues, Muncy was bought on draft day by some following the usual Spring Training injury update hanky panky offered by the Dodgers and Muncy himself. His shoulder was healthy, he was feeling good, and we just had Fernando Tatis hit about 500 home runs with a broken shoulder last season. Why not Muncy?
We don’t know if it’s the shoulder, but we can agree that if one was to assign the phrase “slow start” to a hitter, Muncy would surely qualify for the tag.
Sure, like everything in life, “bad” performances in baseball are relative. I would argue that Luis Robert had a truly cold start to the season. Conversely, Taylor Ward is murdering the very souls of every Brandon Marsh and Jo Adell. Do I think Taylor Ward is going to outperform Luis Robert for a full season? He better not. Joe Maddon should not be so emboldened. Joe Maddon has done so much to ensure that guys with platoons splits never get a decent contract in this sport. He even starts them young, platooning due to splits earned in the minors, and I say you can’t have it both ways. If some of the best statisticians in the league still can’t find a method to project minor league players’ outcomes using minor league data, then don’t use that same data to limit a player’s growth! That’s like my teachers and parents telling me in 2nd grade that I wasn’t a “math person,” immediately cementing in my mind a bias against a world of numbers I realized I loved later in life. Joe Maddon is a cruel daddy.
If you think this last paragraph was a stretch, you should see what they’re saying about Mookie Betts’s current production. And if you want to read more ands and buts, you’ll have to click See More…
Until next week, my blurby friends!
