Comments for Baseball Prescriptivism at http://www.wezen-ball.com , comment 1 to 3 out of 3 comments http://www.wezen-ball.com Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:55:39 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://www.wezen-ball.com/2009-articles/november/baseball-prescriptivism.html#comment-165 Larry, this assignment was supposed to be written in MLA format. I'm a little surprised you cannot follow directions. Please resubmit it at once! - Ryan G. Mon, 23 Nov 2009 05:53:31 +0100 http://www.wezen-ball.com/2009-articles/november/baseball-prescriptivism.html#comment-164 It seems people are sold on the notion that baseball is the exact equivalent to childhood and innocence (probably because it makes a lot of money for people) and I think that plays a lot into it too.....that people transfer their regrets and wishes to the sport....If you change things, the fantasy is over..Once it starts being an emotional crutch, THEN you have problems. Kind of like how Star Trek fans flipped out over JJ Abrahms directing the new Trek...'You CAN'T!', 'What about the canon!'.... or romanticizing the teenage years... If your existence revolves around being young and those puberty plagued years....that's pretty sad... And frankly, I'll take maturity and wisdom over innocence every day of the week. Same thing with baseball. It's a sport that sometimes does a great diservice to itself because it's entire marketing strategy seems to be built on the past and revisionist history... Which can be pretty insulting to current and future players...Plus it's also widening the gap between the fan base age groups...Which damages the sport even more. You don't need to have fancy stuff to attract young people and you don't need to resist change to keep the jaded old folks happy. Just change the dialogue and keep in step (reasonably) with the times...Heck maybe reinvent things...Is baseball gonna be Seals and Crofts or Madonna ( you don't see her complaining about the good ol' days)..... Frankly I'm more excited to see how current players (young and old) mature and grow as athletes. I yearn for a purity of the sport simply because I find athletics (and subsequent feats) inspiring....but I don't wax philosophical about the days of yore because it simply didn't exist and I'd be doing a diservice to do so.... Statistics and evaluation is a necessary component of that evolution. New isn't bad as long as it's done the right way. - The Terrific Girlfriend Mon, 23 Nov 2009 05:33:49 +0100 http://www.wezen-ball.com/2009-articles/november/baseball-prescriptivism.html#comment-163 It's funny, before I got to the final sentence of this piece I was thinking it was very Posnanski-esque. I'm actually on opposite sides of both worlds you describe here (language and baseball). I think I'm something of a language prescriptivist, but that probably has more to do with the way my mind is wired than the way I learned it. I don't necessarily hold everyone else to the same standards, but I do my part to preserve the purity of our great English language. When it comes to baseball, it's funny to think that my main resource used to be a baseball encyclopedia that didn't even list OBP. Now when I use Baseball-Reference.com my eyes naturally move to the OPS+ and ERA+ columns. I guess the difference is that I see language as a system of communication that has its own protocol while I see baseball stats as data for interpretation of a player. More accurate data? I'm all for it! Improper grammar? You're butchering something beautiful! - Ian W. Mon, 23 Nov 2009 05:23:03 +0100