Off Wing Opinion

Since my original post on Ralph Wiley's attack on Bill James and Sabermetrics as racist, a number of others have chimed in. Reading all of their comments is worth your time.

Over at ESPN.com, Rob Neyer was called out to provide the official in-house response, which while complete, comes off as a little tepid. Then again, he does share server space with Wiley.

Next, we should refer to Dave Pinto's post, where he elaborates further on why Wiley attacked James in the first place -- an article that analyzed Henderson's 1982 season and focused on the damage to the A's run scoring caused by all the times Rickey was caught stealing the same year he swiped 130. It's illuminating (and quite frankly, fills a real gap in Neyer's response), but I don't think it recognizes just what sort of damage someone like Wiley can cause when throwing around a casual charge of racism.

You can find another good take over at the Baseball Crank, while Mike Carminti did his typical yeoman's job deconstructing Wiley's tripe. Further, just a few minutes ago, Mike went at Wiley again, as he tried to backtrack on his original comments in an ESPN.com online chat and make it look like he didn't call James a racist (I can't find Mike permalink for this post. Go to his site, and read the entry for July 24.)

Finally, Steve Sailer of UPI has put together an interesting piece that deals directly with the race issue and puts Sabermetrics into some historical perspective. It's a great piece, and in part recapitulates many of the incidents that other bloggers and I have been writing about over the last few weeks.

Thanks to Peter White of Mariners Musings for passing along the Neyer and Carminti link.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2003 at 2:23 am by Eric McErlain and is filed under Baseball, Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.