Effectively Wild Episode 300: Brian Kenny on Sabermetrics, Broadcasting, and Confrontation
Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast
Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley
4.7 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 4 October 2013
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ben and Sam talk to Brian Kenny about the reaction to his campaign to kill the win and why sabermetrics needs a confrontational face.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Warren Spahn's Classic 300 Major League Victory is the most inspiring sport throughout of 1961. |
| 0:12.1 | Good morning and welcome to episode 300 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from |
| 0:17.2 | baseballperspectice.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindbergh and because 300 is an exceptionally |
| 0:25.2 | important number in baseball, we have an exceptionally important guest who I will announce |
| 0:29.7 | in a moment. By way of introduction of him, I want to start by talking about a piece that |
| 0:36.7 | sometimes baseball writer named Mosha Mandel wrote on March 18th about the Insular |
| 0:42.4 | Log Rolling World of baseball blogging. Mosha said, use certain stats, praise the right people, |
| 0:47.8 | criticize certain writers and you too can be part of the counter culture that is sweeping the sports |
| 0:52.3 | nation. Once you're in the club, your content is not subjected to nearly the same rigorous analysis |
| 0:57.5 | and subsequent snark that an outsider might face. In the few instances where a member of the club |
| 1:02.7 | is criticized is with a much softer touch and more forgiving tone than that afforded a member |
| 1:08.0 | of the media. Just a few days later as though Mosha was a prophet, Brian Kenney got his own |
| 1:15.4 | radio show on NBC Sports Radio. A few days after that he got a show called MLB Now in which he |
| 1:22.4 | debated baseball topics with Harold Reynolds and just like that the Sabermetric World had its |
| 1:28.8 | probably most divisive member. Kenney has been, I would say probably the most high profile |
| 1:37.6 | defender of many Sabermetric viewpoints over the last six months. He has also, I would say, |
| 1:44.2 | changed the tone in a way that Sabermetricians are often not very comfortable with and because of |
| 1:48.6 | that, he is strangely criticizable in a lot of ways. I would say it feels as though people who |
| 1:55.8 | have been playing polite with each other for many years now feel no compunction about getting a |
| 2:01.8 | little bit, I don't know, in tussles with you and in a way it's kind of nice to see and in a way |
| 2:08.9 | I'm not sure where it's taking us. So Brian Kenney, welcome to the podcast. How are you? |
| 2:14.6 | That's no welcome. You say I'm confrontational. All right, let's do this fellas. |
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