Jose Reyes and His Meaningless Batting Title

Before last night turned into the most exciting night in regular season baseball history, the story of the day was Jose Reyes battling Ryan Braun for the National League batting title. As you probably know, Reyes dropped down a bunt in the 1^st inning of his game against the Reds to raise his batting average to .337, leaving him .003 points ahead of Braun, who had a .334 average going into his game. Wanting to protect this lead, Reyes then checked himself out of the game. Braun still had a chance to win the batting title if he had rattled off 3 or 4 hits in his game, but alas, he went 0-4, finishing the season with a .332 average and 2^nd place to Reyes. 

Now I’m not going to judge Reyes for doing this. Whether or not you feel what he did was wrong and “disgraceful to the game” is a matter of opinion and I personally don’t think it’s worth debating the merits of it. For all I know he has an incentive in his contract that guarantees him more money for winning a battle title. In which case more power to him. But what I am here to argue is that making a big deal about winning the batting title is completely pointless.

Batting average is one of the three classic hitter’s baseball stats that people still celebrate, along with home runs and RBIs. Over the last decade or so (the Moneyball era, if you will), a lot of baseball fans (re: nerds) have enjoyed watching baseball stats evolve. Being a baseball nerd and a Moneyball reader (and A’s fan), I have loved this. Websites like Fangraphs.com and BaseballReference.com have made these stats readily available for anyone to see. No longer are they locked away in a spiral bound Bill James notebook somewhere. Any national writer or everyday fan can look up and see what any players OBP, wOBA, WAR, or WPA is at anytime. While no baseball stat is perfect, using some of these advanced stats can help paint a better picture of a player than using just batting average.

Mayweather vs. Ortiz, HBO 24/7 and the Boxing Hype Machine

In my opinion, there is no better sports reality show than HBO’s 24/7 series. Being a boxing fan, it’s easy for me to say this, but many aspects of the show are appealing to mainstream sports fans and just regular TV fans alike. The first of the 24/7 series I watched was for the build up to the Ricky Hatton and Manny Pacquiao fight. I had become aware of Manny Pacquiao after he defeated an aging Oscar De La Hoya in his previous fight to essentially become the most popular boxer in the world. I was less than familiar with Hatton, knowing only that he was a brawler from England who was regarded as one of the top pound for pound fighters in the world.

That was enough for me to decide to get back into the world of professional boxing. I had in essence sworn off the sport of boxing after the Lennox Lewis vs. Mike Tyson debacle in 2002. I had semi-regularly followed the heavyweight division for a while and this was by far the most compelling fight Lewis had had as champion. Though Tyson was long past his prime, I had believed him to be the only heavyweight who could actually give Lewis a run for his money. With Lewis’s last handful of fights coming against such no names as Francois Botha, David Tua and Hasim Raham, I was hoping Tyson could channel some of the skills he possessed that made him a boxing phenom and regain the heavyweight title. Forgetting that it was 2002 and not 1995, Lewis embarrassed Tyson. While Tyson showed some flashes early, it was clear he was nowhere close to being in the same class as Lewis. By the 3^rd or 4^th round, it was evident that Tyson knew he had no chance and essentially stopped fighting. Finally in the 8^th round, with Tyson barely having the energy or willingness to throw a punch, Lewis knocked Tyson to the canvas and the referee counted him out.

I had felt duped by the boxing hype machine. Even though I knew this would have been a much more entertaining fight 6-7 years previous, there was enough hype and promotion around the fight that led me to believe that it would actually be a close, hard fought battle. Lewis only fought once more in his career and retired as the undisputed heavyweight champ. Since then, the division has been dominated by Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko. Both are amazingly talented fighters but have been (perhaps unfairly) punished by the fact they don’t have a very entertaining fighting style in the ring and that the heavyweight division is the weakest that its ever been. Even though there were many great fighters still active (including De La Hoya), heavyweight fighters are still the huge draw for casual boxing fans, which I was at the time, so with nothing exciting going on for a while, I stopped following the sport altogether.