Excerpt from an interview with Michael Lewis:

"The news just can't be intelligent about baseball because news by definition is small samples. Because it's daily, right? The most typical opinion in sports is the opinion about something that just happened. If you listen to them, they are always rationalizing the most recent events. If someone hits a home run, it becomes a reflection of that person's whole career. And they make these vast generalizations about the home run. If someone walks in the game winning run, it's a reflection of that player's character. So it's always taking some event that just happened and trying to make it signify more than it does. There's an inherent idiocy in baseball commentary. It's particularly idiotic in baseball commentary because you do have this pool of data that's available from which you can actually make some pretty intelligent statements which is just being ignored in that moment because you want to explain that moment."

I agree completely with Lewis, but there's clearly no solution in sight because the daily papers need something to talk about, so they need to build up the importance of what happens every day. Otherwise, there's no reason to buy the paper. Plus, it's human nature to want to attribute greater meaning to every single event.

And all this is why I found it so hard to keep doing Baseball and Booze each week of the season, because there's not much that can be intelligently said about what happened during a single week of baseball. The preseason was always more fun to talk about because you could talk much more broadly about what had been done during the offseason and what we could expect at the macro level for the season.

Completely unrelated, Baseball America has projected rosters for the World Baseball Classic. This is gonna be awesome. The US has the strongest team. DR is close. The US has a lot more depth, but I don't think it'll matter much in this format. Each team is probably only going to need 3 starting pitchers. The US and DR lineups are pretty even, but DR's pitching is a little lacking after Pedro. Venezuela, on the other hand, has Johan and Zambrano, plus KRod out of the 'pen. But, their lineup is weak. PR and Japan are the only other teams that have a chance as far as I can tell. Then again, based on everything said above, any reasonably good team can win a one game semi-final or final, so overanalyzing the rosters is probably foolish.