Last year, the two heavyweight sports blogs in town made it to the finals of Blarch Badness. Over 5,000 votes were cast and USS Mariner came out on top over Lookout Landing in what amounted to an easy victory [m-b]. Given their huge (and naturally competitive) readership, it wouldn’t be surprising to see these two blogs in the finals again (especially if SLOG continues to ignore us).

USS Mariner’s first match started this morning [m-b] and Lookout Landing’s first match will begin tomorrow. After the jump is the transcript of an email conversation I had with Dave and Jeff about last year’s experience, among other things.


Ryan [Seattle Metblogs]: Jeff and Dave, congratulations on your fine performances in last year’s Blarch Badness tournament. You were both able to rally the troops to your cause although the final tally showed a rather lopsided USS Mariner victory (3,000 to 2,300, roughly). We here at Seattle Metroblogging take it as a given that USS Mariner’s victory finally validated its existence (and for that, you’re most welcome), but what I’d really like to know, Dave, is how your life has changed as a result. Are fans still stopping you on the street?

Dave Cameron [USS Mariner]: I’ll refer you to my P.R. rep to answer this question, but I’m sure she’ll assure you that I’m the same person I’ve always been.

Ryan: Jeff, you seemed unaffected by your loss. Shockingly, you went right back to blogging about the Mariners the very next day. Would you care to describe how you were able to suppress such profound grief? Also, please explain ERA+ [wiki] for the average Capitol Hill hipster. Feel free to include references to street art, the condoification of Seattle, and your favorite indie rock band.

Jeff Sullivan [Lookout Landing]: By the time last year’s Blarch Badness rolled around, I hardly had any grief left in my bloodstream. I like to think of emotions as substances of which you only have a limited quantity at any given time, and the Vidro/Ramirez trades used up about a six-month supply of all my bad ones. So while I knew my defeat should’ve stung, I didn’t have any means of feeling it. Being numb is a great way to reduce the sorrow caused by life’s little curveballs. (Don’t do drugs.)

As for ERA+, I’ll explain this as best as I can. Let’s say you upload two tracks to your playlist - Doors, by Dangermart, and Saddest Of All Keys, by Sour Owl. You listen to them both and identify one of them as your favorite. Why did you choose that one? Maybe the one you didn’t choose was recorded in a lousy studio/garage/back alley. Maybe the band was feeling under the weather at the time. Maybe one of the amps was faulty. Is the other song *really* your favorite, or did the recording just sound better due to any number of other variables? Ideally, if you’re really determined to make a comparison between the two tracks, you’d be able to have them recorded under identical conditions (identical shitty conditions, so as to protect all necessary indie cred). That’s what ERA+ tries to do with pitchers. It adjusts for the advantages/disadvantages provided by their environment to allow for better analysis.

Of course, ERA+ isn’t perfect. But then, neither is your ear.

Ryan: You two are bitter rivals. I understand it’s difficult to even be in the same city together and that’s why Jeff lives in San Diego and Dave lives in North Carolina. However, in a move more surprising than a grammatically correct sentence in one of my posts, you worked together last summer to ferret out some of Felix Hernandez’s mid-season struggles (simply put, he was throwing lots of fastballs in very predictable situations and getting pounded). What resulted was Dave’s now famous “Open Letter to Rafael Chaves” (the Mariners pitching coach last year) that wound up in the hands of the King himself. Felix heeded your advice to throw more off speed pitches and his improvement was noticeable. I can’t think of too many other examples of bloggers affecting real world outcomes. It must have been immensely satisfying to know you made a positive difference for the team you have both dedicated a large amount of time and energy rooting for and studying. Did that experience change your perspective on what you do?

Dave: The entire thing was a surreal experience. The open letter was originally going to be a Dear John letter, where I “broke up” with Felix because I just couldn’t handle watching him waste his talent anymore. But, I let my emotions settle and finally decided to just vent rather than dump, and didn’t really expect it to have any kind of impact. But, really, the whole thing would have been a lot sweeter had Jeff not tried to steal my spotlight. While he was hosting beer threads, I was fixing our ace, and somehow he convinced people that this was a joint effort. Right. In this joint coalition, he’s the Canadian army.

Jeff: I’ll tell you right now, Dave did most (all) of the statistical legwork for that whole thing. I just tried to get his analysis into the proper hands. Honestly, I’m still not entirely sure how his letter got as far as it did - I mean, I passed it along to a guy I knew could help, but since then I’ve heard like three or four different stories about how Felix got the letter, so whatever, the important thing is he got it. I wasn’t even home when the whole thing came to light; I was at a wedding in Boston, and while I was drunk out of my gourd on the dancefloor I got a text from Dave telling me that Felix thanked “those internet dudes” after a game in which he threw eight shutout innings. It was a delightfully sobering experience.

Anyway, to answer your question, yeah, it did a little bit. It’s really easy to sit here whining and complaining about some of the stupid things the Mariners do, and if you do that long enough, you can slip into a sort of autopilot bitchfest. When this happened, though, it kind of rejuvenated my spirit. It showed that, if someone in our shoes produces a sufficiently strong, coherent argument, he really can make a difference. There’s no greater way to keep your blogging motivation running high than knowing that you have some influence, even if it’s just the slightest bit. It allows you to be a dreamer.

An important follow-up question here ought to be, “is this a good thing?” To which my answer would be: I’m not sure. I don’t know if this sets a good precedent or not. I mean, there’s a reason bloggers are blogging instead of working in Major League front offices. To be able to help with something specific like this is great, but I don’t think Dave or I wants to take on the responsibility of having to be right all of the time. That’d be too much pressure. It was pretty cool once, though.

Ryan: Finally, like most bloggers (including the fine folks here at Seattle Metblogs) you both have day jobs and commitments outside of blogging. Five years from now, do you see yourselves still blogging about the Mariners? If not, what will you be doing? You’re both very talented baseball analysts and have received attention as such outside of your rabid readership. Is there a possibility we could see you in a front office?

Dave: I’ve always thought that I’d blog about the Mariners until I had a family, at which point I’d hang up my keyboard and let someone else carry the torch. But, USSM has turned into something we never really imagined it would become, and it’s hard to see me walking away from it completely. But five years is a long time, and who knows what blogs will look like then? All I know for sure is I’ll still be rooting for the Mariners, and I don’t have any plans to stop having opinions about the team any time soon.

As for working in a front office, I’d call that unlikely at best. I have friends who have advanced degrees from some of the most prestigious universities in the country, references from hall of fame coaches, friendships with current high level executives, experience in player development and scouting, and still can’t get a job for an MLB club. The supply of ridiculously smart, highly qualified people who want to work in MLB is huge, and I don’t pretend to believe that I offer anything that thousands of other people with better resumes don’t bring to the table as well.

Jeff: Five years from now…well, I ask myself some form of that question on a daily basis. Right now, I have no idea. I mean, one of the reasons I started working after college instead of going straight into grad school is so that I could see how far this whole blogging thing can take me; I don’t think I’d be able to keep it up if I were in a chemistry Ph. D program. So with that in mind, I could keep doing this for a long, long time. But if I do decide to go to grad school a few years down the road, or if I do decide to start having a life, then the blog’s inevitably going to suffer, and in that scenario I’d prefer to quit cold turkey rather than churn out a shoddy product (you listening, Rod Stewart?). So it could go either way. I will say that a lot of the uncertainty could be resolved by someone offering me a regular paycheck to do this for a living.

I have no aspirations of working in a front office. I mean, it’d be awesome, but because it’s not something I’m planning on, they’d have to come looking for *me*, and since I don’t offer anything particularly innovative or unique, that doesn’t seem very likely. That said, if the Padres called me tomorrow morning and offered me a job, I’d take it without bothering to explain how underqualified I am. (I’d screen the Pirates.)

Related posts:

1. The King reads the Internet, listens
2. USS Mariner: Your 2007 Seattle Blog Of The Year
3. Blarch Badness: Round 1, Day 2
4. Barry Bonds, Mariner? Please God no.
5. Blarch Badness: VOTE in Capitol Hill, Round One