#BuckFiftyADay: Why Numbers Bore Me

Among those who earn (or used to earn) a living writing about baseball, I am in the minority. I’m not a numbers guy. Couple of reasons. One, I find reading about math to be tedious. Math -- charts, graphs, formulas and problems --is fine. But paragraphs written about numbers bore me. It’s homework. When reading a baseball story, I don’t want it to feel like homework. Buit biggest reason is that I’ve yet to see a stat that isn’t reliant on a reasonable “sample size.” Baseball is a game of situations. It’s a game of hot and cold. Can a manager who’s watching a guy who’s 0-for-his-last-15 with 10 Ks just sit back and wait for the “sample size” to expand? Or does he, in that moment, trust the guy who’s looking better in a recent stretch? For me, there’s way more to analyzing baseball than just doing the math.

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The new Jeff-Bradley.com, the home of a #BuckFiftyADay

Challenging myself in new and different ways. Today, I begin a new adventure that I've hashtagged #BuckFiftyADay. This will be my daily exercise, and maybe you'll want to participate too. I'm going to address a topic, could be anything, and try to nail it in exactly 150 words. Today, I’m going to have to be even more on point since I’m using up my allotment to explain the project. Watched the ESPN Outside the Lines special the other night, entitled “The N-Word.” Provocative topic, for sure. My thoughts after seeing the show were that while I’m not (at all) comfortable using “The N-Word” I don’t think I’m really one to tell someone else what words they should or shouldn’t use. Do words always reflect what a person is feeling in his or her heart? I honestly don’t hate, unless given reason to hate. Only I know what’s in my heart.

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