More media bias

One guy with too much time on his hands is 'journalist' Allen St. John. In the friday issue of the Wall Street Journal, John, or St. John, or whatever he calls hisself, surrounds a few paragraphs he probably calls an 'article' with some data on "P-wins".

"P-wins" are the useless stat that that takes the number of games a team has won and "adjusts" them based on run differential. Its more complex than that, and he gives Bill James full credit for developing the pointless and complex mathmatical formula. The goal of this stat, I guess, is to identify which teams might be better than their win-loss records indicate and vice versa.

Not surprisingly, the White Sox gets slighted and all credit for any of their success in 2005 is attributed to 'luck'. Jamesians don't like 'luck', or heart or drive or desire or any intangible figure that is immeasurable and arbritary. Yet it is these intangibles that seem to carry teams to victory, again and again and again.

Oh, and just for the record, according to St. John, based on P-wins, the 2006 world series will be St. Louis over Boston.

OK, maybe. We'll see.