skyking162

The Hardball Times ran an article by Dave Gassko last week that discussed whether consistency for pitchers was desirable and/or actually a skill. I’ve long considered “consistent” as one of those words tossed around by full-of-crap announcers that really just means “good”. Think about it, any time baseball fans call Joe-Bob Stanley inconsistent, all they mean is that he’s not that good. People don’t care if a player maintains a consistent level, we simply want players to maintain their good performances more often (i.e. get better). Sure, you could call that being consistently better, but I’m sure we’d all take inconsistently better, too. All that really matters is being better. (Or just being good in the first place.)

It’s kind of like the misuse of the word “clutch”. Most people would describe David Ortiz, Alex Rodriguez, and Albert Pujols as clutch, because you’d want them batting in important situations. But that’s not because they turn up their performance level in important situations — it’s because their performances are always at a high level. Forget whether or not the skill of clutch actually exists, would you rather have a clutch Ronnie Belliard or an un-clutch Derrek Lee batting in the bottom of the ninth? When people say “clutch”, they again just mean “good”.

If I were an elementary school teacher from hell, I’d suggest we now play a little game to practice what we’ve learned. Directions: find all the uses of “consistent” and “clutch” in the sentences below and replace them with “good”:

Holy cow! Albert Pujols is so damn consistent good!

Quality announcers will replace “good” with something more inspiring, but it won’t suck like “consistent”.

You know, Joe Crede would be a lot better if he was more consistent good.

If you replace “more good” with “better”, you can see just how ridiculous a claim like that is. Yes, Joe Crede would be a lot better if he was better.

How about one more?

How can you let Juan Pierre bat with the tying run at second? He’s just not clutch good enough.

Exactly.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, May 7th, 2006 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Baseball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.