swishnicholson wrote:I'm not quite sure where you get this. I assumed your motives were as follows: You read an article by Conlin in which he made a case for Jimmy Rollins as the MVP and felt it necessary to throw in a number of gratuitous and not very clever insults at statistically-minded baseball fans and researchers. You then sent him an email which said, essentially, Bill Conlin, you are an idiot.
I'm as big a Jimmy Rollins fan as anyone, and even the Sabermetrics make a decent case for Rollins, but not for Rollins v. Wright.
I explicitly refrained from using Sabermetrics in my E-mail with Conlin, and simply asked him how Rollins was superior to Wright statistically. I didn't ask him to use WARP or EQA or WPA.
As for my motives, this is how it started:
1. I clicked on Fire Joe Morgan's article on the subject.
2. I read FJM's take, then I clicked the link to Conlin's article provided.
3. I read Conlin's article.
4. I saw Conlin's E-mail address at the bottom of his article, and opened up my Gmail account and typed out that E-mail you see posted on my blog.
I had no intention of rabble-rousing. I was simply curious if there was something I was missing in the MVP debate. If I didn't think there was, I wouldn't have asked him.
swishnicholson wrote:I realize that's not what you SAID, your contact was far more polite in form than that, but what spurred the initial email was that you thought Conlin was completely off-base, was it not?
Not completely... I was unable to see how Rollins was a more viable candidate than Wright and his article did more to dissuade me of Rollins' candidacy. As a Phillies fan, I was simply looking for some reasons to hop on Rollins' bandwagon. To that point, I hadn't seen any and still haven't.
swishnicholson wrote:My arguments were strictly that following Conlin's lame but predictable reply, the exchanges became considerably less polite, and that the farther this became removed from the initial, "reporter writes an article and reader responds", the less consequences it should have for Conlin professionally. At some point these can be regarded as personal emails, and the content contained seen as responses to private conversations, rather than anything publicly published. But I used that fact to judge Conlin's conduct, not yours.
I really don't see how there is a gradual transition from professional to personal E-mail. His E-mail was on a professional website right next to his professional work. Any E-mails he sends to readers who have used that E-mail address shown on that website are professional, and he is representing his employer and his employer's product every time he sends out an E-mail.
If I had acquired that E-mail address -- which I presume he uses for both business and personal matters -- differently, it'd be a different story.
swishnicholson wrote:I never had any problem with posting a columnist's email response. I did feel that once you had clearly made your point you should have let it go at that. I realize that would have been acting considerably more professionally than Conlin did, but someone has to set the standard.
I definitely could have done some things differently. As they say, though, hindsight is 20/20.
I appreciate the criticism, though.
