I’ve got a few responses on a few subjects regarding my mental state and the state of my intellectual capabilities. Realize that I’m mostly kidding when I take jabs at myself, but that these sorts of things do come from somewhere. Job one when I decided to do this blog was to be as honest as I could about myself. The world doesn’t need any more ad-copy.
One of the difficult things I ran up against in baseball (interviewing with the Red Sox, at places like the winter meetings, dinner with Bill James and Rob Neyer and such) was the educational backgrounds and general qualifications of the people I was dealing with compared to my own. Here I was in a thicket of Ivy Leaguers, Berkeley-ites and other people of that ilk, and I was stuck with 6 credit hours short of a Bachelor’s from “We Advertise on TV University.” Part of me realized how silly it was to worry about something like that, but the rest of me felt like the world’s biggest fraud. Folks were expecting some kind of genius and they got one of the Superfans. How am I supposed to pretend I’m on even intellectual footing with guys from Dartmouth and Yale? While they were getting advanced degrees, I was a bicycle messenger.
So whenever some stupid troll starts screaming about me having conned people or being dishonest or being a fraud, it kind of wounds me because that’s precisely how I feel about myself sometimes. I mean, who the hell am I to invent something? The Wizard of Menlo Park I am not.
For the most part though, those moments come few and far between and in general I just consider myself damn fortunate to have had the run I had. I may have seemed small time having dinner with Bill James, but I still had dinner with Bill James. I may be a mere flea to Theo Epstein’s accomplishments, but he still magnanimously called me the smartest guy in the room once (though I’m not sure he actually believed that). I may have random people on the internet hate me for no good reason, but then there’s random people on the internet who like me for no good reason too, and probably more of them.
I’ll get those six credit hours somehow, or maybe I won’t and the next time you go to Starbuck’s I’ll be the guy handing you your half-caf mocha whatever. Either way, it’s pretty much all icing on the cake from here.
6 responses so far ↓
1 Repoz // Dec 19, 2007 at 9:10 pm
“stuck with 6 credit hours short of a Bachelor’s from “We Advertise on TV University”
gleeps!…That almost trumps my going to Jersey City State Penitentiary for two months…
Hey, Blodwyn Pig (or was it Savoy Brown or maybe Fat Mattress?) tickets went on sale at the Fillmore!…and nevah went back.
2 Craig Calcaterra // Dec 20, 2007 at 5:33 am
Some of my favorite baseball dudes: Neyer, Josh Wilker, you. Common thread: allegedly incomplete educations. This may apply to Bill James to some extent to, in that I seem to recall someone saying he spent a lot of time in the sorts of odd jobs that guys who went to grad school or something didn’t do.
Anyway, I think there’s a lesson in that. Don’t get those six credits, Voros. You’re too interesting without them.
3 Voros // Dec 20, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Don’t knock being boring. Tom Brady is the most boring man alive and he’s dating Gisele…
4 rubemode // Dec 20, 2007 at 8:13 pm
“I mean, who the hell am I to invent something?”
Voros – who really cares about credentials? No one, not even the “Ivy League” guys can take away the FACT that you had a significant breakthrough about pitchers. Not that I know you or anything, but the way I understand your story is your were searching for help for your fantasy baseball team when you stumbled (or whatever) onto DIPS.
Every rational person in the baseball community knows you didn’t have evil intentions in your search, you were just looking for an edge in a game millions compete over. The byproduct of your hard work was that you altered our thought processes about baseball for the better. Theres no reason to think you have to continue to produce great ideas to justify your discovery of DIPS.
Glad to hear your enjoying the game again.
5 JC // Dec 21, 2007 at 5:27 am
Credentials are overblown. Who would you want to quarterback your favorite football team: Ron Pawlus or Jake Delhomme.?
6 Voros // Dec 21, 2007 at 5:19 pm
Right now I’d take just about anybody to QB my favorite football team…
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