Fed up with the projection systems’ hatred of the Rockies? Football Friday has an answer: NERDS.
Hello and welcome to Football Friday, Season Two. After five short months off, the Football Friday team is back to present a second season of the best baseball coverage and content you can find on the internet. There will be changes this year. You may not notice them at first, but there will be changes.
Folks, you can expect a lot from season two of Football Friday, and I think you’ll be happy with all of it. This season there will be good opinions, there will be Bachelorette write ups, but there will also be a ton of new and exciting content that we can’t wait to roll out to your gaping content loving eyeballs.
Remember, above all else, content is king. If you’re not making content, don’t even bother existing in the world, man.
HIT IT!
[Football Friday theme song plays]
Every spring, as the gloves are being dusted off for a new season of baseball, the projection systems are usually the first major talking point before camp opens and spring games actually begin.
Anyone on Twitter knows that these projection systems usually erupt in furious, long running debates. These debates can turn nasty. These debates have led to people being blocked, and most importantly, these debates have led to a lot of clicks.
Here at Football Friday, Inc., we never shy away from debate and more importantly we crave clicks and retweets like a new stepdad craves acceptance from his teenage son. The need for clicks drives our very existence.
With this in mind, Football Friday leapt at the opportunity to create our very own projection formula. We put our best mathematicians on the case. They spent hours crunching numbers to find the best categories to compile and create the best projection formula that 11 dollars and a 50 percent off McDonald’s chicken nuggets coupon can buy. Folks, we worked hard.
It took us all winter, but here it is. I present to you today the New Esteemed and Reliable Discourse System.
Or NERDS for short.
NERDS will not focus on traditional statistical analysis; instead, it wants to break down the barriers of what we’ve originally believed. NERDS will stand for something new and brave. It will push forward into the unknown when everyone else demands it turn back.
NERDS will hope to be the premiere talking point in all projection system debates. “What’s Arenado’s NERDS score?” they will ask on MLB Network. “His NERDS is off the charts!” Keith Law will shout on ESPN. “These NERDS are crazy!” Tom Verducci will exclaim on Twitter. NERDS will supersede every other discussion in February and March as players will do all they can to be the NERDS of the year.
Let’s dive into what NERDS is made of.
The first major point has to come from on field performance, and what better indicator of on field performance than home runs?
Home Runs are the sexiest moment in baseball. There is nothing that turns the crowd on more than the sweet swing and bat crack of a dinger. Dingers, whoppers, dongers, boomers, cheddars, blamos, homers, whatever you want to call them. Remember the most important part: home runs rule.
So we throw in a dash of home runs. Home runs of the last three seasons will be weighed as 1/4th of the predictor score.
Next up, we go into the intangibles. More specifically, the most important intangible: handsomeness. A player’s good looks are a definite indicator of future success, in my opinion. There aren’t too many ugly players in the Hall of Fame, and that’s all I will say about that. A player’s handsomeness will be scored by an independent committee of experts and that score will also be 1/4th of the final predictor score.
So we have half of our formula created from the average home runs of the last three years (AD or average dingers) and a players independent handsome rating from the committee (IHR).
The third portion of the formula may be the most important part. A player’s future really rests on this category. The category I’m talking about, of course, is how good the player is at tweeting.
Tweeting is important. It’s actually become extremely important in the sports world. So much so that many reporters seem to think Twitter is actually the center of the universe. It’s pretty wild. Tweets are huge for people, so this is obviously extremely important. People let it drive the debate of the entire world even though only like 20 percent of the population is active on Twitter. It’s like if you went to a classroom of 50 kids and 10 of them were singing extremely deep Billy Joel cuts and you thought, “this entire classroom is weird as hell.” Basically Twitter is singing crappy Billy Joel tunes while the rest of the world is, you know, operating.
With this in mind, we’ve given a Good Tweets/Bad Tweets ratio a 1/8th weight inside the NERDS formula.
The NERDS formula now returns back to it’s on field roots. We’ve got an important stat to add in to make sure we keep the players playing and the tweeters tweeting.
A quarter of the weight will be given to GIDPs. I hate double plays. Can’t stand them! Just strike out, dummy! The lower the GIDPs over the past two seasons, the better your NERDS score. Basically it will be calculated as 100-(GIDP of 2015+GIDP of 2016). The lower your score the worse it is for you.
The final 1/8th will be an average of how many times I’ve gotten frustrated with how you are playing over the course of your entire career. FOT (Frustrations Over Time) will be objectively calculated by me. This is my stat.
Here’s the total formula
(ADx.25)+(IHRx.25)+{(GT/BT)x.13}+(FOTx.13)+(100-GIDPx.25)
=
NERDS.
Let’s do an example player. First up, Carlos González:
Carlos’ AD (Average Dingers) is 25.33 multiplied by .25 is 6.34. His IHR has been rated a perfect 10 by the committee. Congrats, Carlos! Ten times .25 is 2.5. Carlos’ Good Tweet to Bad Tweet ratio has been independently quantified as 16.67. For every 100 good tweets Carlos sends, he sends six bad tweets. Multiplied by .13 is 2.17. His FOT quantity is pretty low for a player who has played a ton of years. It’s 11. On average, I’m frustrated with Carlos 11 times per year. Usually on sliders in the dirt that he swings at. Freakin’ sliders.
So, 11x.13 is 1.43. Carlos has grounded into 21 double plays the last two seasons. That’s 100-21x.25. So 79x.25, or 19.75.
Now we add all those values up for a Carlos for a NERDS score of 32.19. Pretty good! The higher the NERDS the more likely it is that player will be good this season.
Be sure to check my math if you’d like. But just know that I don’t care. Bring on the discourse, baby!
Welcome back to Football Friday.
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The Good Tweet of the Week
Each week, I will personally scour Rockies-related Twitter feeds for good tweets on food, music, movies, or even bottled water. I will feature anything that I look at and think "that is a good tweet." This week, the good tweet comes from Rockies shortstop Cristhian Adames.
#ParadaDelSol #Rodeo #Scottsdale #AZ @ParadadelSol @LosRockies pic.twitter.com/NMRJMtiN1s
— Cristhian Adames (@Crisadams26) March 10, 2017
This is just a good as heck picture.
Adames is at the Scottsdale rodeo here and he took some of his favorite Rockies along. We had this in a FanShot yesterday. Take your guesses at identifying who else Adames took to the rodeo in the Purple Row “Who did Cristhian Adames take to the rodeo? Challenge”! I’ll give you a freebie. One is Gerardo Parra.
Who knew we had so many cowpokes on our squad?
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So, This Happened
Each week, I’ll dive into some weird news from around the sports (specifically baseball) globe and present it in this section as a So, This Happened of the week.
This week, outside the world of sports, this happened:
✔️ @BoilerBall takes home the B1G Regular Season Championship .
✔️ Purdue takes home the B1G Baby Race . https://t.co/uYFtw4uDPK
— Big Ten Network (@BigTenNetwork) March 9, 2017
It’s a dang baby race!
First off, congrats to Purdue Baby on winning the B1G Baby Race. That’s a major accomplishment in a wacky season of Big Ten basketball.
Second off, baby races should be how we do everything now, I’ve decided. Every minor dispute, every tiebreaker, everything. Baby race.
Arguing with your wife over dinner tonight? Baby race. NL West tiebreaker? Baby race. ELECTION FOR THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES? Baby race.
[Bad stand up voice] Some might say the 2016 election was a bit of a baby race. Thanks folks! I’m here all week.
But seriously. Baby races are a perfect settlement between two parties. You have no control over what happens, let’s leave the world up to the babies now. It’s their turn.
So, that happened.
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Football Friday Season Two Preview
Wow, here we are, Football Friday, Season Two.
As some of you remember from Season One, there was plenty to love. Every week, a new theory or a new solution to a problem you didn’t even know the Rockies had.
This season will be even better. We’ve streamlined the sections, we’ve listened to the fans, we’ve ignored the fans we didn’t like. We have fans.
We hope you are as excited for Season Two as we are. Here’s just a little preview of the sections we hope to have this year:
Connor Watches The Bachelorette will make it’s triumphant return this summer.
Connor Farrell vs. Connor Harrell will return once the season begins and Connor Harrell attempts to dethrone me as the Best Connor (TM).
Nolan Arenado vs. is a new feature. We’ll look at some crazy things in the world (insane pitches, animals, giant tanks) and determine through independent analysis if Nolan Arenado could beat them in baseball.
Fixing MLB Marketing. We all know MLB’s marketing plan is bad and broken. Football Friday will come up with some great ideas to fix MLB’s marketing. Whether it’s doing better with superstars, improving the game’s perception in demographics, renaming the sport “football,” or just overall style improvements. Football Friday, Inc. is here to save baseball.
This and much more, coming all summer long! Every Friday for the next seven months!
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Bye.