Humanity’s active roster became a little less interesting yesterday following Dr. John’s call-up to an even higher plane. A special and influential embodiment of New Orleans’ special and influential scene, it remains unclear whether, contrary to his own suggestion, anyone else would have done what he did had he not done it. Henceforth, any nocturnal confusion seems likely to be just a little less sweet.
It is long past time we remembered this Jam:
(Note: These Chambers Brothers are not to be confused with the Detroit crack gang of the same name.)
Yesterday, the NFL held round one of its 2019 draft on Lower Broadway in Nashville, which, predictably, meant the night’s biggest news involved a bachelorette party and a Taylor Swift song premiere.
Realistically, though, when you look back on this night a few years from now, all you’re going to remember is whether the leadership of your favorite pro football team found its generational franchise player of the future or continued to repeat the mistakes of its predecessors, only this time the Lions are unduly obsessed with tight ends instead of wide receivers. If you’re at the point where the thought of NFL roster construction makes you sick to your stomach, or maybe you’re seeing visions of Lombardi trophies, or maybe you’re somewhere in between and just thankful you were smart enough to plan your pre-wedding bar crawl for literally any time and place other than last night (a Thursday, I’ll just pause to note here) in Nashville and therefore did not appear on a now-viral piece of local news footage that may or may not send a tremble through the foundations of your anticipated marriage, this week’s Jam is for you:
And, if you just want T-Swift’s new video, I get that. Find it here.
In 1969, Frank Zappa began recording material that eventually would coalesce into the 1974 album Apostrophe (‘), which would eventually be certified gold and peak at number ten on the Billboard charts. In April of 1968, Frank Zappa made an unannounced tour stop in Atlanta. His then-rare professional visit to the city provided the inspiration for the album’s opening track, which is this week’s Jam:
First, due mostly to past winners not claiming their prizes created by the overworked and underpaid ALDLAND staff, I have made the decision to officially disband our March Madness bracket challenge and swing the support of our legions of readers and participants to the bracket challenge hosted by the favorite band in the AD household by ranked-choice voting, the Tedeschi Trucks Band. Enter here:
Second, there are a number of good actual and potential tournament matchups on which to keep at least one of your eyes this month:
Third, in case you were wondering, the NCAA still hasn’t fixed its absurd play-in round problem. Background here.
Have fun and surrender to the madness.
This MLB offseason, while arguably a bit chilly by hot stove standards, did offer baseball fans a hot new hitting metric in Baseball Prospectus’ Deserved Runs Created Plus (DRC+). In the words of its creators, DRC+ is “designed to parse out more accurately . . . batters’ expected individual contributions — separate from all other player and environmental factors — to their teams’ offensive production.” (My summary of that introductory article, which was nominated for a SABR research award, can be found through here.)
Unlike traditional, rate-based hitting metrics such as batting average (BA) and on-base percentage (OBP), DRC+ is an index statistic, meaning that it’s arranged to indicate the degree to which a player is above or below average, where 100 represents average. As part of its DRC+ rollout, BP published an homage to rate statistics (link and summary available through here) that touts their simple approach to delivering contextual information.
This undoubtedly is a user advantage for metrics like DRC+, but, by placing the focus so squarely on the average reference point, the initial transition from the rate-stat world of BA/OBP/SLG to the index-stat world of DRC+ can be a little bit rough. To help smooth things, I thought it would be beneficial to illustrate the translation with a quick look at all of the hitters who had “average,” according to DRC+, seasons at the plate in 2018.
Last season, eleven batters finished with at least 275 plate appearances and DRC+ marks of 100. As their traditional slash lines illustrate, they got to that point in a variety of ways.
The ranges for these eleven on each of the traditional hitting rate statistics are:
Obviously, because of the multitude of factors DRC+ considers, including both player-performance factors and environmental factors, these rate bands only serve as rough guidelines for fans making the mental shift from the rate world of BA/OBP to DRC+ that want a little help finding their bearings. (Also keep in mind that these “average” slash-line bands will vary from year to year. For example, in 1998, there were four players with at least 275 PA who posted DRC+ marks of 100, Matt Williams, Devon White, Luis Alicea, and Robin Ventura: BA between .263 and .279; OBP between .327 and .372; and SLG between .425 and .456. For reference, Mark McGwire, .299/.470/.752, led MLB with a DRC+ of 211 that year.)
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Previously
Miguel Cabrera continues to shine in the DRC era
Miguel Cabrera further bolstered by sabermetric update
Trout vs. Cabrera, and Aging with DRC+ (via Baseball Prospectus)
The year 2018 was a year. Here are some of our favorite things from the year that was 2018.
Thank you for your readership this year. Look for more great content here in 2019.
The Raconteurs have been my favorite Jack White outfit, but I didn’t think they still were an active group until this week, when they posted a new music video and stated that they’ve released two new songs, their first public recordings since 2008’s Consolers of the Lonely. One of those songs, “Sunday Driver,” is this week’s Jam:
Thanks to things like the Internet Archive and YouTube, the music of the Grateful Dead is widely and freely available online. While the band made about a dozen studio albums together during a roughly twenty-year period of active recording, they obviously are best-known for their live performances over thirty years of touring with the core ensemble and, including various partial lineups, over fifty total years.
A quick search suggests that, the second-most-viewed Grateful Dead YouTube video of a single live song (2.5 million views) is July 9, 1995’s “So Many Roads.” The popularity of this video is readily understandable. The night is recognized as the band’s final concert, and Jerry Garcia would be dead exactly a month later. The song itself appears in the middle of the second set and features a vocal performance from a weak, haggard Garcia that nevertheless translates as pleading, desperate, retrospective, resigned, and soulful over an undeniably emotional twelve minutes. It’s just extremely real. The hindsight of knowing makes it dangerously easy to project external narratives on a captured and preserved moment of the past, but one hardly can avoid the feeling that Garcia is in this moment conscious of his impending departure (cf. Warren Zevon, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” The Wind (2003) (live in studio)), particularly given the dark, desolate, windswept (probably just a stage fan on a hot Chicago night but still) nature of the visual shot of the video.
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“So Many Roads” was a 90s Dead product, debuting on February 22, 1992 in Oakland and appearing regularly in setlists thereafter. Garcia considered the song (auto)biographical:
It’s [lyricist Robert] Hunter writing me from my point of view, you know what I mean? We’ve been working together for so long that he knows what I know. The song is full of references to things that have to do with me . . . .
Hunter is the only guy that could do that. He can write my point of view better than I can think it, you know what I mean? So that’s the kind of relationship we have. And he frequently writes tunes from my point of view that are autobiographical. They’re actually biographical I guess. He’s the one writing them, but even so they express my point of view – and more than that they express the emotional content of my soul in a certain way that only a long-term and intimate relationship with a guy as brilliant as Hunter coughs up . . . . I can sing that song, feel totally comfortable with it.
Although the band performed “So Many Roads” fifty-four times between February 1992 and July 1995, until this week, the only version I could recall hearing was the one from that final night. I don’t think that fact is terribly surprising; as a general matter, mid-90s Dead tapes aren’t exactly in high demand.
On Tuesday, though, I heard a new-to-me version of “So Many Roads,” this one from the Boston Garden on October 1, 1994, and the relative differences are striking. It’s brighter, stronger (even if Garcia’s physical frailties remain noticeable), upbeat, energized, and about half as long as the final version. It also is this week’s Jam:
As the foregoing indicates, I am not an expert in this narrow channel; however, if you only ever hear one performance of this song, it needs to be the July 9, 1995 offering. If you hear two, though, then October 1, 1994 makes for a good and uplifting pairing.
My favorite recent PFT Commenter conspiracy theory is that Space Jam 2, which is set to star LeBron James but remains in preproduction, actually is a vehicle to allow James, newly a member of the strikingly mediocre Los Angeles Lakers, to recruit top players with salaries in excess of the league’s caps by paying them to be a part of Space Jam 2, a movie that might never actually get made. If about-to-be-free-agent Kevin Durant signs a cheap contract with the Lakers this offseason, we’ll know the foregoing is true.
Another thing that’s true is that my friend Grant Zubritsky is a musician who just released two new tracks this week that wouldn’t be out of place on the soundtrack for Space Jam 2. (Take a moment to remember the strength of the soundtrack to the original movie.) In light of all of that and the fact that I don’t know if these Spotify embeds are going to work, here for this week’s Jams are both of his new numbers:
ALDLAND 