Been in kind of an ornery mood for the past 24 hours, so I thought I'd take that out on pretty much everyone here.
Hey, what more could anyone ask of a subscription site?
Stuff gets commonly spoken and written about sports that's just wrong. And I'll usually stay silent about it or, at the most, make parenthetical mention of it. But on this day and in this state of mind, it just felt like it would flow naturally.
Here are a handful ... no, a fistful:
1. Pittsburgh is a small market.
It actually isn't. Bloomfield is a small market. The four-pump GetGo in Bloomfield is an even smaller market, in the most literal sense.
The U.S. Office of Management and Budget defines a metropolitan area as one that has at least one urban core and at least a population of 50,000. For 2017, there were 382 such areas in the country. The Pittsburgh metropolitan area ranked 26th on that list with a population of 2.33 million. Going by TV markets, as some prefer, the Pittsburgh market is 24th with a population of 1.14 million.
There are 53 markets in the U.S. with at least one major-league sports franchise, and Pittsburgh ranks 24th among those, which is obviously well into the upper half. Within Major League Baseball, where this small-market nonsense is misapplied most often, the Pirates rank 23rd of 30 but also just barely behind St. Louis, Denver and Cleveland. Within the NFL, the Steelers rank 21st out of 32. Within the NHL, the Penguins rank 19th out of 30.
Where's the "small" in that?
The truth is, baseball people have lazily applied this degrading term for two decades when they've actually been referring to payrolls. I'll never forget one guy on ESPN referring to the "small-market Phillies" just because the baseball team in America's fifth-largest market wasn't spending much on payroll. And with the Pirates, specifically, they've used it as a crutch to justify a lower-than-it-should-be payroll.
Pittsburgh's one of the bigger cities in America, and it's above-average size for those with a major-league sports franchise.
Get it right.
2. Attendance should be higher because the team had a big win, the weather is nice, etc.
Not how it works. Not in Pittsburgh. Not anywhere.
Ask any sports executive, from the majors to the minors, and they'll attest that attendance is dictated almost entirely by season-ticket and group sales. They'll also attest that the overwhelming bulk of those occur -- or don't -- in the offseason.
In the Pirates' case, since that's curiously become a topic, they didn't. Fans were furious in the offseason. That's when they made up their minds to not buy tickets. That's when plans of all kinds were canceled. That's why the home opener wasn't sold out. That's why I could fit everyone at PNC Park the other night in my living room with space for a spare sofa:
Those same executives will tell you that, when a team gets on a roll or something else happens to perk up the public, there's a two-week lag between that event and any spike in attendance. That's because, again, most sales, even single-game sales, happen in advance.
Sure, we've all got anecdotes about spontaneously walking up to the ticket window just because we felt like catching a game. But the evidence powerfully illustrates that's rare. If the Pirates have a game-day sale topping 2,000, that's considered extraordinary in the very best of times.
Rip or praise the poor attendance all you want, but get the reason right.
3. Mike Tomlin loses to bad teams.
This one's becoming insane.
So we ran this graphic yesterday that showed the Pirates, to their credit, taking care of business against bad opponents ...
... and we put a copy of that on social media, which prompted a whole bunch of replies about how it sure would be nice if Tomlin -- not the Steelers, mind you, but Tomlin -- would do likewise.
Well, for all of them and for everyone else who participates, a news flash: The Steelers and Tomlin are 14-2 over the past two seasons against losing teams.
Fourteen. And. Two.
Just because the other meme gets repeated and repeated and repeated doesn't make it any less wrong, wrong, wrong.
4. Batting order matters.
We all debate if Clint Hurdle bats Gregory Polanco second or sixth, or if Jordy Mercer moves to leadoff against a lefty, and it's utterly negligible in the mathematical sense.
As the author Jack Moore once wrote for the analytics site FanGraphs.com, "No single item sees more energy expended with less gain than the analysis of batting orders."
He's so very right, and almost everyone else is so very wrong. Almost every study undertaken this decade powerfully illustrates that lineup optimization -- defined by trying to improve upon existing lineups with a wealth of advanced data -- adds roughly 10 to 15 runs to a lineup.
Not per week.
Not per month.
For the whole bleeping season.
And being that those same studies equate an additional 10 runs with one victory, we're basically talking about a win and a half.
5. Defense wins championships.
Nope. Not anymore.
In the NFL, the Eagles just beat the Patriots, 41-33, to win the Super Bowl. Sure, both teams ranked in the top five in total defense in the regular season, but so did the Jaguars, and they beat the Steelers, 45-42, not because of their defense. Besides, half of all of the past dozen Super Bowl champs ranked outside the top 10 in total defense, including Eli Manning's 2007 Giants, who ranked 27th.
In the NHL, the super-easy example, if focusing purely on defense and omitting goaltending, is local. The Penguins won the past two Stanley Cups on speed, skill and superstars, albeit with Mike Sullivan focusing on beginning at the back end. But this spring, when they allowed an average of three fewer shots per game than any of the 16 playoff entries, they didn't last two rounds. Far more significant, not since the 2003 Devils has there been a defense-first Cup champ. The Red Wings, Blackhawks, Kings, Bruins and even the Penguins in their own way played solid defense, in particular Chicago, but they weren't founded on it.
In Major League Baseball, again focusing on defense in the field rather than pitching, four of the past 20 teams to win the World Series had a top-five defense. And in that same span, the 2004 Red Sox won it all with the 29th-ranked defense, the 2011 Cardinals with the 26th. The Astros, the champions last fall, were 25th in defense but had a historically dominant offense in averaging 5.53 runs per game, most in baseball in a decade.
Score. Just score.
Bonus: Marc-Andre Fleury stinks in the playoffs.
We over that one yet?
Cool. Because that one took about two or three years to die here, half a decade across the hockey world.
Minds aren't easily changed.