“I’ve been through plenty of ups and downs in my career and the back of my baseball card says it all,” said Teixeira….
“I don’t know how many times I have to tell you guys, I had a great May,” Teixeira said in an exasperated, defensive tone. “You have a couple bad games, you don’t worry about it. You put it aside and you go play today. If I had struck out six times (Sunday), you probably could have written an article saying, ‘Man, there’s something wrong with Tex.’ But I swung the bat really well. I didn’t get any hits, but results are going to show up if I keep swinging the bat.”…
Asked about the stark dropoff over the past three weeks, Teixeira quickly dismissed the significance of those numbers.
“You guys can do that all year long – and go ahead,” he told reporters after Sunday’s game. “It’s fun to do, because stats are what’s fun about this game. But as a player that plays 162 games a year, you don’t live and die with every good game or every bad game.
– Mark Feinsand, N.Y. Daily News.
This is a fascinating article. The early edition of the News actually had a front-page inset that boasted special coverage of Teixeira’s slump (which has since been bumped for the Fashion Oscars) and Mike Lupica chimed in with a column of his own.
Here’s the funny thing: The “exasperated, defensive” first baseman is absolutely right. Teixeira’s rate stats are almost all in keeping with his career lines. He is hitting the same amount of line drives as he did last year. The principle difference in his production comes from a .229 batting average in balls in play that’s a full 75 points below his career .304 line.
Mark Teixeira is suffering through a prolonged run of terrible luck. He happened to strike out six times in a game on Saturday, and that’s bad, and the type of thing that prompts multi-page special features about his slump. But his strikeout rate is, again, perfectly in keeping with his career total.
The numbers will normalize. Hits will fall. Mark Teixeira understands this. It’s almost as if that guy knows a thing or two about baseball.
Tedquarters 
TB, as part of the sports media world do you ever worry about mass awareness of small sample sizes and the impact it would have on regular readership?
If everyone really kept each inning, each game, and even each week, in perspective there would be less reason to read a lot of whats out there since most of what we see and talk about are just random snap-shots of a huge “thing” (600abs/200ip/162 games, etc) working themselves towards their end.
So shouldn’t I the reader be especially suspicious (or even dismissive) of basically everything put out there discussing said small sample knowing that on some level there has to be a reason to write a story even when maybe there isn’t anything there of any significance?
Yes, I have a tin foil hat on. But hey man, its not totally without merit.
That said I read this blog and Cerrones any time I’m online so either you guys manage to stay out of the above trap or offer something else to the reader. Or I’m just some kind of fan-boy sheep. I’ll reserve judgement.
I think you’re right, but I think there are plenty of newspaper writers and bloggers who avoid the small-sample size traps and still manage to tell interesting stories.
There’s no shortage of fascinating things to learn about baseball. Just the fact that Teixeira has been unlucky for so long is, to me, an interesting story. And a writer can always weigh in on a single happenstance without trying to extrapolate it into something more. I can write about Johan Santana’s masterful start in the waning days of 2008 and say it was amazing and amazingly clutch because it was, I just avoid pointing to it to argue that Santana himself is innately clutch.