Really makes you think

For years, I've thought football an inferior sport because it's basically impossible to predict who is going to win from one year to the next. Parity may help sell tickets, but it is also evidence of a certain arbitrary quality to the sport. The truly arbitrary contest -- lotteries -- also have different winners every year. You never know when 0-4-2-5 will be the winning number in Pick 4, and you never know when the Panthers will make the playoffs. Or so it occassionally seems.

Alan Schwartz took a baseball bat to that argument with this article about finding pitching talent:

Of 27 pitchers on the [All Star] teams, 16 had been traded, waived or released before becoming All-Stars for the first time. Eleven had been dealt by their original teams before age 27, and before any significant trial in the major leagues.

Of course, the story would even be worse with the NFL, which drafts player much closer to the peak of their career. And TEAM preformance is far more predictable, year to year, thanks to the relative paucity of injuries in baseball, among other factors.

Those losers who spend time in fantasy baseball (hello!) know how good pitchers seem to appear from nowhere, get hot, and return to mediocrity. Ted Lilly's been killing me for three seasons now. But the fact is, Jim Bowden sucks.