WaPo: One Of Hitler's Minions

As you can tell, I’ve got nothing today. I was going to use the hoary ol’ standby: a wonderful traipse through the delightful world of statistics. But, thanks to the IT Nazis and their fleet of Panzer-powered web filters, I’m blocked out from much of the developing world (read: baseball and porn).

Enter our beloved hometown broadsheet, the Washington Post. Their website is so chaotically organized, containing so many different subsections, and has stories and articles that are cross-linked in so many different ways in those different subsections, that with a few clicks, one is able to avoid the Web Frau if one knows where to look.

Imagine my excitement then, when I stumbled across the Post’s baseball stat section! Screw you and your impotent Goebbels-sanctioned powers, WebSense Corporation!

So, with much glee, I’ve been compiling the on-pace blurbs once a week. And everything looked kosher, but I had a dread feeling.

Today, I started looking at our rankings within the league. Here’s National League Team Batting, for example.

I copied the numbers into excel, started sorting them and writing up a blurb, just like I did the previous week. Halfway through I noticed something odd. If you click on the link, look at it for a second or two, you’ll see what I mean.

I knew the Nationals batters were hitting like crap lately, but somehow they’re ranked behind the New York Yankees in National League team batting average -- an impressive feat, no doubt! Curses! The IT Luftwaffe had strategically bombed the data, rendering it useless to all! (Unless the Yankees had magically been transferred to the NL, along with the Angels and ChiSox, but even Hitler didn't mess with the League structure in WWII.)

So screw you and your band of computerized Hitlers! And screw you Washington Post for running junk AP-hosted stats! And while we’re at it, how come you don’t have box scores online? Yeah, I can just (hypothetically, were I not being persecuted) click on ESPN, but if you want to be the source, would it be so hard to just run it along with the gamer?

Or maybe the WaPo hates me too.

--Links Fixed--