As I read through various baseball blogs every day, I occasionally come across something I truly wish the ol' Yankees Chick had written or at the very least thought of and then been too lazy to write. The best piece of blogging gold I've seen lately comes via the Flotsom-Media site. On Friday, the geniuses over there put together a very unique and scientific new measurement of a specific and previously un-quantified stat: GRIT. Yes, grit. Writer Chuck Dickens's plan?

"I’m proposing a new composite statistic: General Requirements of Intangible Talent (GRIT). GRIT incorporates four basic components: dirt, determination, talent, and opportunity."

In other words, Dickens has created a stat to "celebrate" (or make fun of?) people that don't have much intrinsic talent ("I hold that gritty players are those who sincerely want to win or succeed at baseball (determination), but due to a lack of natural skill (talent), are forced to do so through the least efficient means possible, resulting in an excessive amount of dirt on their uniform.") but through scrappiness, aka GRIT, they attempt to succeed in the game. I implore y'all (like yesterday, I'm using "y'all" to try to trick southerners into reading this shit!) to read the full article and enjoy the glory of GRIT! He's got lists of the grittiest players in history as well as the least gritty ones - I won't ruin the fun by posting them all here, but here's a teaser: Biggio = gritty player extraordinaire, and the likes of Balco Barry ain't too gritty...

Enjoy the full article here:
http://www.flotsam-media.com/2007/12/flotsam-data-special-tangiblizing.html