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The Brunansky Effect, part I
Posted by Gene Claude on December 16th, 2008 under Uncategorized
That should handily win the competition for the most obscurely titled Mizzou football post of the week.
St. Louis Cards fans over the age of 30 should remember Brunansky as the moustachioed right fielder obtained from the Twins for Tommy Herr in April of 1988.
He had been called up from the minors in 1982 at the tender age of 21, getting 463 at bats and slamming 20 home runs for the Twinkies. Over the next 5 years, he averaged around 560 at bats and 25 home runs a season. More of the same in 1988 and 1989; over 550 at bats, at least 20 home runs. He was the Maytag appliance of right fielders, steady, consistent, dependable. I listened to many a Cards broadcast during Brunansky’s two years in St. Louis, and let me tell you, there was never an at bat that Bruno’s consecutive years with 20 home runs and 550 at bats wasn’t lauded by Mike Shannon or Jack Buck.
As far as I can tell, during that 8 year streak, no manager ever considered replacing Bruno. Managers just love a guy that shows up for work every day and gives you what you expect. Easy on the stomach, keeps the press off your back.
Here’s something though: Bruno wasn’t really that good.* Not bad, mind you, just not that good. He was just consistent and durable, which made it nearly impossible to replace him in the starting lineup. The sort of guy that if he was a college football player would lead you to…a 9 – 4 record and a plaque proclaiming you tallest midget in the North. It is coaching suicide to replace guys like Tom Brunansky barring a force majeure.
That’s what I’m calling the Brunansky Effect: The tendency of coaches, fans and the media to vastly overstate the value of the consistent, dependable, experienced players. The corollary is that when your Tom Brunansky goes the way of the buffalo, or graduation, or whathaveyou, not only does your team not necessarily get worse, it might actually get better.
*If you want to debate me on this, bring it on in the comments. He was a below average hitter against right handers, a mediocre defender, an atrocious base stealer and middle of the pack offensively for a right fielder in his era. I’m not saying he sucked, he was above average. Above average does not win championships.
Now that I have dazzled you with my knowledge of Polish right fielders of the eighties, what does this have to do with Mizzou football? College football has a massive Brunansky Effect. Every year, your favorite preseason magazine does an exhaustive survey of returning starters, a very inexhaustive survey of possible replacements for departed starters, and cranks out an opinion that rarely ends up having much to do with reality. Why? Because placing a high value on returning starters (outside of true stars and, maybe, the QB position) is a really shitty way to judge a college football team. I remember tittering at Athlon’s statement before the 2007 season that Mizzou was going to miss its two since-graduated play making linebackers, Dedrick Harrington and Marcus Bacon. No offense to those two fine Tigers (and I really mean that, Deke is one of my all time favorite Tigers, not their fault that they were asked to play different positions every year), but as a semi-insider, I was willing to roll the dice that Spoon and Van Alexander would not, in fact, be a downgrade from wrong-angle-taking slow linebackers.
In other words, graduation is the colonics of college football, ridding your favorite team of those annoying Brunos stuck in its tubes. If you have talented athletes waiting in the wings, you might be better for it.
This website was inspired by our friends over at Barking Carnival, and one of the first things I remember reading there (aside from Scipio’s brilliant preseason takes on the various Big 12 teams) was the opinion that the 2007 version of the Texas defense was clogged with Brunos (interestingly, that collection of dependable good-but-not-great players led Texas to a good-but-not-great 9 – 3 regular season record). Sure enough, a bracing off season colonic and voila! The 2008 Texas defense led the league.
Assuming the return of Sean Weatherspoon for his senior year, I firmly believe the 2009 Missouri defense is going to be an upgrade over the 2008 version. All of us, from Athlon on down to this AT dipshit, bought into the idea that returning 10 starters from a decent 2007 defense somehow meant a fantastic 2008 defense. Turns out, Brock Christopher didn’t deduct 3 tenths from his 40 time, Justin Garrett didn’t have a zone defense epiphany and Castine Bridges didn’t channel the soul of Deion Sanders last offseason. Expecting them to was way stupid, and I was as guilty, probably more guilty, than anyone. The way college defenses take big leaps forward is not returning a bunch of good but not great players for another go round. Rather, great leaps come from replacing good players with great players.
Part II will look at the expected 2009 Missouri defense and why we might actually take that leap.
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Mizzou Basketball – The Dooling Effect
By Boo Radley on December 10th, 2008
Sheriff Blalock said:
December 16th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
You’d have been in trouble had you chosen to slight Deke Harrington. Harrington is to me what Jimmy Jackson is to JR Slim.
Phenomenal Smith said:
December 16th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
You should hear what Gene has to say about Cookie Belcher.
Sheriff Blalock said:
December 16th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Don’t be talking about Segado that way! Don’t even think about it!!
Tyronn Lue too, even though he went to high school in KC.
Phenomenal Smith said:
December 16th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
This should go in Chet’s Getting Old post, but
How do you know you’re getting old?
When Cookie Belcher is 30! I made the mistake of googling him and was shocked and appalled to see that he was already a 30 year old man.
Gene Claude said:
December 16th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
I love Deke. The coaching staff, out of necessity, fucked him repeatedly. I don’t blame anyone, but he is a great example of the what if game. What if he got a chance to play one position for 4 or 5 years? By all accounts, he is a great human.
How does someone end up with the name Cookie Belcher? That should be unpossible.
Phenomenal Smith said:
December 16th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Deke was the Poet Linebacker. That’s all that matters.
Sheriff Blalock said:
December 16th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
I can’t remember the story behind “Cookie”, but if your given name is Segado, I think it’s a reasonable alternative.
Gene Claude said:
December 16th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
I use the following name programming rule:
If surname Belcher, NOT first name = food substance.
Phenomenal Smith said:
December 16th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
You should see Sheriff’s “name programming rules.”
Euclid said:
December 16th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Cookie has really let himself go.
Sheriff Blalock said:
December 16th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Hey, Cookie scored 22 points Sunday. He’s still a steals machine, with 22 in his last 6 games.
Still kind of burns me that Norm wanted Hafer over Belcher. Pretty similar players, but it would have been great to see.
Gene Claude said:
December 16th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
Hey, no digging on Joplin boy Jeff Hafer. He played all 5 positions at Mizzou!
Phenomenal Smith said:
December 16th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Re Brunansky – the only reason he can be considered “above average” was his durability. His numbers in the Homer Dome weren’t that impressive, even adjusting for era. Right? For the Cardinals, he was merely average. For the Twins maybe he had some decent peak years.
Sheriff Blalock said:
December 16th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
I meant no offense to the hairy fellow from Joplin, I was just expressing my disappointment that the best player from my hometown couldn’t find a place at the state school.
I didn’t think Bruno was above average as a Cardinal either, PS, but he was actually pretty good in 1988. 1989 he pretty well stunk though.
Gene Claude said:
December 16th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
Bruno had a few good years, but none were great, and most years he was just an out producing machine.
Phenom, don’t you remember all the fuss made over his 20 HR streak? I remember hearing about it all the time.
Phenomenal Smith said:
December 16th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Now that you mention it, I remember the 20 HR streak. I remember thinking it was freaking awesome and that Bruno was a hero for it.
Euclid said:
December 16th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
what was the streak?
Phenomenal Smith said:
December 16th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
8 years with at least 20 home runs.
Gene Claude said:
December 16th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
I thought it was awesome also, until the great Baseball Prospectus Epiphany of ‘97-’98. That, and the evolution of baseball-reference allowed me to go back and re-evaluate the heroes of my youth.
Phenomenal Smith said:
December 16th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
Baseball Prospectus ruined a lot of shit for me.
Gene Claude said:
December 16th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
Seriously. I just watched Polar Express with my kids. There’s a lot to this just believing in stuff shit.
Euclid said:
December 16th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
Did Tom Hanks get paid for every role he played in that freaking movie?
Brunansky Effect « Excuse the Type O’s said:
January 12th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
[...] 12, 2009 I stumbled in this article at Atomic Teeth, which is mostly a college football site. It describes a phenomenon I have been [...]
Scipio Tex said:
January 23rd, 2009 at 10:07 pm
This is a really sharp observation though the colonic iconography was deeply disturbing. May I recommend some gentle psylium husks next time?
There’s nothing more irritating (primarily because I can and have fallen for it) than the false notion that an inexperienced bad player is likely to become anything more than an experienced bad player over time.
It’s really about the types of mistakes someone is making. An athletic young kid who keeps making mental errors can be salvaged. A shitty “dependable” athlete who knows all of the formation calls and gets in the right place to miss the tackle is someone you never regret getting their diploma. I’ve just described years of Longhorn linebacking there and my mind just flashed like Tim Robbins in Jacob’s Ladder to a series of 25 yard runs by Adrian Peterson, Rashan Salaam, and Curtis Martin…
I’m going to go and lay down for a while.
Dough dough said:
August 27th, 2009 at 10:21 am
Lay off the best defensive player to ever grace a UNL basketball jersey!!! Segado Cortez Belcher is a much more endearing name than plain ol JOhn Smith so back off! and leave the man alone, he is a sweet, generous person…everyone gets older and not everyone can look like a 20 year old for the rest of their lives, be easy and concentrate on world peace or cleaning up the environment in your area rather than talk shit about nice people on the web!!!!!!
Sheriff Blalock said:
August 27th, 2009 at 10:46 am
Dough Dough,
I got your back. There’ll be no bad mouthing of Cookie on my watch.
Atomic Teeth » Blog Archive » 2009 Tiger Defensive Preview said:
September 2nd, 2009 at 9:22 am
[...] The Tiger defense lost to the NFL Hood, Sulak (however briefly) and Moore and to graduation Christopher, Bridges, Chavis and Garrett. Of those seven seniors, the only clear downgrade is at defensive tackle. Now, I love me some Ziggy, and he has made us all proud in his brief NFL tenure, but Ziggy was not *really* an NFL first rounder. He benefited as much as any player ever has from a series of underclassmen (Gerald McCoy, Ndaaahhhemmonng Suh and Terrance Mt. Cody, to name three) deciding to accept booster money over NFL money for one more year. Nevertheless, replacing Ziggy is no small task. Replacing a healthy, focused William Moore would be no small task, but that is not the task at hand. William Moore was either unfocused (his preseason comments last August about breaking the Missouri interceptions records were alarming) or injured all of last year—because I really love William Moore, I’m going to believe the latter. Finally, Sulak, Christopher, Chavis and Garrett deserve mad props for being outstanding multi-year starting Tigers, but none were standout athletes and, I would argue, each would struggle to start for this year’s Tigers had he been able to return. Each is a Bruno, in other words. [...]
Barking Carnival — Blog — The Skeptic Says.... said:
September 11th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
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