Buster Olney's Questionable "Olnalysis" of Colorado Rockies' Huston Street

(Photo by Doug Pensinger/Getty Images)

ESPN's Buster Olney writes, at the beginning of a 2,800-word "blog post", that Rockies closer Huston Street has experienced dramatic improvement due to the smallest of changes:

...Bob Apodaca, the Colorado pitching coach, approached him and told him he wanted to make a rather major alteration. "We'd like you to move to a different part of the [pitching] rubber," Apodaca said.

Street didn't buy it. Not then, anyway. But after a mediocre spring training, and after he allowed four runs in his first four relief appearances in the regular season, Street had an open mind. He shifted from the left side to the right side of the rubber, and after he had done it for a short time and saw what the change did for him, he couldn't even imagine moving back to the left. "I don't know why things work out the way that they do," Street mused Sunday, "but they do."

Since those first four outings, Street has excelled, posting a 2.33* ERA, converting saves in 15 of 16 chances. He is 8-for-8 this month as the Rockies have made their push back from deep in the NL West standings to over .500, capped by Street's picking up the save Sunday, closing out the Pirates.

*Editor's note: Actually it was 2.22. I'm just sayin'.

Articles like this one always make me laugh, about how changing from one side of the pitching rubber to the other made someone a better pitcher, or how an offseason training regimen, starting to jog everyday, or eating more granola (or something) made some former star a better player again. Usually, it's just normal statistical fluctuation, but of course, sportwriters can't write about that because

A) it's boring and

B) ZZZZZzzzzzzz......

So, they talk to the pitcher, who probably has never taken a statistics, physiology or physics class.

He explains to them, that this and that is the reason for his sudden success. This is much more interesting, or at least less sleep-inducing, than Chi-square distributions and bell curves and standard deviations and all that rot.

Anyway, by next week nobody will remember what he said or what Buster wrote because they'll have moved on.

Olney's explanation for the improvement is as follows:

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