He goes by Ken Tremendous on firejoemorgan.com, Mose Schrute on “The Office,” and Michael Schur in real life. He is a husband, father, full-time blogger, big-time TV writer and Harvard grad.
He’s also one of the first interview subjects here at The Ball Star.
He talks about Joe Morgan, mistakes he sees from mainstream media, getting caught in the middle of the stats-vs-scouts debate, the newly settled writers’ strike, the disappointing charm of Derek Jeter, Jose Guillen, and gives a prediction on the Royals’ 2008 win total.
Name:Michael Schur
Age: 32
Favorite team: Red Sox
Favorite baseball memory: Foulke underhands to Mientkiewicz; Sox win Series; Schur weeps like small girl
Favorite restaurant: AOC (in L.A.)
Before we get to less important matters,congratulations on the baby. I assume you didn't name it Joe or Josephine.
Baby will be called Timothy McCarver Joseph Morgan William Plaschke Woody Paige David Eckstein Scrappy Schur. And I will insist that his teachers use his full name.
I’m a product of public school (although there are some who will tell you the University of Kansas is the Harvard on the Kaw) so please excuse the dumb question: is Harvard as tough as I imagine?
Common thought is that it’s harder to get into than to survive once you’re in. Like anything else, it is what you make of it. Some people goof off, some work really hard.
What's the best and worst thing about doing the blog?
The best thing – and there’s not a close second – is that it started as a way for a couple friends to try to make each other laugh, and has now blossomed into an actual like thing that people read. We don’t have millions of readers or anything, but the ones we do have are pretty hard-core. And extremely loyal. And strident. And scary, sometimes, in their fervor. I think it’s because they can sense that it’s organic. We don’t accept ads (though we did for a few months, to cover the expenses of the blog). We have no graphic design skills. We use a Blogger template that they discontinued years ago. It’s just text, and jokes, and common sense, and people have responded.
The worst things are: it’s time consuming, we don’t get to post as much as we’d like, it gets misunderstood sometimes by people on both sides of the stats-vs.-intangibles debate, and my wife doesn’t understand why I find it so enjoyable to write 5,000 words about a 12-minute Colin Cowherd radio segment about the Baseball Hall of Fame instead of like taking her out to dinner.
You say both sides of the stats-vs-scouts debate sometimes misunderstand you. Can you elaborate?
Sometimes I find sites where our blog is being discussed, and hard-core stat people are like incensed that anyone would read us or take us seriously. They point out that we, for example, use WARP3 to evaluate players, and argue that WARP is terrible because WARP uses FRAA, which is a bad fielding metric, and that it equates FRAA with VORP, and we should really use UZR or something, and also: how can we call ourselves sabermetricians when we haven’t even read the latest Voros McCracken piece refuting Bill James’s refutation of Pete Palmer’s comment about Super Linear Weights?!
Now, keep in mind, this delights me. There is nothing more fun than feeling very worked up and strident about something, and encountering people whose worked-uppedness and stridentitude (not a word) far outweigh your own. But I think those people maybe misunderstand the point of our blog. We’re not mathematicians, we’re comedy writers. And we don’t calculate anything, or formulate anything, because we aren’t nearly smart enough. We just look stuff up. We keep tabs on the basic tenets of the SABR world, and we try to make judgments on what stats seem like they make sense to use. That’s about it. (I myself had a crisis recently when I read someone’s account of how FRAA is calculated and why exactly this person thought it was bad, and I panicked and thought oh my God, he’s right, and now I have to go back through every post I have ever made and substitute UZR for FRAA and get rid of every instance of WARP3 and like apologize to everyone who has ever read the blog. Then I got hungry and made myself a sandwich and forgot about the whole thing.)
Now this is not to say that we should not be held accountable for what we write. We absolutely should be, as should everyone who ever writes anything, frankly, for public consumption. When people write to us with good counter-arguments to what we’ve posted, we go out of our way to print them, in their entirety, and to admit that we are dummies and got something wrong. What I am saying is that the site is intended first and foremost to entertain, and to point out how easy it is for journalists to use like OPS+ instead of BA or something.
As for the people on the “intangibles” side of the debate, well, some of them seem to think that we are mean nerds who hate baseball and have never seen a game, nor truly enjoyed the taste of a hot dog at the ballpark, nor can we truly appreciate the beauty and poetry inherent in The National Pastime. When I hear from them – which is rarely, thank goodness – I thank them for reading the blog and try to assure them that I do, yes, love baseball, and that I have been to many games – in person! – and that hot dogs are delicious, and that I am not trying to make them have less fun or like scold them or something. And by that time I’m hungry again so I make myself another sandwich.
What stat do you think is the most overlooked or misunderstood by fans?
Every stat is overlooked. The ones most misunderstood are wins, saves, batting average, RsBI, and ERA. Maybe, actually, in that order.
Ever have any contact with Joe Morgan?
No, and I don’t anticipate we will. Another of the worst things about the blog qua the blog is that many people – and who can blame them? – think we have a specific vendetta against Mr. Morgan. We really don’t. We put very little thought into the name when we started, and if we had we probably would have chosen differently. We don’t really dislike Morgan any more than fifteen other guys, and we’re kind of stuck with the name now. I’m sure he’s a very nice guy, and a good father, and I honestly don’t want him to get fired. In part because then my life would be far less entertaining than it is now.
Ever heard from any of the writers you guys shred?
We have, yes, in some off-the-record emails. They are generally very good sports, who understand that we are just trying to be funny. They appear to have good senses of humor, which gives me great hope for the future of sportswriting.
Big general question here, but what do you think is the single most common mistake made by print and broadcast media?
Many of them still use batting average to determine a hitter’s effectiveness, which is like judging someone’s wealth by the size of her TV screen. Many of them retroactively attribute winning to “team chemistry” or “leadership” instead of “good players.” But number one, for me, has to be how they treat Alex Rodriguez. No one has ever been as good at something, yet insulted more, than A-Rod.
Why did you initially do it anonymously, and why did you decide to "go public?" Any reaction at work or otherwise from people who didn't know it was you?
We used pseudonyms originally to avoid people conflating our professional lives and our blog. I personally didn’t want anyone judging the blog on the merits of “The Office,” or vice-versa. Not that I really thought anyone would care, or anything, but it just seemed like the blog should be about sports writing, and my professional life should be my professional life, and ne’er the twain should meet.
Then we just started to get a little queasy about anonymity. We fling a lot of (crap) at a lot of people, and figured we should stand up behind it. The people we attack have the right to face their accusers.
The reaction has been fine, though the dreaded conflation of our two lives did occur, a bit. We asked people not to send us emails with anything but sports journalism-related information, and for the most part they have obliged. Those who have commented on our real jobs have been pretty nice.
I saw a website that said you guys write about 300,000 words in a season, the equivalent of three or four full-length books. It's obviously a popular site and I assume you could make some coin just by accepting ads. Why not?
Well, thankfully, right now we don’t need to. The blog is a hobby. And at the risk of seeming self-important or something, I like to think of it as a public service more than a commercial enterprise. Sports institutions subject us to some pretty miserable commentary and journalism, and we make fun of it, and some people seem to enjoy it when we make fun of it, so we do it. It’s literally just for fun. We’ve had offers from some companies to like absorb us into their folds, and although it’s always flattering, we figure if we stay on our own we can just write whatever we want, and curse as much as we want, and post whenever we want, which is largely appealing.
If you're commissioner for a day, give me the first three things on your to-do list.
(1) Tell the Players’ Union that we’re testing for everything under the sun, and if they don’t like it they can go on strike forever. I have no sympathy for them. (2) Set a hard salary floor, so teams can’t take revenue sharing money and pocket it. (3) Change the name of “The Baseball Hall of Fame” to “The Baseball Hall of Very Good,” so every journalist who snivellingly argues against someone’s candidacy by saying “It’s not called the ‘Hall of very Good’” has to find new material.
No hard salary cap?
I’d prefer a hard salary cap too, sure. But absent that fairyland pipe dream, and given what we have to work with, the floor could help. With a floor, people in Kansas City and Tampa Bay and Miami could have a lot more optimism about long-term competitiveness. So I suppose the actual answer should be: either (a) a hard cap, or (b) the current soft-cap/revue sharing thing plus a floor. The 30 guys who get to own MLB franchises, and run them under a government-granted non-competition clause, owe it to the cities in which they live to field competitive teams and to retain players who are young and good. They ought to be able to do this in a business that generates $6 billion a year.
And I gotta ask you a couple questions about the Royals. Give me their 2008 win total, and your thoughts on signing Jose Guillen.
Dayton Moore’s gotta be worth 3 wins by himself. Yabuta could be interesting. And of course you have the indomitable spirit, leadership, and intangibles of Ron Mahay. I’ll go out on a crazy limb and say KC wins 78 games. (You were only outscored by 72 runs last year, and should have finished above the ChiSox.)
As for Guillen, he’ll be fine if he keeps juicing. If not, enjoy the .265/.320/.440 line he puts up over 95 injury-riddled games.
On to your other job, and I read where “The Office” is coming back on April 10, great news. Did the strike scare you? What's the best picket line story you can tell me?
The fear for me was that the explicably adversarial relationship between the people who program content for a living and the people who provide that content would metastasize, and before cooler heads prevailed, the entire TV industry would collapse in on itself like a dying star. (So yes, it did scare me, I guess.) Thankfully, the AMPTP finally realized that the total amount of money we are asking for is less than what Rupert Murdoch pays his mechanic’s assistant’s pool guy’s plumber’s animal trainer’s tennis instructor’s mechanic.
As for picket line stories, the best and funniest one was definitely the time a group of us walked in circles for 3 hours at the CBS lot. The second best story was the time a group of us walked in circles for 3 hours at the Paramount lot.
How did you become Mose Schrute?
It’s a long story. Basically, we needed someone to play a weird half-Amish beet farmer, and we looked around the room, and someone was like, “Hey – Mike is a weird half-Amish beet farmer.” And now here we are.
What's the best off-camera story you can tell us from the show?
It’s a crazy drama-fest every single day. One time all of the main actors had to pose for a photo shoot – the cover of Vanity Fair. You should have seen the jockeying for position...the egos...it was unreal. Teri had to be in the middle. Nicolette wouldn’t be to Marcia’s left. Eva wanted taller heels. It was a nightmare.
You also spent six years on "Saturday Night Live. Who was the coolest host or musical guest you had? Biggest jerk?
Not a lot of jerks. We had Tenacious D on as a special musical guest before Jack Black was super famous – that was cool. Jeter hosted, and it pains me to report that he is an incredibly polite and nice person. Tina Fey and Rachel Dratch used to write a sketch called “Sully and Denise” about two idiot Boston teenagers who were obsessed with Nomar Garciaparra, and he came on the show, and suddenly I was 9 years old. The best weeks were when Christopher Walken or Alec Baldwin hosted.
Any advice for me as I attempt this blog?
Just be yourself, man. (whispered) Just...be...yourself.
OK, almost done, we'll finish with a quick final four:
Favorite sports blog: The Hardball Times, if that counts. Or Baseball Prospectus. Or Deadspin. I also really like Athletics Nation.
Favorite TV show that you don't work on: The Wire.
2008 World Series pick: Tigers over Mets in 6.
McNamee or Clemens: Clemens. Debbie Clemens.
What is Mr. Schur's connection to the show Desperate Housewives? I don't see any explicit mention of it in the article, but he speaks of a photo shoot involving Nicholette, Marcia, Teri, and Eva who wanted higher heels, which points squarely in that direction.
Chaim Mattis Keller
New York City's # 1 Royals Fan!