By what criteria have the 2008 MLB playoff teams been ranked in the lists below (and what would the relevant raw numbers be)? [This becomes easier still when you look at the subtle differences between the lists.]
1. Rays
2. Brewers
3. Dodgers
4. Phillies
5. Cubs
6t. Angels
6t. White Sox
8. Red Sox
1. Rays
2. Cubs
3. Brewers
4. Dodgers
5. Phillies
6. Angels
7. White Sox
8. Red Sox
1t. Brewers
1t. Rays
3. Cubs
4. Phillies
5. Dodgers
6. Angels
7. White Sox
8. Red Sox
Jay Jaffe won't miss Yankee Stadium.
When the time comes, I'll miss exactly one thing about [A's baseball at the] Oakland Coliseum: its proximity to where we live.
Then again, in the 1990s I was aghast at the condition of Fenway Park, mainly how unhygienic it all was. I had no desire to see taxpayers buy a new stadium, but I just didn't see how the "Save Fenway Park" movement could succeed. Apparently the new [as of earlier this decade] ownership did a tremendous job, though.
While plausibly in their earshot, I've yelled worse things to at least two three four pitchers in my baseball watching lifetime, one of them specifically weight-related:
1. The year Jose Mesa (then with Cleveland) was acquitted of rape charges, he made his first appearance at Fenway Park the same evening Harvard and/or BU held a Take Back the Night Rally. I've conveniently forgotten my actual choice of words here.
2. (the only home player heckle among the four) Late 1990s, Fenway Park: When Jim Corsi was a Red Sock (and on the large side), I accused him of being on the Rich Garces diet plan.
3. 2002, Oakland Coliseum: five rows behind the visiting bullpen, I was one of many fans simultaneously mocking Kaz Sasaki's alcoholism.
4. Also 2002 (this game), same location, I loudly accused Roberto Herrnandez of singlehandedly crippling the Royals' franchise with his ridiculous contract. A ridiculous assertion in hindsight, since
a) it's not his fault he took the money that anyone else would've taken
b) it's not as if the lack of that contract would have magically made Kansas City non-dysfunctional
Will Carroll (best known for gathering info about sports injuries) devotes a Baseball Prospectus blog post to the recent Wall Street meltdown: "Saul Hansell takes a solid look at what some are calling a failure of the quantitative analysts on Wall Street and already, some are wondering if the same kind of backlash will happen in baseball." (hyperlink in original)
(The gist of the Saul Hansell piece is that financial analysts gave their computer models bad initial assumptions, for example (this part is my jumped-to conclusion, certainly not Hansell's per se) underestimating just how many American homebuyers would turn out to be deadbeats.)
Anyhow, shortly after reading that blurb I saw Todd Zywicki, a Volokh Conspirator, ask readers which analogy was more apt between "liquidity problem" or "misvalued assets." There's a lot of both, of course.
Full circle between the financial world and the baseball world, I can finally reconstruct the question I asked Sandy Alderson at a 1999 symposium about players vs. owners, big market vs. small market, etc. (This was at baseball's winter meetings, sponsored by Baseball America; as I recall the panelists were Scott Boras, Gene Orza, and Jerry Glanville; and Sandy Alderson, Randy Smith, and Jerry Colangelo.)
The prevailing meme at the time had been that teams like the Pirates or Royals couldn't afford to sign the best/most expensive free agents. So my question was something like this (nine years after the fact, this is a paraphrase at best):
Did they really mean to imply that it would be unprofitable, even in the long run for a small-market team to sign a big star? Since the very best athletes tend to bring a team marginal revenue well beyond their salaries, wasn't what-can-the-Royals-afford-to-pay-their-players just a liquidity problem that could be easily solved with judicious lending/borrowing? But if the real issue was that signing big stars wasn't worth the opportunity cost (versus sucking but consistently profiting, like the Pirates do), why couldn't they just admit that instead of crying poor?
Boras visibly enjoyed the question; Alderson pretended not to understand it.
The biggest flaw with my premise is of course that a big star will make a much bigger financial difference in a market with more viewers or ticket buyers at stake. If a player would be "worth" $100M to the Yankees or $50M to the Royals, the Yankees could offer $50.1M and reap a big gain. Then again, the flaw with the flaw is that arguably, aside from needing to borrow the money, the small-market teams could have been the top bidders on some particular stars (obviously not others - here's where baseball common sense comes in, e.g. don't overpay mid-30s veterans about to hit a career cliff) and still come out positive (just not necessarily ahead of their otherwise-most-profitable option)
P.S. Speaking of Boras, he certainly knows how to start with an ostensible fight against an arguably unjust situation and extract maximum rent for his client in exchange for letting the broader injustice slide.
As reported by John Perrotto on Baseball Prospectus:
The [Houston] Astros are making a fashion statement in the final days of the season as a sign of protest. They're wearing red T-shirts under their jerseys with a caricature of Commissioner Bud Selig on the front and the inscription "Bud killed us." On the back are the words "We survived Hurricane Ike."
The Astros are still clearly peeved that Selig rescheduled two of their three games against the Cubs that that could not be played in Houston last weekend because of Hurricane Ike to Milwaukee's Miller Park, just a 90-minute drive from Chicago. [...]
"It's just not right what happened," said pitcher Brandon Backe, the Astros' player representative to the Major League Baseball Players Association, and also a native of Galveston, Texas, which was devastated by the hurricane. [...] "To make us have to leave our homes so soon after a major disaster struck showed no compassion whatsoever. All of my family and friends were affected by the storm. Some of the people closest to me are homeless because their houses are gone. It was really a flip of the coin whether I was going to get on that plane and go to Chicago. I knew it was the right thing to do to go with the team but it was hard to leave, one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life. I don't think anybody's heart was in those games in Milwaukee. Heck, we got one hit in two games. What does that tell you?"
I know exactly what it tells me, though that's not necessarily the same thing it tells him. If this isn't sore losing personified, I don't know what is.
(For what it's worth: thanks to WGN I grew up a Cub fan, especially the 1989 team. At some point the Tribune Company's blatant lack of commitment to winning (why should they have cared? win or lose the team was a cash cow) left me indifferent to the Cubs, though obviously living in Boston and then near Oakland also had a lot to do with it.)
With 11 days to go, these players have gotten me 300 or more points in the Kimera Bartee Open this year (league where the object is to have players who play badly):
Carlos Gómez 954
Michael Bourn 856
José Castillo 768
Tony Peña Jr. 660
Bobby Crosby 584
Kurt Suzuki 524
Brad Wilkerson 442
Chase Headley 412
Akinori Iwamura 334
Asdrubal Cabrera 330
Brian Schneider 306
IP
Kyle Kendrick 125.00 940
Brian Bannister 92.67 751
Luis Mendoza 38.00 635
Brian Burres 46.33 456
Greg Reynolds 34.33 384
Kevin Correia 54.33 352
Jason Jennings 22.33 336
Scott Feldman 41.00 331
(Then again, what isn't a disaster-prone area? If it isn't hurricanes it's earthquakes, blizzards, Mississippi River flooding... but the point still holds.)
If you don't want your championship chances dented by a questionably neutral site for your rescheduled games, why not be a bit more proactive and work out a deal with a friendly city closer to home?
For example, no baseball could have taken place in Houston yesterday; but there's no obvious reason why Arlington (the Texas Rangers' home park) couldn't have hosted a game, with the Rangers at Oakland this past weekend. I assume the main reason it didn't work out was that the event staff there couldn't muster a workforce on such short notice (and/or that the evacuation and disaster relief had a ripple effect just that far in-land). But if the Astros and Rangers had made some contingency deal, who knows?
Side note to a spoiled athlete or two: Your own fans got washed out; many of them lost their homes. OMFG, you have to play "83 road games" instead of 81? - the tragedy doesn't quite compare.
Now that the original scorer's decision has been upheld, will this be a more famous or less famous pitching performance than if he'd been charged an error in the first place (and thus ended up with a no-hitter)?
I claim that this game will have been more famous, and as evidence I ask you:
Can you name the last two pitchers to throw MLB no-hitters? You probably can't, unless you're a fan of the team they both play[ed] for.
How many of the last five can you name? (Randy Johnson's perfect game was only the sixth-most-recent.)
Before you look it up, how many of the 12 no-hitters this decade can you describe reasonably well? (Or if you prefer, 15 in the past ten years -- the David Wells perfect game would miss that cutoff by about 3.5 months.)
This article has been up for at least a week now, but I just now realized that it's the best example I've ever seen of what Whitlock was kvetching about.
(Yes, I know it was [some guy whose name I've already forgotten], not Stephen A. Smith, who set Whitlock off, but Whitlock's complaint was really about a style rather than a person.)
Suddenly, the Chicago Sun-Times has a much better sports section.
"Mariotti resigned, and then headed to the Sun-Times office to tape his Around the Horn segment, only to find that his security pass had been deactivated while the paper was deciding whether or not to accept the resignation. They finally accepted it."
"I think that it overshot the mark by far just because, what, in a Yankee game someone didn’t get a homer? Please. It’s happened thousands of times. That’s part of the game. It’s the beauty of the game. Mistakes are made."
--Detroit Tiger pitcher Kenny Rogers, who opposes instant replay
If mistakes were "the beauty of the game," then how would we know if we had the optimal level of them? Should we tweak the rules a bit to subtly introduce even more mistakes?
Fill in the blank. (Don't look it up until you've tried getting it without looking it up.)
1. Joe Mauer
2. Mark Prior
3. [blank]
4. Gavin Floyd
5. Mark Teixeira
Bonus points if you have any idea where he is now (I don't). It's not John VanBenschoten (who's #8 on the list in question behind two names I don't even recognize).
Actually gettable bonus points (that in turn might give away the answer): This guy is to Opening Day 2005 as which two players (actually traded for each other) are to Opening Day 2004 and Opening Day 2006?
Additional (gettable) bonus points: This guy was traded in December 2005, straight up, for whom? (And as a matter of opinion, which of the two players in that deal is a bigger bust?)
Prior to 2008 I don't think I'd made seven fantasy baseball (or fantasy anything) trades in a 12-month span, much less a two-week span. So that was fun.
Nobody cares [etc.] -- though one of these trades did involve both my new third-favorite Oakland Athletic (behind Jack Cust and Frank Thomas) while other trades involve two my new favorite underrated-in-fantasy-baseball pitchers (neither of whom is the aforementioned A.)
From least recent to most recent...
Masters of Puppets: Acquired Andy Marte (3B-CLE), giving up Jeff Mathis (C-ANA). My AL Scoresheet team (baseball simulation), with a comically inconsequential deal (challenge trade?) involving ex-prospects who spectacularly failed to live up to their hype. I sent my third-string catcher to the team that lost Jorge Posada, picking up a 3B in plenty of time for Scott Rolen's saw-it-coming-a-mile-away breakdown (which was a few week's after Eric Chavez's own equally expected breakdown).
Jungle Patrol: Acquired Chris Davis (1B-TEX) and Yovani Gallardo (P-MIL), giving up Jake Peavy (P-SD). 5x5 "sabermetric" (OBP and total bases instead of batting average and HR) roto keeper league; let the dumping begin! Peavy was my first-round pick this year thus can't be kept; Davis will cost me a 13th round pick (somewhere in the 170-180 range)* next year. The injured ace Gallardo would cost me a 9th rounder if he turned out to be one of my six best keep options.
*- it's possible some of these keeper draft pick #s are inaccurate as I'm too lazy to look up confirmation
Jungle Patrol: Acquired Matt Garza (P-TB) and Roy Oswalt (P-HOU), giving up Jonathan Broxton (P-LAD) and Troy Percival (P-TB). In hindsight I hate this deal, because while it ostensibly helps me for 2009 (Garza will cost me a R15, Oswalt would cost me a R3 if he somehow magically rediscovered his peak self over the next few weeks), it actually gives up a shocking amount of 2009 value depending on whether Percival retires and whether Takashi Saito reclaims his old bullpen role. Tremendous future upside for the other owner AND an obvious save boost in 2008.
Harvesters of Sorrow: Acquired Hiroki Kuroda (P-LAD) and Chris Volstad (P-FLA) for Hunter Pence (OF-HOU). My NL Scoresheet team had a grand strategy fall into its lap. I got an e-mail asking who I might be interested in trading among {four or five Carlos Beltran-caliber players, plus Hunter Pence}. Wrote back that I'd deal Pence but that the others were well nigh untouchable. Got this offer, took it ASAP despite its creation of even further havoc in an outfield that's missing concussed Ryan Church, fragile(?) Justin Upton, and the degree of playing time that the Phillies unjustly withhold from Jayson Werth. (And Matt Diaz for whatever he's worth.) This deal also meant that, at the cost of a lot of defense, I finally realized I could play Jim Thome and James Loney at the same time by making the latter stand in left field. (That feels so unrealistic and degenerate, no? And yet in real life the Diamondbacks did pretty much the same thing with Conor Jackson.) Even after doing that I got a brief heavy dose of Alfredo Amezaga, hideously underqualifed corner outfielder.
Jungle Patrol: Acquired Zack Greinke (P-KC) and Brad Ziegler (P-OAK), giving up C.C. Sabathia (P-MIL). This ended a long sweepstakes. Greinke will cost me a R16, Ziegler would be a R14 if he's still the A's closer into 2009, Sabathia is unkeepable. This deal went down right after Ziegler's two-inning save in Detroit.
Harvesters of Sorrow: Acquired Mike Cameron (OF-MIL) and a 2009 round 35, giving up Brett Myers (P-PHI). Obvious counterbalance to the Pence/Kuroda deal. And, not that this was any factor in the trade, but finally the Harvesters are rid of that wife-beating oaf!
Harvesters of Sorrow: Acquired Jeff Baker (2B/OF-COL) and Chris Coste (C-PHI), giving up Jeff Francis (P-COL) and a 2009 R31. The premise for the respective rival owners is that Myers and Francis will each be among their team's 13 best keepers going into 2009. For me they'd be in line (among pitchers) behind Dan Haren, Matt Cain, Clayton Kershaw, Kuroda, Volstad, possibly Todd Wellemeyer, and maybe even Jamie Moyer! (The '08 post-trade Harvesters rotation shapes up as Haren-Cain-Kuroda-Moyer-Wellemeyer.) Baker basically becomes what Chris Burke was supposed to be (lefty-masher who platoons with Kelly Johnson and pinch-hits a lot), Chris Coste is (playing time permitting) quite an upgrade over the 2008 models of Josh Bard and/or Matt Treanor.
One thing about Scoresheet playoffs is that player performance is a combination of season-long performance with September performance (playoff lineup cards are due at the end of August), so even though the Harvesters are six-games out, there's reason to believe they previously underachieved (mainly that 40% of the April-May rotation was Myers/Francis at their worst, and that Miguel Cabrera finally remembered who he is as opposed to his first half), and it's good to stock up on good 2008 performance and jettison players whose '08 numbers are like Myers or Pence.
Suppose Jeff Karstens (RHP-PIT) had walked Chris B. Young in the 8th inning today but retired the next four batters. He would have joined select company: He would have had a very specific thing in common with exactly one other pitcher.
Describe that "thing in common" exactly, and name that other pitcher.
"If it's so overrated then how come you don't see more closers like Hoffman and Rivera?"
--ESPN.com "Featured Comment" in response to an article about baseball's "closer" being the most overrated position in sports.
My first reaction was like the duck in the insurance ads.
My second was to decide whether to bother to work out a concise explanation for why that comment is just so misguided.
We don't see "more closers like Hoffman and Rivera" PRECISELY BECAUSE so many people overrate the work output of that position, and so overrate a particular counting stat (saves) they it takes people too long to realize that Armando Benitez, Jorge Julio, Todd Jones, etc., etc., just aren't any good.
The commenter's question would be valid if we were perfect judges of player ability but terrible judges of which positions matter most -- that is, if we didn't understand comparative advantage, like for example if some baseball manager inexplicably thought the most important defensive position were first base and so always put his best defenders at first.
Despite the phrase, do people actually make bar bets? Now that everything can be Googled, I wonder.
Anyway, without looking it up (some context: I'd been reading a "Jeter vs. Reyes" baseball column) THINK QUICK and name the 2006 American League MVP.
My subjective impression had been that I was having an off year in fantasy/simulation baseball leagues, yet through Sunday, August 3:
$ 1st of 14
* 1st of 6
2nd of 12
2nd of 10
!# 5th of 10
!# 6th of 12
! 10th of 14
$- entry fee and cash prizes
! - entry fee but no cash prizes
*- "suck league" (the object is for your players to play badly)
# - Scoresheet baseball
So I'm fine except in the "sunk cost" leagues. My previous assertion that it was a down year is sort of irrational given that I should care about the league with a prize fund a good deal more than the leagues where despite having spent money to be there I have no money riding.
Then again maybe it's not that irrational - if I were apathetic to how I did in those leagues then what would be the point of the money outlay?
[Both of the Scoresheet leagues happen to be three-way ties (at 55 wins, 57 losses) but that doesn't affect the analysis much.]
Do you consider Nippon Professional Baseball to be on par with Major League Baseball; that is, would you consider them both to consist of (lower case) major leagues?
A lot of questions that people treat as complicated, or controversial, could be answered quite easily if there were clear answer to that question. I happen to think the Central League and Pacific League are not on par with the National League and American League -- but your mileage may vary.
A common conception is that the Japanese Leagues are comparable to Triple-A baseball in the U.S., though Clay Davenport concluded otherwise in 2002).
Anecdotally, I can think of more players who came here from Japan and didn't live up to the hype than players who came here from Japan and exceeded the hype. On the other hand, this may be because high-profile players made the leap before rank-and-file did; for example, nobody in the U.S. expected great things from Hideki Okajima.
On the third hand this gets to why I (chauvinistically?) put U.S. Major League Baseball alone on the top tier: Many of Japan's biggest stars wish to play for U.S. teams; the converse seems not to be true to any extent. Free agents generally go from the U.S. to Japan for lack of U.S. major league opportunities, rather than as a result of getting bids both places and finding a Japanese bid to be superior.
Anyhow, practical implications for how you answer the main question:
Should 30-year-olds who played several seasons in Japan be considered for the MLB rookie of the year award? I strongly believe they should (in large part because in fact they are clearly eligible).
Is it noteworthy that Ichiro now has a combined 3,000 hits between the Orix Blue Wave and the Seattle Mariners? Sort of -- but only sort of. I don't know off-hand how many home runs Henry Aaron hit at any given level of the minors; it says here that Barry Bonds had seven home runs at high "A" and 13 more at Triple-A. There's a good chance that in 2010 Jack Cust will hit his 300th professional home run.
Is it wrong that I feel the exact opposite of sympathy for Dmitri Young?
Fun fact: Dmitri Young was an All-Star in 2007. Then again Cristian Guzman was an All-Star in 2008. What a franchise!
A good time to go to a game is the Monday or Tuesday after the All-Star Break. (Why is an exercise for the reader.)
(Does not necessarily apply to any game involving the A's.)
And by "that," I don't mean either getting hit on the head by a fly ball, or injuring yourself on the mound as a position player.
But what I do mean could have been as many as 20 years ago, or as few as 10. Time flies.
Meanwhile am I really to believe that the hottest riff in top 40 music right now is all quarter notes, perfect[ly white-people] emphasis on all the downbeats?
"Many of you are probably aware that the Chinese are going to great lengths to organize fan cheering for the upcoming Olympics. The Peoples Republic of China can do flip card stunts with the best of them, but this is something different: a massed, coordinated infusion of pre-programmed good vibes.
[...]
This got me wondering what sort of cheers we would hear at baseball games if this procedure somehow made it to these shores and into the stadiums of our national game. How would cheers sound if they were coordinated and attitudinally adjusted to fit the Chinese model?"
--Jim Baker
Chad pointed out to me that one of them is astonishingly good advice:
To the pitcher trying to work his way out of a bases-loaded situation: "Your enemies are everywhere, but focus on the only one who can hurt you."
My perception of Chad's uncanny ability to be right about things is almost like an umpire's perception of Barry Bonds's or Frank Thomas's batting eye: His track record of correct judgment makes me unusually likely to trust his judgment, in particular to change my mind about some logistical decision based on his insight, so we have a virtuous(?) cycle where the fact that he's "shown me the light" in the past leaves me unusually open to his suggestion.
It works on so many levels:
Asked to explain his Red-hot start, Bruce said simply "Sample size."
--Sports Illustrated
(And indeed Jay Bruce's hot start didn't last long, but by the end of the year his total numbers will be fine.)
"What obligations does a city have to a team that is so often considered vital to the community? What obligations does a team have to a city from which it expects undying loyalty and frequent taxpayer support?"
--Caple, referring mainly to the Supersonics' (NBA) attempt to get out of Seattle.
The answer to the first question is almost blindingly simple (unless the city already has contractual obligations); the answer to the second depends on where goodwill fits into one's business model.
That's what they do in Atlanta these days.
Cows are funny.
(Animals in general are funny, if you didn't already know this from the deserved appeal of Get Fuzzy or Pearls Before Swine or Sherman's Lagoon (or the undeserved appeal of Garfield.)
...is that garbage-time blowouts distort them.
Dayn Perry touches on a caveat to the Oakland A's 2008 season, distinguishing between the Oakland and Anaheim records in 1-run and 2-run games, but the real reason A's have an inflated run differential:
13-2
11-2
14-2
15-1
(admittedly there's also a 0-12 floating in there)
I wonder whether projections would be more accurate if blowouts were capped to something like a seven-run margin.
See also Matt Welch's rebuttal to a similar piece predicting doom for the Angels.
"According to the PECOTA-Adjusted Playoff Odds Report, Oakland has a robust 63.4 percent chance of making the postseason. By comparison the Angels have just a 36.5 percent chance of making it. That's a function of Oakland's significantly better run differential. As for the divide between run margin and record, the usual explanations seem not to apply. Usually such discrepancies are traceable back to each team's record in one-run games, but the A's are 10-10 in one-run affairs, and the Angels are 13-9. That's a difference, but not a big one. Two-run games? In those, the A's are 6-10, but the Angels are a whopping 17-4. Is such a disparity in two-run records mostly a function of luck, as we've come to believe about one-run records? Or is it indicative of a skill? The logic of scale suggests that it's more of a skill than one-run outcomes, but measurably less than records in five-run games. Color me flummoxed."
I used to be much more interested in preserving baseball tradition than I am now. Most of the change results in the degree to which traditions have become outdated if not absurd, or (more charitably to those traditions) the degree to which baseball is already ignoring too much, where there's a choice between half-heartedly keeping a tradition stupidly, or making a clean break and doing something that makes sense.
Joe Sheehan ranted about interleague play earlier this week, yet his proposed solution really doesn't do anything to address the actual problem.
(Other than the second-order problem that MLB vastly overstates the excitement of interleague play by failing to adjust for time of year and time of week; as Joe points out, summer weekend series will always draw better than school-in-session weeknight series.)
Anyway, my wife finds it strange that particular teams will play each other only once every three years or so. The schedule as it stands now is confusing and (as Joe illustrates) unfair. If you temporarily ignore how we got here, a better way would be for all 30 teams to play each other at least once series a year, no?
So I have in mind three 10-team divisions. You get one three-game series a year against each team outside your division (whoever you host in even years you visit in odd years). With the 162-game schedule that leaves 102 games within the division, which averages to 11.3.
So in a given year you'll have 12 games each against three particular division opponents and 11 games each against the other six. As the current schedule features 52 series in 26 weeks (although there's the All-Star Break, there's also exactly one occasion where teams get three series, 2-2-3, in one Monday-Sunday cycle), there'd be 20 series outside the division and 32 series within. Three of your division opponents you'd do 3-3/3-3; two of them you'd do 3-3/3-2; four of them you'd do 4-3/4. It's the least problematic way to implement this.
Who's in what division?
Call them West, Central, and East, and you're 90% there. Move the Houston Astros to "West" (buy off Astros owner Drayton McLane for the trouble of the few more West Coast trips that the Texas Rangers already fail to object to).
Do we continue to make sure that same-metro teams aren't both {at home, on the road} at the same time? If so, how?
Sure, why not. The most straightforward way to do this is split each division into five teams that tend to do the opposite of their five counterparts. So you'd have something like:
OAK-LAD-SD-COL-SEA[-OAK-LAD...]
SF-LAA-ARI-HOU-TEX
CHW-MIL-MIN-KC-STL
CHC-CIN-CLE-PIT-DET
FLA-TB-ATL-WAS-NYY
PHI-BOS-TOR-BAL-NYM
(Each pair of same-metro teams could be flipped here. In general I think non-division teams would want to host at least one team per pair of the {Yankees-Red Sox}, {Cubs-Cardinals}, and/or {Dodgers-Giants} any given year.)
I haven't fully put this down to paper (spreadsheet?) but as a general rule road trips would be a sequence of 2-3 teams from one of the cycles above (so e.g. Seattle then Oakland, or Tampa Bay then Atlanta, or Cubs then Cincinnati).
What does the schedule basically look like?
Keeping things as simple as possible unless/until we butt into mathematical impossibilities, I have it in my mind as:
Nine series, everyone in their division (round robin). 15 series, two divisions face each other and the third stays within itself. (5-5-5 for each of those combinations.) Nine series, everyone in their division. 10 series, everyone outside their division. Nine series, everyone in their division.
Your season series with any given division rival would start no later than the first May series and end no sooner than the last August series.
What about playoffs?
This implementation mostly doesn't care about that. The ideal would be three division winners plus a wild card, but if the masses insist on eight playoff teams then the smoothest scenario is three 1st place teams, three 2nd place teams, two wild cards.
What about the DH?
Another question on whose answer this implementation doesn't necessarily depend. But I will say, coming full circle to my belief in baseball tradition (or lack thereof), that my personal preference order is:
1. Everyone uses the DH
2. Nobody uses the DH
[large utility gap]
3. Whether you use the DH depends on who the visiting team is
4. Whether you use the DH depends on who the home team is
...yes, of the four obvious ways to do it, MLB picked the one that (in my opinion) is worst. (Why is "depends on the home team" worse than "depends on the road team"? Because it's ridiculous that pitchers on "DH teams" bat so rarely that they bat only on the road. If an A's pitcher is going to bat maybe once or twice a year, it should happen in front of the home crowd!)
Oh, while we're here, my wife has suggested that from the 10th inning onward, the home team bat first each inning (but the next team to score wins!). I've come to like that idea...
I can't immediately tell what day this column went live, but it refers to an incident Deadspin already told us about two weeks ago.
Maybe the author needed two weeks to collect his thoughts and express insight that would leave us two weeks more enlightened?
For this story is anything more enlightening than "don't do that" even possible, much less necessary?
Wow: The guy outside my window with the mike and the booming voice wasn't just making this up. Despite playing Little League, and growing up in a very red state, I'd never heard of this pledge before.
No kidding the atheists don't like it.
I'm quite confused that on June 14, a baseball season is ending (awards ceremony) rather than beginning. Maybe Stage 2 begins in a week or two?
Should I explain why this particular replay implementation would be shatbit crazy, or will commenters save me the effort by pointing out the most glaring flaws?
(I strongly support instant replay in baseball, and any sport where there's a common sense context to deploy it. I even think it's a good idea to use all available video feeds. It's just the gratuitous layers of bureaucracy and protocol that telegraph themselves as single points of failure.)
Despite knowing of its existence for months (years?) I'd never actually read Curt Schilling's weblog until King Kaufman pointed out how astute an observation he'd made about the NBA.
Tie game, going into the bottom of the 12th. You've just used your 2nd and 3rd best relievers. Now do you bring in:
A. This guy?
B. This guy?
If you said B, you are a true major league manager, with the loss to prove it. (Given my allegiance, obviously I was happy with this particular bullpen usage.)
Meanwhile, satellite oops...
I tend to give major league ballplayers benefit of the doubt, even if they're rumored to be jerks, especially if they're surrounded by uncorroborated innuendo... but if the rumors are corroborated, that's another story.
Anyway, Texas Rangers kick Sidney Ponson to the curb.
You may remember the native Aruban from the time he assaulted a judge.
Or this dugout chat.
...it's Arlington.
(Especially if it's a day game. Humid, 90s, gusts of wind...)
Discussed (indirectly) in this thread re this promotion.
This post seconds what I had already suggested.
Repeating the same trivia question I put there: "For a quick 10 points, without looking it up can you name the player who had nine RBI in a different game that day (May 17, 2002)?"
(Further hint, which would give it away if you looked it up (but obviously you won't look it up until you've given up): The nine RBI player was an Arizona Diamondback at the time.)
Go to MLB.com, Scoreboard, Wednesday's (May 14) games, Boston at Baltimore.
Click on the "MLBTV" logo: It's free but login/password required (if you don't have one already, go through whatever rigmarole it takes).
You'll want "Ramirez's amazing catch." Once you've seen it, the question I have: Did he end up getting help from the fan to reverse his momentum?
Obligatory link to the best Manny Ramirez article The Onion has ever published.
1. Has anyone ever used PitchFix data (or the data Bill James charges you money for on his web site) to compare what "closers" throw in save situations versus non-save situations?
We hear all the time the meme that such players struggle when the game isn't in the line, and I wonder if it's just that they're taking the opportunity to tinker and test. I certainly would in their shoes.
2. We know that basketball teams tend to lose on the road. What statistical elements show the greatest disparity between road and home? If the biggest gaps included (for example) free throw attempts then a major explanation might be (for example) skewed officiating. So how do road teams compare to home teams for, among other things:
Shooting %?
Turnovers?
Offensive rebounds?
Defensive rebounds?
Free throw attempts?
Free throw %?
3-point attempts?
3-point %?
Shot clock violations?
(What would be the quickest, easiest way to test for home-cooked timekeeping?)
Can the home-road disparity be broken down further into how players perform by quarter?
Unlike a lot of baseball fans, especially in Ohio, I've always thought highly of you. So many times I'd just missed getting you in a fantasy baseball league.
Of course this is the year I finally landed you (on two teams!) and this is how you repay me? Feh.
They've entered a golden age of lead writing: Everywhere you look on the site there are one-sentence introductions in amazing "action prose." The sentences are short and simple -- they not only completely avoid wasting words but also get a tremendous amount of meaning from 25 words or less.
I think Ken Korach used not only the same words, but even the same cadence, for both Mark Ellis's 10th inning walk-off home run today and Marco Scutaro's walk-off home run off Mariano Rivera a year ago.
Not necessarily the best, just the ones that I suspect are most widely known among people who are at least casual fans. Sometimes what they really remember (or know of, if before their birth) is the moment (rather than knowing the year or even the teams) but I still count that.
UPDATED May 7, reordered a bit.
1. Game 4, 2004 ALCS (really what people know about is Games 4-7)
2. Game 7, 2001 World Series (I'm surprised I hadn't thought of this first, but if it didn't even cross my mind then who else's mind isn't it crossing? - Yankee fans of course will fondly remember the back-to-back heroics in Games 4-5)
3. Game 6, 2003 NLCS (Bartman's foul ball)
4. Game 6, 1986 World Series (you could argue for this higher depending on the average age of these hypothetical casual fans - a lot here hinges on how old you think these fans are and how Northeastern they are)
5. Game 1, 1988 World Series (Kirk Gibson's home run vs. Dennis Eckersley)
6. 1951 NL tie-breaker ("the shot heard round the world")
7. Game 5, 1956 World Series (Don Larson's perfect game)
8. Game 6, 1975 World Series
9. April 1974: Hank Aaron breaks Babe Ruth's record
10t. Game 7, 1992 NLCS (usually framed as an attack on Barry Bonds for not throwing Bream out)
10t. 1978 AL tie-braker (the Bucky Dent game)
Removed from the list above: Texas 30, Baltimore 3 (formerly #7 hence Paul's comment), Ruth's called shot, Pujols HR vs. Lidge, Game 7, 1960 World Series (Bill Mazeroski's home run)
Would you consider Game 2, 2000 World Series? ("Clemens throws bat head at Piazza," but I don't think people associate this with a specific game.) It probably wouldn't make the top 10 anyway, would it?
And I don't think people especially remember the games in which career records were broken (McGwire #62, Bonds #71, Bonds #756, Rickey's stolen base -- for a quick 10 points each name the opponents in any of those games) so much as that they were broken.
Another honorable mention: Game 1, 1996 ALCS (Jeffrey Maier)
Meanwhile, the game that inspired this post was Game 5, 1999 NLCS (Mets over Braves in 15), yet I don't think even that game makes the top ten. (Trying to pretend to be a casual fan, I'd slot it ahead of Jeffrey Maier but behind Sid Bream. Game 7, 1992 NLCS should probably replace Ruth's called shot in the 10 proper, since it's not like people can readily place the year or opponent on that, just the idea that Ruth did it once.)
Last honorable mention before I finally let this post lie: Game 5, 1995 ALDS. If ever there was a game that I thought would resonate through the ages, and that arguably ought to... and yet I claim that hardly anyone ever even thinks of this game.
"A 129-minute hockey game is the equivalent of a 19-inning baseball game, the likes of which cause oohing and ahing for decades if it happens in the postseason. That is, it would cause oohing ahing. The longest postseason game in baseball history went 18 innings."
--King Kaufman
Think quick and tell me everything you know about that 18-inning game. I immediately recognized it, though I didn't watch it (I suspect few people did). Without looking up the details, as I recall this game involved two teams that played each other in several post-season series over a 10-year span. It had two particular heroes, of whom one is now a national disgrace and the other a utility infielder in Arizona.
So would you say the longest game in post-season baseball history achieved anything close to "oohing and ahing for decades," as opposed to being a mostly forgotten curiosity three years later?
"Today in Oakland A's History" has been featuring radio calls from these fantastic A's victories all year, but today it was a loss, specifically this 17-16 game.
...a game I remember well because I was at this 1-0 game.
(Ah, Retrosheet, correcting one's faulty memories: I could've sworn that 5-0 game was a 1-0 game, which it was until the 8th.)
"Baseball Primer needs to buy a franchise and make it open-source. "
--comment #29 on this thread
So would that mean the team would send a guy down to Triple-A because random user submitted a mod to that effect?
Do I read the April 30 entry on this blog correctly?
It compares Max Sapp (23rd overall pick in the 2006 draft) to eight other players, seven of whom were picked 21st or earlier. (But how dare a team fail to snag Joba Chamberlain from the rough!)
Isn't that sort of like blaming the 1984 Washington Bullets (or any of 19 other teams) for drafting players other than Michael Jordan, Hakeem, or Charles Barkley?
How did it take until comment #4 on this thread to point that out?
My team in the Kimera Bartee Open (fantasy baseball league that rewards players for playing badly) has a collective hitting line that represents about 1.5 seasons worth of a real full-time player's at-bats. So, multiplying everything by 2/3, we get:
AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI SB CS BB K GIDP E
616 86 153 34 4 6 56 18 4 60 116 13 12
Our hypothetical bad player is hitting .248/.315/.346 (for OBP, assume no HBP or sac flies) - in today's offensive environment that's unacceptable, but you could squint and imagine a below-average shortstop. 34 doubles? 18 steals? Just 12 errors?
That's a lot better than Tony F. Pena would do (and yes, Pena is one of the players represented by this composite- had a big decision between Pena and Adam Everett with the #2 overall pick, and I'm still shocked that Pena was still around at #13).
Our composite hypothetical pitcher is 8-12 over 168 1/3 innings, with 186 hits allowed, 114 runs, 20 HR, 76 BB, 97 K. RA = 6.09, WHIP = 1.56
So far Deadspin has run at least three editions of "The Dark Side of the Locker Room." One of them was actually quite good: Jeff Passan writing about a Fresno State basketball player whose girlfriend had taken out a restraining order. The other two that I've seen were unbelievably lame, including Jeff Pearlman getting sand in an unmentionable place because how dare Will Clark be mean to him, and then this one.
A few rules of thumb that I would have thought were common sense:
1. Act as though you belong, and other people will act as though you do (the converse is also true)
2. If you're in a locker room, don't stare.
3. Athletes like to yell. (Blame the testosterone, or the greenies.) If they're blatantly just trying to yank your chain, give your chain some slack.
4. Not a rule so much as an observation: I don't for the life of me understand what was wrong with what Piniella did in this anecdote.
Now obviously a feature like this should only get the most extreme stories -- which is all the more reason why I've been transcendently disappointed so far. People will care even less about the run-of-the-mill interactions.
But I'd be willing to be that my favorite Standard-Times writer has at least ten fantastic stories, nine of which he absolutely can't share. And even I have a thoroughly mediocre story from the only professional sporting event I ever "covered" (a basketball game at Boston College almost counts as professional, but not quite).
On January 1, 2000, the Boston Bruins and New Jersey Devils skated to a 2-2 tie. Whoever usually covered Bruins games for SportsTicker was probably off celebrating the holiday.
I got post-game quotes from the visiting locker room by standing near the edge of the throng, but I didn't have any questions that nobody else already asked.
On my way from the press ring to the locker rooms I got lost and accidentally wound up completely outside the stadium. Despite my credential the security people almost didn't let me in, but finally did.
(If they hadn't, the wire service story might have had one or two fewer Martin Brodeur quotes, though life would have continued.)
Sal Fasano would be a 0, Michael Irvin would be 100, and even Michael Jack Schmidt would probably still be at least in the 30s given how long Philadelphia's fans still booed him.
What about Scott Rolen and J.D. Drew, both of whom I just acquired in the same fantasy baseball deal? (Something about them both stimulated the same part of my brain, and I was trying to remember what else they had in common besides both being made of glass.)
"The Padres' Greg Maddux will make his second attempt at joining the elite 350-victory club against the Giants."
--photo caption on Yahoo! Sports' MLB front page
I hear if the season goes especially well for him, later this summer he might get to take a crack at joining the elite 360-victory club.
Quoting Joe Sheehan:
"I discovered yesterday that the Yankees don’t play on Labor Day, which seems silly. Looking deeper, it appears that MLB is continuing to kill the tradition of holiday baseball. There are 11 games on Memorial Day, just five of them in the daytime, one of those in Toronto. Labor Day features 10 games, eight of them during the day.
Everybody plays on July 4, but that’s only because it’s a Friday. Six of those games are scheduled for the daytime, although a handful of others have late-afternoon or early-evening starts, presumably to allow for fireworks.
I’m sure there are reasons for this trend, but you would think that an industry that so desperately tries to connect itself to its past in some ways would embrace the idea of an American pastime on American holidays, baseball in the sunshine on a Monday afternoon as a means of kicking off the summer or ending it."
I realize Monday and Thursday are both frequent travel days for teams, but having that many teams miss a major holiday is outrageous.
(Fun Labor Day schedule quirk: When the A's had their 20-game winning streak in 2002, they began a series against the Royals on Labor Day, but took the Tuesday off.)
I'd forgotten about this until now, but during Friday's Cardinals-Giants game, Dave Flemming cited as evidence of Troy Glaus's struggles the fact that he was recently replaced in a double-switch for the first time in his major league career.
I remember hoping someone reminded Flem that there's a better explanation for why that particular double-switch was Glaus's first. On further review I suppose it at least shows that Glaus was highly thought-of in 2005.
"Only an idiot" would publicly call out the people he's hired to make his company succeed. If they're not doing what you want them to do, fire them; either way, nobody cares what you think.
"By embracing baseball analytics, Brian Bannister has transformed himself into a must-own fantasy pitcher. "
--headline text at fantasysports.yahoo.com
You know, I think it's utterly fantastic that Brian Bannister is a baseball stat geek (as well as an actual pitcher). But his stat-geekdom isn't what makes him succeed on the mound! If that were all you needed, hey, sign me up. But I know better than to think a 55-mph fastball will work at this level.
Even among people with the raw talent to be pro athletes, understanding stat geek principles is a far cry from applying them. I heard somewhere that Dante Bichette (of all people), for example, had a deep innate understanding that OBP is life. This didn't change the fact that hacking at the first hittable pitch he saw was too ingrained in him to do it any other way.
(Ironically, whatever Bannister preaches, what he practices is well worth staying away from if you do fantasy baseball: In the long run his strikeout rate is unlikely to be sustainable.)
This entire King Kaufman column (both halves: the kid going to the NBA, and the Red Sox jersey) is so obviously right that I'm depressed that any of it actually needed to be written.
You got a problem with that?
I... actually don't. I agree with the Yankees 100% here. I'd like to claim that I'd still feel that way even if I were Catholic, though of course it's impossible to know for sure.
It's small sample size but the Orioles are undefeated since switching from "Orioles Magic" as their take-the-field song to Saliva's "Click Click Boom."
The A's take-the-field music seems to be up to the starting pitcher: Joe Blanton, for example, gets the cheesiest country songs imaginable. (Mark Mulder always warmed up to "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger." That was Mulder's song, and only Mulder's, until he was traded and Barry Zito took it over; since Zito's departure the Daft Punk has lain fallow.)
Every few months I change my mind about what song I'd most want to warm up to as the home team starting pitcher. For awhile I was in a "Shaft" (extended instrumental intro) frame of mind, but now I just wonder if any team would actually be willing to do "YYZ." Oops, I actually mean "The Camera Eye." Getting my Moving Pictures tracks confused in my middle age.
I have no opinion yet about the suspicious dark smudges on Jake Peavy's hand, but I love to tears that both this thread and this thread became so obscene so quickly.
These players are not only on one of my "real" fantasy teams but also on my team in the Kimera Bartee Open (which rewards playing badly):
Kurt Suzuki (Scoresheet)
Asdrubal Cabrera (both a Scoresheet and a roto)
Adam Everett (Scoresheet)
Alfredo Amezaga (Scoresheet)
Dontrelle Willis (Scoresheet)
Ian Kennedy (roto)
I realized at today's game that the ideal visiting team for any game we attend has these properties:
1. Multiple "tell your kids you saw him play" greats, but with top-to-bottom depth of fun talent.
2. Better offense than pitching staff (if Julia is along)
3. Loyal fan base of regional transplants, yet not a huge bandwagon following.
(Games with 10K fans are depression, but on the other hand crowded concourses and a mad throng onto the BART bridge are problems unto themselves, and one or two teams just have jerky fans.)
My completely subjective ranking of potential visiting teams to Oakland (only 16 of whom actually do visit the A's this year) by how excited I'd be to see them play, all other things being equal (day of week, month of year, weather, A's starting pitcher, etc.). Assume the visiting starting pitcher is equally likely to be any of their top five. (Teams shown in italics don't actually visit Oakland in 2008.)
1.Milwaukee. For scarcity reasons (yeah sure, we could see a team play at the Giants, but... brr!) this list might overrate NL teams. (An unwittingly pro-interleague play data point? Incidentally Julia strongly favors a balanced schedule across all 30 teams, tradition be damned.) And alas, the Brewers don't visit Oakland this year (and haven't since they were an AL team). But man: Ryan Braun? Prince Fielder? Rickie Weeks? Beloved former A's backstop Jason Kendall? Baseball-cheeseheads who haven't had a team to be this excited about in many years? Suspect pitching staff?
2. Cleveland. As they announced the visiting lineup Julia and I cheered for both Grady Sizemore (tremendous player) and Asdrubal Cabrera (his name is Asdrubal). The past n times I've seen the Indians, Oakland has started a LHP; this time finally Travis Hafner was still in the lineup. And the hypnotically undulating paunch made Dana Eveland look svelte. (Ah, I have a weakness for overweight southpaws. I too am lefthanded.)
3. Philadelphia. Reigning NL MVP Jimmy Rollins went to Julia's high school. The marquee value is top-heavy (as marquee value tends to be) but Rollins, Utley, and Howard more than hold their own. And I've greatly enjoyed the transplanted visiting fans at every Phillies-Giants game I've ever been to. We'll see the Phillies in person at least twice in June.
4. Cincinnati. Once Jay Bruce (Jay Bruce! no relation that we know of) gets his call-up, Ken Griffey will only be the third-biggest draw (for me) in the Reds' outfield!
5. Detroit. Tough call between the Tigers and Red Sox until I remembered Miguel Cabrera (don't fret about the slow start: I say cold weather + sample size fluke), and more importantly some points against BOS@OAK games.
6. Boston. The defending champions need no introduction. Quite a lineup surrounding Ortiz and Manny. But... the most annoying road fans I've ever seen in the Coliseum have been Red Sox fans. Also, the place gets mega-crowded.
7. NY Mets. Another very top-heavy roster but oh, those stars. And a 40% chance (health permitting) to see Johann or Pedro? Even after discounting for injury I like those odds.
8. Chicago White Sox. I assume this is the biggest surprise so far. In no particular order it's Ozzie, beloved former A's slugger Nick Swisher, the 20% chance to watch Mark Buehrle pitch, and a great fan base.
9. Arizona Young rising stars, plus 40% chance to see Dan Haren's homecoming or watch Brandon Webb pitch. (But Webb vs. A's might just be too depressing.)
10. Atlanta Maybe I overrate Brian McCann and Kelly Johnson for fantasy baseball reasons. But Chipper Jones is still surprisingly good and there's beloved former A's center fielder Mark Kotsay to welcome back.
11. LA Dodgers This is tricky, since it's not as if Jackie Robinson or Sandy Koufax were on the 2008 edition. And I wouldn't go anywhere near a Dodgers-Giants game given all the hubbub. But since the next LAD@OAK series won't actually conflict with our wedding, I imagine Julia will really want to go.
12. NY Yankees. Franchise cache (thinking about Julia's likely preferences led me to drop the next two teams two spots apiece at the last minute). And they're still very good.
13. Colorado. Tulo, Helton, Holliday, and if nothing else they're the defending NL champs.
14. LA Angels. This was a fine rivalry when the A's were good. But if both teams aren't at each other's throats, the Angels are... still generally fun to watch, and they have Vlad. Oh, and Torii Hunter now. Still not quite top 10 material (if you count both leagues) given that the rivalry will be a little one-sided for a bit. There's also anti-scarcity at play: Can't come to this series? Catch them again in six weeks.
15. Chicago Cubs. This could be their year but I really suspect this wouldn't be worth the annoyance factor (crowds, some of the visiting fans).
16. Seattle. The Mariners are Oakland's archetypal opponent, sort of the traveling partner, also the "not the good one but not the bad one" division rival. The star power is basically just Ichiro.
17. San Diego. This is almost entirely for the 40% shot at Peavy or Maddux, neither of whom I've seen in person before.
18. Tampa Bay. About ten spaces higher than they would've been a year or two ago. Obviously no road fan base to speak of, but interesting lineup + leaky pitching staff.
19. Kansas City. Also quite a bit higher than I'd have predicted. Essentially Butler, Gordon, 20% shot at Greinke, and of course the Kubicek connection.
20. Toronto. Beloved former A's DH Frank Thomas is the closest thing to a face on this surprisingly good yet unspectacular team.
21. St. Louis. Pujols!
22. Minnesota. Joestin Mauerneau can only sell you so many tickets.
23. Pittsburgh. Are you shocked they're this high? I can commiserate with the Pirate fans I know, and really, the next six teams are all bland at best.
24. Washington. Lastings Milledge and Ryan Zimmerman can only sell you so many tickets.
25. Texas. The "bad" division rival.
26. Houston. We've welcomed back beloved former A's shortstop Miguel Tejada many times as it is. After him and Berkman, blah.
27. Florida. Why?
28. Baltimore. Below the Marlins only because they come at least once a year. (And I guess Hanley Ramirez beats... Nick Markakis?)
29. San Francisco. Sure there's a 40% chance of Matt Cain or Tim Lincecum. But it's still the worst of both worlds: Depressingly bad opposing team, yet aggravating crowd situation.
No idea whether Baseball Tonight still employs Forrest Gump, but if you want to see/hear something priceless go to the MLB.com Media Center for Wednesday, April 2, click on the Daily Rewind link for ARI @ CIN, and wait for (or skip to) the 1:15 mark.
You were saying, Jeff?
(In a perfect world, "This guy is not a clutch hitter" would become a SportsCenter cliche. Well, in an almost-perfect world that nonetheless has SportsCenter cliches at all.)
"Channel 4 San Diego will carry 150 Padres games this season, all of which will be in high definition. Matt Vasgersian, who is in his seventh season, and Mark Grant, entering his 12th season, are the main play-by-play team, with Tony Gwynn and Steve Quis coming off the bench. The pregame show for 7:05 p.m. home games starts at 6 p.m. The postgame show with John Weisbarth and Bob Scanlan follows all home games and most away games."
--this column (emphases added)
Along those lines, Denny Hocking can be heard on Fox Sports Radio on the weekends now. Your mission is to find still more obscure/mediocre players (but just distinguished enough that we'd actually remember them) who now have obscure/mediocre media gigs.
Six teams, 169 roster spots filled as of March 31, 2008 (Opening Day for most of the league).
Obviously doesn't account for future add/drops; also doesn't include the "suck league" team that drafts later this week.
Team representation:
Arizona Diamondbacks: 11
Atlanta Braves: 11
Cleveland Indians: 10
Kansas City Royals: 10
Tampa Bay Devil Rays: 9
[...]
Seattle Mariners: 0 (purely unintentional)
4-time offender:
Conor Jackson (1B-ARI)
3-time offenders:
Adam Jones (OF-BAL)
Josh Bard (C-SD)
Kelly Johnson (2B-ATL)
Lastings Milledge (OF-WAS)
2-time offenders:
Adam Dunn (OF-CIN)
Andrew Miller (SP-FLA)
Asdrubal Cabrera (2B-CLE)
Billy Butler (1B-KC)
Brian McCann (C-ATL)
C.J. Wilson (RP-TEX)
Carlos Pena (1B-TB)
Chris B. Young (OF-ARI)
Daniel Cabrera (SP-BAL)
David Wright (3B-NYM)
Derrek Lee (1B-CHC)
Hiroki Kuroda (SP-LAD)
Huston Street (RP-OAK)
Jacoby Ellsbury (OF-BOS)
Jamie Moyer (SP-PHI)
Joakim Soria (RP-KC)
Jonathan Broxton (RP-LAD)
Justin Duchscherer (SP-OAK)
Justin Verlander (SP-DET)
Kosuke Fukudome (OF-CHC)
Matt Diaz (OF-ATL)
Peter Moylan (RP-ATL)
Rickie Weeks (2B-MIL)
Troy Percival (RP-TB)
Zack Greinke (SP-KC)
Two more below the fold. (One took place via web server from Thursday nine days ago to earlier this week; the other took place on ESPN this morning.)
Alameda Islanders
12-team head-to-head keeper league
Roster Positions: C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, CI, MI, IF, LF, CF, RF, OF, OF, OF, Util, SP, SP, RP, RP, P, P, P, BN, BN, BN, BN, BN, BN, DL, DL, DL
Stat Categories: R, HR, RBI, SB, FPCT, AVG, OBP, SLG, W, SV, K, HLD, ERA, WHIP
Players in bold were kept; there's no meaningful distinction between "round 1" and "round 8" but we could keep "rookies" at the end. (I got very lucky with our league's playing time cutoffs on mine.)
Round Pick Player Position
1. (9) Brian McCann C
2. (16) Todd Helton 1B
3. (33) Derrek Lee 1B
4. (40) Justin Morneau 1B
5. (57) David Wright 3B
6. (64) Derek Jeter SS
7. (81) Carl Crawford LF
8. (88) Carlos Zambrano SP
9. (105) Kosuke Fukudome RF
10. (112) Pat Burrell LF
11. (129) Rickie Weeks 2B
12. (136) Kelly Johnson 2B
13. (153) Josh Willingham LF
14. (160) Lastings Milledge LF,CF,RF
15. (177) Conor Jackson 1B
16. (184) Joakim Soria RP
17. (201) Jay Bruce CF
18. (208) Jonathan Broxton RP
19. (225) Bronson Arroyo SP
20. (232) Hiroki Kuroda SP
21. (249) Zack Greinke SP,RP
22. (256) Dave Bush SP
23. (273) C.J. Wilson RP
24. (280) Andrew Miller SP
25. (297) Aaron Heilman RP
26. (304) Al Reyes RP
27. (321) Justin Duchscherer RP
28. (328) Jacoby Ellsbury LF,CF
-----
California Ceiling Cats
10-team roto redraft league
C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, MI, CI, OF, OF, OF, OF, OF, Util
P, P, P, P, P, P, P, P, P, BN, BN, BN
Overall picks #2, 19, 22, 39, etc.
1. Hanley Ramirez
2. David Ortiz
3. Grady Sizemore
4. Adam Dunn
5. Derek Lee
6. Chris Young (Ari)
7. Corey Hart
8. Huston Street
9. Matt Capps
10. Rafael Soriano
11. Joakim Soria
12. Francisco Liriano
13. Rickie Weeks
14. Edwin Encarnacion
15. Ben Sheets
16. Lastings Milledge
17. Jeremy Bonderman
18. Conor Jackson
19. Derek Lowe
20. Orlando Hudson
21. George Sherrill
22. Eric Gagne
23. Troy Percival
24. Jonathan Broxton
25. Josh Bard
Red Sox players did exactly the right thing.
I'm shocked that so many people disagree with that seemingly simple proposition, and that the disagreement is so illogical.
"Mister High Standards" has the most blatantly false user handle ever.
Chad caught a funny error in this BIll James piece on Slate. (He meant "more than 1/10 the number of seconds," not "more than ten times the number of seconds.")
Bill James is arguably the most misunderstood figure in baseball analysis. He doesn't pretend to have all the answers, but then doesn't pretend that anyone else does either. (Think about how he went against the grain on the question of Pete Rose's guilt. It just dawned on me today how perfectly consistent that is with the rest of his analytic approach.) That level of humility is the perfect starting point for scientific inquiry.
On the other hand, his actual forays into number crunching are frighteningly ad hoc and sometimes more complicated than they needed to be, a conspicuous result of a human being (albeit an insightful one) doing a lot of trial and error until he trips over something that works (but then of course tests it further to see how robust it is).
Never trust any Bill James formula until you've sanity-checked the explanation behind it (unlike some of his peers, he uses plain English very well and his work is reasonably transparent). On the other hand, that's exactly the advice he'd probably give himself. He'd probably chide a few other stat geeks for pretending to be a lot more certain of the future than is plausible.
His sense of humor is also marvelous, but perhaps the most misunderstood element of his public identity. Given his very subtle humility, I'm sure his equally subtle dry wit is often grievously mistaken for crankiness, and his self-deprecation mistaken for everyone-deprecation.
14 teams, 24 rounds, keeper system of escalating draft pick compensation. I picked 7th, 22nd, etc.
Roster Positions: C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, OF, OF, OF, Util, SP, SP, SP, RP, RP, RP, P, BN, BN, BN, BN, BN, BN, BN, BN, DL, DL
Stat Categories: R, RBI, SB, TB, OBP, W, SV, K, ERA, WHIP
Keepers in bold.
Jake Peavy
Nick Swisher
C.C. Sabathia
Huston Street
Lastings Milledge
Kyosuke Fukudome
Alex Gordon
Adam Jones
Conor Jackson
Billy Butler
Troy Percival
Carlos Pena
Brian McCann
Justin Verlander
Asdrubal Cabrera
Andrew Miller
Ian Kennedy
Kelly Johnson
Yunel Escobar
Daniel Cabrera
Dan Wheeler
Peter Moylan
James Shields
Matt LaPorta
AB R HR RBI BB K AVG OBP SLG OPS
April 75 4 0 7 3 8 0.200 0.238 0.213 0.451
May 59 7 2 8 8 7 0.254 0.338 0.424 0.762
June 94 14 1 9 10 10 0.298 0.364 0.447 0.811
July 106 18 3 17 7 15 0.368 0.410 0.528 0.939
August 111 15 2 17 7 8 0.306 0.350 0.468 0.818
September 100 8 0 15 8 20 0.180 0.236 0.220 0.456
But I also have to admit that they're not nearly as damning as I thought they might have been.
Can I get odds on whether Seth Macfarlane's best Chris Berman impression makes it to network TV one way or another this year?
(If you weren't already familiar with these, the best (and first one made public) is the bottom one on the linked post.)
(Fourth league, but the other three are teams for which I've kept the same name over the years.)
Jungle Patrol: I plan to rotate the tag-line between the various quotes featured on that link.
Part 1 of N; forgive the ugly formatting.
AB R HR RBI BB K AVG OBP SLG OPS
April 86 24 5 15 24 16 0.326 0.473 0.593 1.066
May 108 16 2 14 10 23 0.259 0.322 0.426 0.748
June 86 9 1 10 13 21 0.256 0.356 0.360 0.717
July 73 16 4 16 8 17 0.356 0.427 0.658 1.084
August 93 16 3 8 16 21 0.269 0.382 0.452 0.833
September 75 10 1 5 8 19 0.200 0.282 0.267 0.549
"Hispanic baseball pioneer Roberto Clemente’s uniform number 21 will be retired from use by all 30 teams in Major League Baseball if the New York City Council has its way.
--NY Sun via Baseball Primer (emphasis added)
In the grand scheme of things they matter far less than their proponents think -- or at least, they ought to matter a lot less. (Power to the people: we have significantly better access to the players and games of our time than ever before -- and even to a very large body of classic games; more important, we have much better access to enough analytic tools that we don't need a HoF either to be the gatekeeper or to prevent the deserving from being forgotten.)
That said, I have a few brief points to make. Feel free to argue with me, as long as you understand that I'm right, that it's not even close, and that I feel no need to discuss any of these further:
Bert Blyleven = yes
Tim Raines = yes
Jim Rice = no
Don Mattingly = no
Barry Bonds (when the time comes) = yes [with as many disclaimers as you see fit: disclaim him until the cows come home, but to omit him completely would be antithetical to any conceivable purpose of a HoF]
Anyone else is either uncontroversial enough to catch my eye, or borderline enough that apathy wins out for me. (This includes McGwire and Sosa: My blink-of-an-eye reaction would be yes to both, but I'm not so married to either of them that I'd find excluding them unjust, even if I found the reasons to exclude them laughably contrived.)
P.S. Here's a frightening collection of actual arguments made by actual voters.
Sandy Koufax did not juice, despite an ambiguity of the English language.
The reason I bother posting this is that it reminds me I got through maybe five pages of Squeeze Play (Leavy's attempt at a farcical novel). I guess you'd like it if you were the sort of person who liked Primary Colors. I had assumed that it would be vaguely similar to Ball Four (but fictional rather than real); I was utterly wrong.
"We're now using draft slot as a criteri[on] for identifying comparables for prospects (this turns out to make a HUGE difference)."
--Nate Silver
Credit where it's due: Unless I'm mistaken, that idea first came up as a chat question to Silver a few months ago, as asked by joonpahk (Cambridge, MA)
The front page of today's Baseball Prospectus reminds me that my all-time favorite NFL/MLB/NBA logo is the old Denver Bronco D with the horse head. But if anything, the Bulls uniform (seen in the photo of Evan Longoria) does it even better.
That is, if instead of "assistant to the regional manager," Schrute weren't 'assistant to' anyone in particular.
(Something about the latest King Kaufman column brought this to mind.)
I have three comments about the Mitchell Report:
1. I find it fascinating that the only thing most people seem to care about is the naming of names.
2. In the part before the naming of names, Mitchell recommends a few solutions. Some of them are either obvious ("more education"), too vague to be useful, or both. One of the specific recognitions is to set up a permanent Department of Investigations (its actual name! - see page 37 of the PDF file), like the baseball counterpart to the office of a special prosecutor. It's hard for me to comment further given that I'd like to avoid confirming Godwin's Law.
3. Most importantly, I'm appalled by how many people want to scapegoat the MLB Players' Association for warning players about the potential adverse consequences of talking to Mitchell. The letter is here. Forgive me for stating the obvious, but the key points of that letter -- that Mitchell had no legal authority to grant anyone immunity (thus anything they told him could lead to criminal charges), and that the commissioner's office pointedly reserved the right to punish people for what they told Mitchell -- were not only quite true but also deeply consequential.
(And why I decline to think too hard about issues of who's in/out.)
Bowie Kuhn somehow made it in; Marvin Miller still hasn't. That's outrageous, yet is it even surprising?
"A few weeks ago, Bud Selig proudly announced that MLB’s revenues exceeded $6 billion in 2007. This is a watershed moment, a sign that the game, no matter its problems on a micro level, is as healthy and successful as it has ever been. (My extensive disagreements with his decisions and his approach aside, Selig’s reign has to be considered successful for this reason.)"
--Joe Sheehan (parentheses in original)
How much of an understatement is "has to be considered successful"?
Just think, though: all MLB had to do to get there was cozy up to some supremely corrupt politicians (for the new stadiums) and sign over the TV rights to a network that makes the game unwatchable.
By the way, have I mentioned my ambivalence about how, just when my wife had become a passionate A's fan, we've all but clinched that there will never again be a championship caliber baseball team whose home park is in Oakland?
Dmitri Young, Lastings Milledge, and Elijah Dukes are now teammates.
Nothing in The Dugout yet, but you know it's coming.
"Part of the problem was that [Dave] Winfield’s [10-year] contract [signed with the Yankees after the 1980 season] contained a cost of living adjustment, which meant that he received an automatic raise every year. He became much more expensive than the Yankees had initially planned (they apparently didn’t fully comprehend the impact of that clause at signing), and this was nettlesome to the owner."
--Stephen Goldman
I wonder whether the COLA percent was fixed. Given the year the deal was signed, I could imagine somebody vastly overestimating what inflation would be like through the 1980s (compared to the late '70s).
It's come to my attention that a big-city sports writer recently began a sentence:
"The only positive thing I can think of about Hitler’s time on earth [...]"
There's no need to even finish a sentence like that, as the first part already marks the speaker as a deranged attention-whore.
It gets even better when the writer in question refers to Colonial pamphleteers in a pejorative sense. (Damn that Thomas Paine...)
(OK fine, here's a second-hand link, via Baseball Think Factory)
We have two month-by-month picture calendars in this apartment. One was created for our honeymoon and shows a glacier for November 2007. The November 2007 picture on the other one is of a man who died this morning, way before his time.
Earlier this week I'd looked at the calendar and thought it somewhat ironic that he'd been released by three different teams since we got the calendar as a giveaway.
There is also an eerie connection involving back-of-the-rotation A's pitchers who had previously been with Tampa Bay. Well, maybe two is one short of a "eerie connection," but if I were pitching in the Rays system right now I wouldn't want to take my chances on being the third.
Full article here but I learned everything I needed to know from the block quote here:
"This is a major step in the right direction. Bonds was a cancer."
Feinstein leaves (intentionally?) vague just what the "this" modifies (it's the first word of a new paragraph) but surely he doesn't mean the indictment itself. I hear Vince Carter is hard to get along with sometimes; why not indict him as well?
"In the court of public opinion you can be guilty at any time, especially when the evidence of your guilt is overwhelming."
The Baseball Primer posters mentioned Feinstein apparently has some ugly history involving the Duke lacrosse case. Someone less lazy than me can look it up and comment as needed.
"Being a hero is not a right granted by the constitution; it is a privilege. "
So rumor has it that people who play sports for a living are capable of being something other than a hero or a villain. I think this intermediate state is known as humanity.
"Joe Nuxhall, Modern Baseball’s Youngest Player, Is Dead at 79"
--most poorly conceived NY Times headline ever?
"Check my license. Mohammed Jafar.
[Bonds], when you're done with this fare, get your indicted ass down to the convention center!"
So what's going on in the world of baseball today?
(I do have to give MLB.com credit for acknowledging the Bonds indictment, and in fact making that the top story. On the other hand, I take issue with "Player A might have reached a deal with Team B" supposedly being a bigger story than the hardware.)
My prediction that the Angels would sign both Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez is starting to look terrible. Given that the A's probably have to blow it up and start over either way, I can't decide whether the lack of an Anaheim juggernaut makes that more or less sad.
Oaklandathletics.com wants me to vote for Bill King for the Ford C. Frick award. I can't really see what difference it makes to King in the afterlife whether he wins it or not. Either way, I assume he's in a happy place these days.
From the first six posts to this thread:
"Why would the Astros do this? Wasn't someone willing to give them something better for Lidge?"
"This is interesting. I thought Bourn was worth a lot more than that."
Finally. (If they're even smart enough to go through with it.)
Chuck Tanner will try to help restore Pirates discipline.
I'm sure it's possible that lack of discipline cost them a game or two last year, maybe a handful this decade. Meanwhile lack of talent cost them 15-20 games this year and well over 100 this decade.
If I put my wife in the batters box and asked her to hit home runs, I'm sure her failure to do so would reflect some sort of character flaw.
Incidentally, I agree completely with most of the commenters about what a travesty it is that people still sing "God Bless America" in the middle of a ballgame.
Oh, while we're simultaneously having a fit of libertarian pique and thinking about things Dwight thinks about, rarely are their more truthful words written than:
"You can feel the collapse of [the Johnstown] economy coming. If the primary impetus for what stabilizes the district is one man's patronage, the aftershocks will devastate."
See also military base closures, and the poor deluded people who argued against them for pure local-economy reasons that had nothing to do with national defense.
The last several times I've read "the D-word" (the feminine hygiene one, not the fate of your eternal soul one) have all related to Bostonians, their sports teams, and/or those teams' fans.
I think this breaks that streak. In fact, I think the quasi-curse word I've used to frame this post conveys almost the exact degree to which this is grating: Enough to merit a word like that but harmless in the grand scheme of things.
(And I even like Joe Girardi!)
This Onion article captures exactly why I was seething in rage at Fox Sunday (this is what I get for inexplicably backtracking from my standard practice of muting the TV for Fox baseball).
Meanwhile, the obvious punchline to this post was dutifully made in the very first comment.
(On the other hand, the funniest thing Josh Fruhlinger ever wrote about a comic strip wasn't on his own blog, but in a comment to this post (warning: link contains foul language and may be seen as heresy to some Peanuts fans).)
Not nearly enough is made out of the fact that when the Texas Rangers traded Alex Rodriguez to the New York Yankees, the Rangers agreed to pay a large chunk of the salary owed to Rodriguez under his contract -- that is, the contract out of which he just opted.
Any contract extension agreed to before the opt-out would have supplemented the original contract: The Rangers obviously wouldn't have been on the hook for whatever else Rodriguez (actually Scott Boras on Rodriguez's behalf) and the Yankees agreed to, but they would still have owed the Yankees money until the original contract ended. ($21 million in all.)
Once Rodriguez opted out, of course, any new contract he signed would replace the one he terminated. In other words, Tom Hicks no longer owes George Steinbrenner $21 million.
When Brian Cashman claims that the Yankees won't negotiate with Rodriguez after an opt-out, even though the posturing is of some sort of hallowed principle, it really just means that he thinks the $21 million difference makes the window where both sides would be content a whole lot smaller (probably non-existent).
The Yankees had a chance to get Rodriguez for $21 million less (from them) than he'd cost now (all other things being equal). They failed to take advantage of this -- or, more likely, were unwilling to let Rodriguez/Boras keep some insanely high portion of that $21 million.
I imagine it was a lot like an ultimatum game, where Boras's demand simplified to (something like) $19 million of the $21 million, the Yankees called his bluff, and he followed through on his non-bluff.
Today Baseball Prospectus decided to repost its article last spring (one of a series of 30) on how the Boston Red Sox could win the World Series.
Given that the Sox weren't exactly underdogs, I think how the Colorado Rockies could win the World Series is much more interesting for your hindsight reading.
I meant to call my favorite Sox fans but it was well past midnight EDT when I remembered intending to do so.
This is why I still read the work of Bill Simmons despite the level of self-caricature he sometimes achieves. Simmons on how McCarver would analyze things from within a particular car commercial:
"John, here's the thing about our country -- it might be a country that belongs to folks like you and me, but the key to this country is that we fought two major World Wars in the 20th century, and each time, we defeated foes who could have potentially conquered democracy inside our borders. Had we NOT won those wars, this might not be our country right now. (Dramatic pause.) But we DID win those wars. And when you win wars, usually, with very few exceptions, you get to keep your country. That's why ... This is ouuuuuuur country."
It's funny because it's true, and it's sad because it's funny.
McCarver was my favorite broadcaster when I was ten years old. But I was an unusually pedantic, tendentious, and all-around annoying ten year old. At that age I probably could have done his schtick yet not realized why it was so grating.
Nate Silver rocks my world (find it for yourself).
Am I to understand that some of you are four wins away from getting money back from Jordan's Furniture?
I'm floored. How was it even possible, given the quality of today's TMQ and today's Sports Guy, for this Tim Keown column to have the worst lead-in of the three (by a wide margin!)?
What part of "I [Paul Byrd] have a pituitary tumor, and disclosed my medical treatment to my team and to MLB the entire time I took it" did Keown (willfully) fail to understand? This column, and more than half the columns that led with the same topic, are almost exactly like the old middle school joke "Hey, I just took an aspirin. That means I just took DRUGS (omg lolz)!" -- except that they're all apparently dead serious.
It gets better when Keown decides to make fun of any Christian who wants to spread the word about why Christianity might be a good thing. I understand that many proselytizers are annoying and pushy, and that athletes who credit God for their success are especially annoying (paraphrasing from TMQ, Tony Dungy is dead right that God doesn't care about the outcome of sporting events). But we've reached the point in America where if you dare to even call yourself Christian, a large segment will deride you as a Jesus freak.
(DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT treating that last paragraph as some piece of martyrdom, or breaking out the world's smallest violin. This isn't about having a pity party; it's about how absurdly spiteful and hateful some people off when they vastly overstate their reasons for mocking any given person's religion.)
Getting back to Keown's medical slander (rather than his religious slander):
"There's been an eerie [...] pattern to the leakage of names, especially when it comes to HGH. [...] It's probably best not to speculate -- the lawyers hate that -- but there's a good chance a few World Series participants are promising to be good for a long, long time if they can just make it through the next 10 days without needing a news conference."
And here when I read the word "eerie" I thought he might actually start to question the timing of some of these suspiciously timed leaks. But no, instead he decides to lob innuendo at 50 players at once. After all, it's not as though any of them have reputations to uphold (though doing this after he's already made fun of people who dare defend their own honor is a nice rhetorical touch).
Keown, not that you'd have any reason to read this blog, but you're chicken-shit.
Therefore, I should have known better than to savor the delicious irony of J.D. Drew's Game 6 grand slam and its effect on one particular sports writer.
The entire second half of this column makes me want to bang my head repeatedly against a brick wall. (This after the man joked about naming a kid after Josh Beckett but was too much of a yuppie frou-frou to make the commonsense decision that "Josh" is a first name and "Beckett" in fact is not.)
I don't know which would be worse: That he were the effect of the Conventional Wisdom, or that he were the cause.
While we're here riffing on ESPN columns, has Easterbrook finally lost it? Chad & I traded plenty of e-mail about this column, wherein he confirmed that yes, RCA Dome can be called "antiquated" despite its being built in 1983; and yes, even though Easterbook egregiously compared apples to oranges, a punt return TD is more likely than a successful Hail Mary pass if the distance to the goal line exceeds the quarterback's arm range.
(Here's why I call it: Haily mary situations only come up every few games, whereas any given game should feature a good half-dozen punt return opportunities. So "once a week versus once a decade" is quite the non sequitur. Heck, I've been to twice as many Raider games as weddings.)
As for TMQ's Harry Potter reference Chad reminded me that the character in question died before passing through the arch, and that if such dark magic existed it would probably be hard to destroy (therefore some locked room in the Ministry of Magic, close to people who could study it but away from the general public, is the PERFECT place for it).
Coming full circle to the subject line (both Red Sox and CW): About two weeks ago I heard someone in an office break room express the hope for a Yankee-Red Sox ALCS on the grounds that no other match-up would be nearly as interesting. I nearly threw up in my mouth. More recently I heard a different person claim that Boston hadn't been to the World Series in 80 years -- from context they meant "prior to 2004," and more importantly they really meant "won" rather than "been to," though it's unclear whether they knew the second part. (1986 wasn't that long ago, certainly more recent than 1954...)
Fans, in any given moment, do not induce their teams to play well or play poorly, at least not nearly to the extent that your latest column implies.
(Come to think of it: If they did, then you and your brethren would have a lot of 'splaining to do, for jinxing your own franchise all those decades with that negative attitude. For shame!)
EXCEPTION: Strategically, Cub fans can be blamed for their team's own drought, in that their unwavering support means the Tribune Company can turn a healthy profit without needing to waste dollars on the margin attempting to assemble championship-caliber rosters.
(And not affiliated with ESPN.com)
"With Rick joining Bill Simmons, our readers will now enjoy the two best sports columnists anywhere."
To what extent can thinking people debunk that claim? (THE two best?!)
As mentioned here, I'll start with King Kaufman for the low-hanging fruit.