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Good article by Jason. In the media v media|blogger, it’s like a bear choosing between Usain Bolt and Ernie Lombardo: the media will always look for the easier target.
Magic Johnson preferred to play against Larry Bird, because that’s how greatness is defined.
Here-here Aaron Gleeman.
I just noticed… Aaron is a blogger turned columnist, and Murray Chass is a columnist turned blogger. In order to prove this, Aaron can make some outlandish steroids claim, and the rest of the media will give him a pass, while Chass can do the same thing, and the media will go after him.
(Did “backne” get much play in the MSM?)
Why is the season 162 games long? Don’t forget that Spring Training is a month and a half as well.
That’s easy: that’s the optimal point to match supply and demand. Or in corporate talk: that’s the most MLB and MLBPA can extract money from fans.
Did the Astros really trade Lance Berkman and Roy Oswalt? I never thought Drayton would do it.
You are loyal to whoever is giving you money, not to whoever you are giving money to.
Why does the All Star game give home field advantage in the World Series? Must be a ton of money.
Marketing. Not to mention that without a game 7, there is actually no home field advantage.
I definitely don’t like back-loaded deals for teams. That just makes it more difficult for teams to deal a guy if he stinks in a couple years.
No it doesn’t. Suppose the Astros signed a 3-yr deal with Morgan Ensberg for 1MM$, 1MM$ and 22MM$. And just before that third year, he gets hurt. Well, would it have helped if the Astros gave Ensberg 16MM$ in the two years prior, rather than 2MM$? If it did, then just take the 14MM$ that they saved and give it to the team that would take Ensberg. It’s the same thing. Read this:
http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/article/the_fallacy_of_paying_too_much_for_out_years/
How come Adam Dunn is a trade target in the media every single year of his existence and he never gets traded?
Fans don’t trade clutch hitters, and to a fan, a clutch hitter is someone who puts the bat on the ball. An excessively patient hitter, regardless of how effective he is, will always look like someone who you won’t miss. Fans love Vlad. They don’t care for Dunn.
Why is base running so terrible in the big leagues?
Chicks dig the long ball.
Why do teams play “no doubles” defense late in the game when they are winning by 1 run. Doesn’t that give the offense a better chance to get a base hit?
It does give them a better chance at one base, at the expense of fewer two-base hits. It’s one of those things that is a close call, and so, you need to work out the break-even points. From the studies I’ve seen, it seems to not be a big deal whichever way you go.
How come Joe West is always on Sportscenter?
I love what the MLB Network does with their highlights: just the games, the sounds of the play-by-play guy, and action. When they go to the gasbags on parade, I zone out very fast. I just want to see baseball, not gasbags. Speaking is not analysis.
A great writeup, and I love the conclusion:
But, that’s not an interesting story, and so it doesn’t get written. Instead, we get speculation about what the players might be doing to try and sabotage their manager, tea-leaf reading about the interpretation of some comment that was or wasn’t made in a way that some journalist thinks it should have been made, and the results of echo chamber conversations where a bunch of people who all think the same reinforce each other’s biases and then try to pass their opinions off as news.
Ignore all of it. None of it actually contains any kind of insight that you should care about.
The Mariners hitters stink. They’ve run into some really good pitchers lately. The result has been ugly. These are facts – stick to those. Leave the uninformed speculation about the players trying to get their managers fired to everyone else. It’s not worthy of discussion.
About Lance Berkman:
And Lance Berkman is one of them.
I profiled Lance for SI years ago, and truly enjoyed him. He’s an off-the-charts right-winger, which isn’t my cup. But the guy also has authenticity, and decency, and—I feel 100% confident in saying—never used steroids. He’s a Texas kid who attended Rice, then went on to star for the hometown ballclub, the Astros.
So, again, some players aren’t meant for New York. Berkman is an excellent addition—still enough pop in his bat to make a difference; a tremendous clubhouse guy who won’t complain if he’s out of the lineup for a few days. But he doesn’t belong in a big nothern city. He’s a country dude; a Texan through and through.
That said, I hope it goes well.
I really do.
Geoff Baker:
And I think it’s time for everyone to take a page out of the book of Bill James, founder of sabermetrics, and start to think “outside the box” again.
Because the thinking I’m seeing offered up, even from people who followed James in their youth and are now numbers wizards themselves, seems to be creating an entirely new box to confine ourselves within.
That new box states that anything that can’t be quantified with numbers, or a stats formula written in “The Book” by Tom Tango, or measured with a high degree of certainty, has to be discarded.
These same people will keep repeating that team chemistry doesn’t really matter, citing a stock quote from Jim Leyland—now apparently recognized as the greatest thinking mind in baseball by some of those same folks who had written him off as “yesterday’s man” five years ago.
OK, you have Leyland saying it doesn’t matter. Who else in the game? I can give you a dozen managers off the top of head who say it does, Don Wakamatsu among them. Jack Zduriencik has been around the game forever and says it matters.
Know who else does? Bill James. A guy who invented stats wizardry and has actually worked for a major league team.
When we sat down to interview James back in spring training, he said the Red Sox—you know, Terry Francona, Theo Epstein, two World Series since 2004—paid a huge amount of attention to it.
Baseball would be a quite remarkable activity if it was the one place in the world where your co-workers didn’t have any impact on how productive you were. But in fact, baseball is a high-stress occupation and those sort of stress-inducing activities have a sort of, just have a huge impact on how the team functions, I think.
Can James quantify it? Nope.
Nor can he quantify the intangibles that a catcher brings to the table. I asked him then, how we could possibly go about considering things we can’t quantify. His answer? Start thinking outside the box.
You don’t learn by studying the stuff you know. You learn by studying the stuff that you don’t know. So, if you divide the world into (crap) that you know and (crap) that you don’t know, and you study the stuff that you know, then you’re not going to learn very much. All of the progress comes from studying the stuff that you don’t know. So, that’s really what’s interesting. And that’s where most of your focus should be. Studying stuff that you can’t agree about.
And maybe trying some of it, too.
I never said that, nor do I believe it.
Tim Marchman:
I took every player in baseball who has run up at least seven WAR since the beginning of the 2008 season, a fairly generous cutoff that demands just two seasons’ worth of above average play over the last two and a half years. (There were 105 such players.) I then ranked their WAR against the size of the market in which they play and against how many hits turn up on a Google search of their name, and averaged the resulting numbers.
Click for the full article. Here’s the list:
10) Franklin Gutierrez
9) Matt Garza
8) Joakim Soria
Tied-6) Ben Zobrist
Shin-Soo Choo
5) Kurt Suzuki
4) Jeremy Guthrie
Tied-2) Ryan Ludwick
David DeJesus
1) Paul Maholm
Articles like what Bill Baer is FJMing is exactly what newspapers need less of.
Report on things that only you can give me, with your inside access. Don’t give me your opinion about some bullsh!t. That’s for us bloggers to do.
That’s where you come in. I’m like Joe Girardi in that I’m big on preparation, and hate being caught off guard. I’d like to solicit our readers to help me bolster my arguments. Tell what are some of the most common rebuttals you’ve come up against when explaining these stats to people who are completely unfamiliar with them, and how you counter their arguments. It’s radio, so short and succinct answers work best.
Let’s see, just like the Bush White House supplies Faux News with talking points (no political talk in this thread, posts will be deleted on sight… my capriciousness let me throw in that jab), so to will we supply some of the talking points:
1. We’re trying to figure out why; we’re constantly asking questions like how could Joe Carter have 115 RBI in a year where his SLG was under .400.
2. Those stats (RBI, ERA, etc) are good. We’re just trying to find new angles to show things in different, and sometimes better, ways.
3. We love getting surprises. We all think of Greg Maddux as someone who was able to get easy outs for his fielders. But, if we focus only on the non-fielder portion of his performance, his walks, HR, and strikeouts, virtually his entire success could be explained by his performance in that area. He was almost no better in getting outs on balls that stayed in the park than the average pitcher.
4. Streaks and hot/cold performances offer almost no predictive indications. A player’s performance in the past few years offers far more value in terms of predictions than a player’s 20 at bats against a certain pitcher, or a player’s hitting in the last two weeks. Players know this, but fans seem to be disbelieving.
First two are short. What do you guys got?
This is from TSN (Canada’s ESPN).
As far as I’m concerned, this is satire. And that means it’s protected by Copyright law. And that mean Youtube doesn’t have to listen to the eventual takedown notice from MLBAM (which is surely going to happen).
I’m not a lawyer, so TSN and Youtube’s lawyers can decide for themselves.
BPro’s Joe Sheehan has a newsletter. I don’t know anything about it, other than it exists.
Not exactly the question Kristi is asking, but I will say that when I run my baseball surveys, the leaders are either Mariners or Redsox fans (and this was before my involvement with the M’s). Yankee fans are well represented, but, I’d call it Mariners fans #1. These two lists are instructive.
I was wondering why I haven’t been reading any Rob Neyer for a while. Apparently, his RSS feed has changed. This is what it used to be:
http://myespn.go.com/blogs/feed?blog=sweetspot
This is what it is now:
http://espn.go.com/blog/feed?blog=sweetspot
I don’t know why the change was made, and I don’t know much about feeds. Some sort of linking should be in order. Anyway, for anyone else who was in my position, now you can get your fix in. The change happened on or around May 18.
A definite bias: all five are female.
Did you notice that when someone wants to point out a problem that they personally have, even if they are in the minority, they will label this as “The problem”.
For example:
It’s that time of the year where writers huff and puff their way to phony outrage insofar as the All-Star Game is concerned. Why are these articles always limited to MLB? Is it for the same reason that PED are mostly about baseball, because our standards are so much higher for baseball?
At first I thought this was hyperbole:
In the biggest electoral fraud since the 2000 presidential election, Major League Baseball and its 30 teams are telling fans to choose All-Star Game lineups by voting up to 25 times.
But nope, that’s tame compared to the rest of the article. Anyway, not a single original thought in the entire article.
So, ignore that entire article, and give me YOUR original and inspired thoughts on the ASG. Here’s mine:
1. Have two games, so you have more players. Limit one game to the young players, say anyone under 25, and the other for the veterans.
2. When introducing players, no music. If there’s one thing that the World Cup has taught the world is that loudness does not equal party. Those horns sounded like death at the Big O, when there’d be only 15K-20K fans there, and those darn red horns would just echo throughout. Easily the single worst viewing experience imaginable.
3. Try new rules.
Morgan Ensberg was in the broadcast booth for a NCAA Arizona State vs. Arkansas game tonight. He was on his twitter during the game, and asked for things to say. I tweeted this. Later in the inning, he said something along the lines of “We’ve never brought up sabermetrics before”. His broadcasting partner Justin Kutcher then said “I hate them”, to which Morgan replied “I love them”.
Now that Braden used the dreaded L word, can I use it without qualification?
One of my pet peeves is how the mainstream media doesn’t do its job in highlighting the story of service time handling. Longoria for example would have been declared a free agent after 6 years and 170 days of service (i.e., 7 full seasons), while most players would be declared free agents after 6 years and a late-season callup. Other players are held back to prevent early arbitration because of the Super Two clause. All are legitimate reasons by teams (they give their fans extra years for lower pay) at the expense of the player of course. There’s me, there’s Dave Cameron, and there’s a few other bloggers that point this out on several occasions.
But none of us can match the high-quality reporting of a top-notch blogger: Murray Chass. While the rest of us just spout out whatever comes into our head, Chass talks to the principals involved:
Kasten, the Nationals’ president, grudgingly said that service time was “one of the factors” in their decision to keep Strasburg in the minors this long. Six weeks ago Kasten refused to acknowledge that. “It’s one of the factors,” he said in a telephone interview last Friday. “This is a guy who never spent a day in the minor leagues. There are things our guys felt very strongly about that he needed to experience. Could he have pitched up here opening day? I’m sure he could have. Were there things for him to learn? I’m sure there were.” Speaking of salary arbitration, Kasten said, “I would think the Super Two date passed a long time ago. It was a factor among others but not especially a major one.” Kasten rejected any suggestion of an integrity issue.
“In our case,” he said, “we’re doing the best we can to build a good team for a long time. We felt this was the best way we could have handled Stephen’s development and media access. I’ve never been through this. There wasn’t a manual on how to handle it. I think our decisions have been appropriate and correct.” But what about the Reds’ decision to put Leake in their pitching rotation even though he went directly to the majors without visiting the minors? “It’s an amazing thing,” Kasten said, then reverted to Strasburg. “Could he have pitched in the majors? Probably. But could he benefit from time in the minors? Definitely.”
This Chass kid is doing a great job, and here’s hoping the young blogger keeps it up and one day finds himself working in the mainstream media. Until then, we bloggers will keep claiming him as one of our own discoveries.
Twins’ bullpen is first in MLB in Situational Wins (WPA/LI), and 4th in MLB in WPA. They are 5th in ERA and 10th in FIP.
This is just like your buddy coming back from Vegas, and only telling you about the days he won big and ignores the days he lost big. “Look at me! I’m nostradamus! I’m going to make 100 predictions, 50 of which will be wrong, but boy will I tell you about the 50 that are right!”
Also reminds me of a good scam I heard. You call this hotline, where you are guaranteed to get the 3 winners of 3 games on NFL Sunday… a free call. You are supposed to call a specific number. Unbeknownst to you, they actually have 8 separate numbers setup. So, all possible combinations of winners are covered. And, for 1/8th of the suckers out there, they’ll be convinced of the forecasting talents of this random hotline.
Media: do me a favor, and next time an ace reliever goes down, just say this: “It’s going to be a tough road for the team, but there’s a decent chance that the team won’t miss him at all. That’s because baseball is subject to such random variation that to pin the outcome of the season to any one player is foolish.”
Yes, I know this means that the 1000 articles that were written about Joe Nathan gets lowered down to 1. And I know that means that you won’t get easy money on the standard woe-is-Twins article when Nathan went down. Be a man about it, and write something with more inspiration.
Aug 31 15:28
Fans Scouting Report: Update
Sep 02 15:54
The two uncertainties of UZR
Sep 02 15:17
Mail: rWAR v fWAR
Sep 02 14:59
Roger Federer
Sep 02 14:59
It’s hard to beat the crowd (Vegas in this case) no matter how smart you think you are
Sep 02 14:57
Could Rob Dibble have been a comp for Strasburg?
Sep 02 14:15
WOWY Teachers
Sep 02 13:37
Who’s Waldo?
Sep 02 08:36
Team Elin
Sep 02 01:19
Can someone tell me why Trevor Hoffman is still allowed to pitch?
THREADS
August 31, 2010
Fans Scouting Report: Update
September 02, 2010
The two uncertainties of UZR
September 02, 2010
More on Morris and Cox, bloggers / editors
September 02, 2010
It’s hard to beat the crowd (Vegas in this case) no matter how smart you think you are
September 02, 2010
Roger Federer
September 02, 2010
Ryan Howard: Mr September
September 02, 2010
WOWY Teachers
September 01, 2010
Jose Bautista
September 01, 2010
Workload Regularity Score
September 01, 2010
Strasburg II
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