THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I think Purple Row is by far the most popular Rockies blog (it’s part of the SBNation setup).  Want me to ask the admins there to post it?  I’m surprised they haven’t, as several of them claim to be Book blog readers!

I got a few links from there, but maybe it wasn’t part of the main page?  Sure, whatever you can do…

I posted it; I’ve asked the admins to promote it to the front page.  I don’t remember seeing a link to the survey, but I could have missed it.

It’s not a big blog by say, Cubs/A’s/Red Sox standards, but I’d think you could get 20-30 informed opinions even if a lot of people don’t want to take the time or feel sheepish about volunteering their opinions.

You probably have all the Marlins’ fans already.

I put in my votes for the Marlins and have been pushing for people to vote on my blog and on Fish Stripes, probably the largest Marlins blog. I hope people come out to vote for them.

Well, thanks to you Rockies fans who came out in droves!  Fantastic.

So, out goes the Rox, and now added to the hot seat are the Padres and Rangers fans.

The Angels seem kind of low at 19 votes, too, given their resurgence this decade.

I took a screenshot of the Rockies results before yesterday; looks like up to 32 new people voted on the players.  FWIW, overall ratings for the players changed very little. I wondered if fan favorite Todd Helton might shoot up in the ratings.  3B Ian Stewart and Helton went up 0.1.  Catcher Chris Iannetta made the biggest jump, to 3.7 (+0.3), OF Ryan Spilborghs jumped 0.2 to 3.6.

Catcher Yorvit Torrealba is the only one who dropped (by 0.3).  Only Torrealba and Atkins have been rated below average (3.0); somehow Hawpe escaped that fate.

I emailed the SBN baseball email list and specifically mentioned the six teams in this thread.  We’ll see what happens…

Cool, thanks guys.

As for the non-changing, this is exactly what is expected to happen with reasonable picks.  This is why, once I get to a threshhold of around 15-20 picks, everything after that won’t change much, but rather reaffirms the rankings, and prevents a crazy outlier pick from affecting anything.

Say, for example, that Ichiro is a “4.6” on a scale of 1-5.  Then, some bozo comes in and gives him 1 across the board.  If I had 10 fans, his rating goes from 4.60 to 4.27.  If I had 50 fans, it goes from 4.60 to 4.53.

So, I could even get away with not doing any data cleanup, if I had big support.  However, I’m pretty meticulous, and I go through every ballot to at least make sure they are reasonable in some regard.

In the end, I end up throwing out 2% of the ballots, half of which involve Jeter or Pedroia.

Marlins, Astros, and Pirates remain on the hot seat.