Interesting Baseball News Items That Do Not Warrant Their Own Thread

[RhodyYanksFan]

Unquestionably. All the Marlins got was salary relief.

And Heath Bell relief. Wakka wakka.

[Snatch Catch]

I suppose the A's won that but its hard to call them winners when their prize is a guy with a career OPS+ 95 and declining power numbers.

I think CY is elite defensively, not just good, but I could be wrong on that.

[RenoHightower]

I think CY is elite defensively, not just good, but I could be wrong on that.

His UZR numbers over the past three years are exceptional.

[Jax Teller]

Ozzie Guillen & Joey Cora let go by the Marlins

[Mr Coffee]

Ozzie Guillen & Joey Cora let go by the Marlins

Must be freeing up cap space for A-Rod.

[fredgmuggs]

Ozzie Guillen & Joey Cora let go by the Marlins

And here I thought they would be centerpieces of the ARod trade to Miami.

[b-ball-lunachick]

Must be freeing up cap space for A-Rod.

I hope Pena doesn't get interviewed/tempted to take that job...Loria is nuts and not worth the hassle...

[Eldee5]

I hope Pena doesn't get interviewed/tempted to take that job...Loria is nuts and not worth the hassle...

Absolutely.
I think Girardi will give Pena ample warning.

[hardrain]

Carlton Fisk arrested for DUI -- found drunk and passed out in a corn field

http://espn.go.com/chicago/mlb/story...sk-charged-dui

[Donnybaseball72]

Carlton Fisk arrested for DUI -- found drunk and passed out in a corn field

http://espn.go.com/chicago/mlb/story...sk-charged-dui

Yeah DWI is no laughing matter. Unless you're an Ex-Sox who ends up passed out in a corn field.

[35Knucklecurve]

Carlton Fisk arrested for DUI -- found drunk and passed out in a corn field

http://espn.go.com/chicago/mlb/story...sk-charged-dui

Maybe he was looking for The Field of Dreams.

[-tz]

Maybe he was looking for The Field of Dreams.

Or he was booked on that Pepsi Max commercial with CC, Randy and the gang ...

[Ram Man]

I received the following information from a SABR colleague. I've not proofed it for accuracy.

For the first 60 years of the American League (1901-1960) there were just 16 major league clubs, eight per league, meaning that there were 64 possible combinations of World Series matchups. The Tigers and Giants, meeting in a World Series for the first time, are the 43rd such matchup. The remaining 21 are as shown:

Red Sox vs. Braves
Orioles vs. Braves
Orioles vs. Cubs
Orioles vs. Giants
Tigers vs. Dodgers
Tigers vs. Phillies
Tigers vs. Braves
Twins vs. Phillies
Twins vs. Cubs
Twins vs. Reds
Athletics vs. Phillies
Athletics vs. Pirates
Indians vs. Phillies
Indians vs. Pirates
Indians vs. Cardinals
Indians vs. Cubs
Indians vs. Reds
White Sox vs. Phillies
White Sox vs. Pirates
White Sox vs. Cardinals
White Sox vs. Braves

Note: The Orioles were formerly the St. Louis Browns and the Twins were formerly the Washington Senators.

The Yankees have met all eight of the original (as of 1901) NL clubs in World Series play.

[Panamaniac42]

http://triblive.com/sports/dejankova...#axzz29xfwc3PE

On Oct. 14 at 11:45 p.m., the Pirates’ minor-league coaches and instructors broke the midnight silence by banging on dorm rooms throughout the complex shouting, “It’s Hell Week! It’s Hell Week!”

Players were told to be dressed in 20 minutes and to meet outside by the batting cage. Waiting there were Kyle Stark, the assistant general manager and architect of the team’s “Hoka Hey” ways, as well as Larry Broadway, the first-year farm director who never before held any instructional position at any level of baseball.

Look it up.

Broadway told the assembled players this would be their “rite of passage” to become Pirates, then sent them on a two-hour scavenger hunt for envelopes hidden across the complex.

(Don’t ask. No idea.)

At 5 a.m., after a wink or two of sleep, they were bused over to Bradenton Beach for a two-mile run, followed by relay races in which they ran back and forth filling garbage cans with sand.

(Don’t ask. No idea.)

This garbage — pardon the pun — went on all week.

On the “Hell Week” finale Friday, with a 10 a.m. road game on tap, the players again were awoken at 5 a.m. This time, it was to perform sliding drills on a still-dark field lit by a solitary quartz lamp. The coaches took turns manning second base and tried — not always successfully — to leap over players sliding into the bag, generally making a mess on the basepaths.

(Now this one explains a lot.)

I know about the above because I continue to hear from prospects worried about injury (some among the team’s most expensive draft picks), from parents who wish their sons had never signed with the Pirates, from angry agents, even from men who answer to Stark and GM Neal Huntington.

I’ll repeat: The Pirates’ development system is the laughingstock of baseball.

They also apparently forced one of their top prospects to push through this stupid "SEALS" workout program and reinjure his ankle: "It happened during a drill in which Polanco sprinted across the outfield, through an above-ground pool of ice water, then leaped into a sand pit."

[awy]

it reads like bad fanfiction

[35Knucklecurve]

http://triblive.com/sports/dejankova...#axzz29xfwc3PE



They also apparently forced one of their top prospects to push through this stupid "SEALS" workout program and reinjure his ankle: "It happened during a drill in which Polanco sprinted across the outfield, through an above-ground pool of ice water, then leaped into a sand pit."

.....and these morons still have a job?! Better yet, why has the organization allowed this to continue?

[Mr Coffee]

Carlton Fisk arrested for DUI -- found drunk and passed out in a corn field

http://espn.go.com/chicago/mlb/story...sk-charged-dui

The Catcher in the Rye?

[jcarey]

The Catcher in the Rye?

I chuckled.

[-tz]

The Catcher in the Rye?

More like the rye in the catcher ...

[jcarey]

More like the rye in the catcher ...

I chuckled again!

Man, Frank Thomas is still humongous.

[ieddyi]

interesting article on political polling using baseball stats as a reference- in particular discussing Nate Silver and his baseball and political analysis

http://www.redstate.com/2012/10/31/o...ewed-unskewed/

[i] "Let me use an analogy from baseball statistics, which I think is appropriate here because it’s where both I and Nate Silver first learned to read statistics critically and first got an audience on the internet: in terms of their predictive power, poll toplines are like pitcher win-loss records or batter RBI.

At a very general level, the job of a baseball batter is to make runs score, and the job of a baseball pitcher is to win games, so traditionally people looked at W-L records and RBI as evidence of who was good at their jobs. And it’s true that any group of pitchers with really good W-L record will, on average, be better than a group with bad ones; any group of batters with a lot of RBI will, on average, be better than a group with very few RBI. If you built a model around those numbers, you’d be right more often than you’d be wrong.

But wins and RBI are not skills; they are the byproducts of other skills (striking people out, hitting home runs, etc.) combined with opportunities: you can’t drive in runners who aren’t on base, and you can’t win games if your team doesn’t score runs. If you build your team around acquiring guys who get a lot of RBI and wins, you may end up making an awful lot of mistakes. Similarly, you can’t win the votes of people who don’t come to the polls.

Baseball analysis has come a long way in recent decades, because baseball is a closed system: nearly everything is recorded and quantified, so statistical analysis is less likely to founder on hidden, uncounted variables. Yet, even highly sophisticated baseball models can still make mistakes if they rest on mistaken assumptions. Baseball Prospectus.com’s PECOTA player projection system – designed by Nate Silver and his colleagues at BP – is one of the best state-of-the-art systems in the business. But one of PECOTA’s more recent, well-known failures presents an object lesson. In 2009, PECOTA projected rookie Orioles catcher Matt Wieters to hit .311/.395/.546 (batting/on base percentage/slugging). As regular consumers of PECOTA know, this is just a probabilistic projection of his most likely performance, and the actual projection provided a range of possible outcomes. But the projection clearly was wrong, and not just unsuccessful. While Wieters has developed into a good player, nothing in his major league performance since has justfied such optimism: Wieters hit .288/.340/.412 as a rookie, and .260/.328/.421 over his first four major league seasons. What went wrong? Wieters had batted .355/.454/.600 between AA and A ball in 2008, and systems like PECOTA are supposed to adjust those numbers downward for the difference in the level of competition between A ball, AA ball and the major leagues. But as Colin Wyers noted at the time, the problem was that the context adjustments used by PECOTA that season used an unusually generous translation, assuming that the two leagues Wieters had played in – the Eastern League and the Carolina League – were much more competitive in 2008 than they had been in previous years. By getting the baseline of the 2008 environment Wieters played in wrong, PECOTA got the projection wrong, a projection that was out of step with what other models were much more realistically projecting at the time. The sophistication of the PECOTA system was no match for two bad inputs in the historical data.

My point is not to beat up on PECOTA, which as I said is a fantastic system and much better than anything I could design. Let’s consider for a further example one of PECOTA’s most notable successes, one where I questioned Nate Silver at the time and was wrong; I think it also illustrates the differing approaches at work here. In 2008, PECOTA projected the Tampa Bay Rays to win 88-89 games, a projection that Nate Silver touted in a widely-read Sports Illustrated article. It was a daring projection, seeing as the Rays had lost 95 or more games three years running and never won more than 70 games in franchise history. As Silver wrote, “t’s in the field…that the Rays will make their biggest gains…the Rays’ defense projects to be 10 runs above average this year, an 82-run improvement.” I wrote at the time: “this is nuts. Last season, Tampa allowed 944 runs (5.83 per game), the highest in the majors by a margin of more than 50 runs. This season, BP is projecting them to allow 713 runs (4.40 per game), the lowest in the AL, third-lowest in the majors…and a 32% reduction from last season…it’s an incredibly ambitious goal.”

PECOTA was right, and if anything was too conservative. The Rays won 97 games and went to the World Series, without any improvement by their offense, almost entirely on the strength of an improved defense. I later calculated that their one-year defensive improvement was the largest since 1878. Looking at history and common sense, I was right that PECOTA was projecting an event nearly unprecedented in the history of the game, and I would raise the same objection again. But the model was right in seeing it coming."

[35Knucklecurve]

Bryce Harper says Happy Halloween.

http://mlb.mlb.com/cutfour/index.jsp#contentId=40137162

King Felix:

http://mlb.mlb.com/cutfour/index.jsp#contentId=40134130

Angel Pagan enjoying his well earned meal from Taco Bell:

http://mlb.mlb.com/cutfour/index.jsp#contentId=40130200

The Top Ten MLB Halloween Costumes:

http://mlb.mlb.com/cutfour/index.jsp#contentId=40139038

[RenoHightower]

interesting article on political polling using baseball stats as a reference- in particular discussing Nate Silver and his baseball and political analysis

http://www.redstate.com/2012/10/31/o...ewed-unskewed/

[i] "Let me use an analogy from baseball statistics, which I think is appropriate here because it’s where both I and Nate Silver first learned to read statistics critically and first got an audience on the internet: in terms of their predictive power, poll toplines are like pitcher win-loss records or batter RBI.

At a very general level, the job of a baseball batter is to make runs score, and the job of a baseball pitcher is to win games, so traditionally people looked at W-L records and RBI as evidence of who was good at their jobs. And it’s true that any group of pitchers with really good W-L record will, on average, be better than a group with bad ones; any group of batters with a lot of RBI will, on average, be better than a group with very few RBI. If you built a model around those numbers, you’d be right more often than you’d be wrong.

But wins and RBI are not skills; they are the byproducts of other skills (striking people out, hitting home runs, etc.) combined with opportunities: you can’t drive in runners who aren’t on base, and you can’t win games if your team doesn’t score runs. If you build your team around acquiring guys who get a lot of RBI and wins, you may end up making an awful lot of mistakes. Similarly, you can’t win the votes of people who don’t come to the polls.

Baseball analysis has come a long way in recent decades, because baseball is a closed system: nearly everything is recorded and quantified, so statistical analysis is less likely to founder on hidden, uncounted variables. Yet, even highly sophisticated baseball models can still make mistakes if they rest on mistaken assumptions. Baseball Prospectus.com’s PECOTA player projection system – designed by Nate Silver and his colleagues at BP – is one of the best state-of-the-art systems in the business. But one of PECOTA’s more recent, well-known failures presents an object lesson. In 2009, PECOTA projected rookie Orioles catcher Matt Wieters to hit .311/.395/.546 (batting/on base percentage/slugging). As regular consumers of PECOTA know, this is just a probabilistic projection of his most likely performance, and the actual projection provided a range of possible outcomes. But the projection clearly was wrong, and not just unsuccessful. While Wieters has developed into a good player, nothing in his major league performance since has justfied such optimism: Wieters hit .288/.340/.412 as a rookie, and .260/.328/.421 over his first four major league seasons. What went wrong? Wieters had batted .355/.454/.600 between AA and A ball in 2008, and systems like PECOTA are supposed to adjust those numbers downward for the difference in the level of competition between A ball, AA ball and the major leagues. But as Colin Wyers noted at the time, the problem was that the context adjustments used by PECOTA that season used an unusually generous translation, assuming that the two leagues Wieters had played in – the Eastern League and the Carolina League – were much more competitive in 2008 than they had been in previous years. By getting the baseline of the 2008 environment Wieters played in wrong, PECOTA got the projection wrong, a projection that was out of step with what other models were much more realistically projecting at the time. The sophistication of the PECOTA system was no match for two bad inputs in the historical data.

My point is not to beat up on PECOTA, which as I said is a fantastic system and much better than anything I could design. Let’s consider for a further example one of PECOTA’s most notable successes, one where I questioned Nate Silver at the time and was wrong; I think it also illustrates the differing approaches at work here. In 2008, PECOTA projected the Tampa Bay Rays to win 88-89 games, a projection that Nate Silver touted in a widely-read Sports Illustrated article. It was a daring projection, seeing as the Rays had lost 95 or more games three years running and never won more than 70 games in franchise history. As Silver wrote, “t’s in the field…that the Rays will make their biggest gains…the Rays’ defense projects to be 10 runs above average this year, an 82-run improvement.” I wrote at the time: “this is nuts. Last season, Tampa allowed 944 runs (5.83 per game), the highest in the majors by a margin of more than 50 runs. This season, BP is projecting them to allow 713 runs (4.40 per game), the lowest in the AL, third-lowest in the majors…and a 32% reduction from last season…it’s an incredibly ambitious goal.”

PECOTA was right, and if anything was too conservative. The Rays won 97 games and went to the World Series, without any improvement by their offense, almost entirely on the strength of an improved defense. I later calculated that their one-year defensive improvement was the largest since 1878. Looking at history and common sense, I was right that PECOTA was projecting an event nearly unprecedented in the history of the game, and I would raise the same objection again. But the model was right in seeing it coming."

Silver is incredibly smart, and most of the criticism of him comes from the fact that people can't understand the difference between predictions and projections. I guarantee you that he knew that Wieters' projection was likely off, but it takes to make these tweaks.

Of course, since he left BP, PECOTA has ceased to be the premier baseball projection model, and now he's running the most accurate election projection system around.

[awy]

redstate.com? is that satire

[Yankee Fan in Boston]

Silver is incredibly smart, and most of the criticism of him comes from the fact that people can't understand the difference between predictions and projections. I guarantee you that he knew that Wieters' projection was likely off, but it takes to make these tweaks.

Of course, since he left BP, PECOTA has ceased to be the premier baseball projection model, and now he's running the most accurate election projection system around.

Yeah, if you read Silver regularly, you know he's pretty open about the challenges of modeling and the fact that he's working in probabilities, not absolute predicitions. The writer's criticisms seem less "open," as he's drawing conclusions about Silver's numbers and is fixated on the 2008 voter ratios, while linking to a blog in which Silver ran also ran the numbers using 2004 and 2010 turnout ratios. But I guess that is to be expected in this season.