Answers to fantasy baseball questions (and much more) since 1996
peter One reads a lot of crap analysis about sports (well, and other stuff too), but this is totally on.
It doesn’t mean that Boras isn’t a problem in the context of organized MLB baseball, but why would us fans choose to side with the owners and their uncounted stores of money, rather than the players, who make the game we like to watch with their talent?
I picked up on a Tweet from an MLB character tonight who says that the White Sox will DFA Wilson Betamit tomorrow and promote Gordon Beckham.
I’m not opposed to this. I’ve been carrying Betamit in the American Dream League, and I recently traded for Beckham, who will certainly play if promoted.
But I’m posting this here because it seems dubious to me that this chain of events will actually happen.
I’m hoping they do, but how reliable is this Tweet? I have no idea at all.
And, if it is, does that mean that future Tweets are more reliable? Or just another indication that information on the internet isn’t always reliable?
Which is why I’m going to bed.
Cheers.
I’m not generally a fan of going on the radio, but Jeff Erickson is a great host. I was on his show yesterday, talking about this week’s free agent pick ups and some other stuff. I haven’t listened to it, but I had a fine time talking.
You can find the conversation at www.blogtalkradio.com, by searching my name.
I’ve mentioned my friend Les Leopold’s book, The Looting of America, here before. But a review at toomuchonline.com, does a better job than I can recommending the book and explaining what it has to do with fantasy baseball. I copy the whole thing here because the website doesn’t seem to offer permalinks to individual pages. Forgive me:
Les Leopold, The Looting of America: How Wall Street’s Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2009. 220 pp.
Great teachers love metaphors. To help learners grasp the unfamiliar, great teachers — like Les Leopold, the founder of the respected Labor Institute in New York — latch on to realities students already understand. Leopold has been using metaphors, for decades, to help working men and women understand how our economy really works.
But two years ago, amid the gathering Wall Street storms, Leopold suddenly realized that, as a teacher, he really didn’t understand the high-finance “innovations†just then beginning to crash into the headlines, the CDOs and the swaps, the tranches and the quants.
So Leopold set about to educate himself on Wall Street’s innards, and now he’s sharing what he has learned — in an energizing and remarkably entertaining new book,The Looting of America.
The book’s core, perhaps not surprisingly, revolves around a delightfully insightful metaphor. If you really want to comprehend how Wall Street has melted down our economy, Leopold suggests, give a look to fantasy baseball.
In fantasy baseball, groups of baseball fans create their own “teams†and stock them with players they pick from lists of real-life baseball players. If the players you pick for your fantasy team do well on the real-life baseball diamond — if they hit lots of homers, for instance — your fantasy team will do well.
Your fantasy team, in effect, “derives†value from real baseball. You have no actual relationship to this real baseball. But you can still make money, playing fantasy baseball, if the real-life players you pick for your fantasy team put up better numbers than the players your fantasy league competitors pick.
“In effect,†explains Leopold, “you are speculating on the stats derived from real major league players, but those players don’t know they’re playing on your team.â€
This same sort of speculation, over recent years, has been driving Wall Street. We have “fantasy finance.†Bankers and traders have created a sticky global web of “derivatives†— collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and more — that bear the same relationship to the “real†economy as fantasy baseball bears to real balls and strikes.
In the “old†days, bankers and traders bought and sold claims to real things. Owning a stock entitled you to a stake in a real enterprise. Holding a mortgage gave you a claim to an actual home. In fantasy finance, bankers and traders don’t have to hold a claim on anything real. They buy and sell financial products that only “derive†their value from real economic activity.
Bankers, for instance, can sell you a “derivative†that will rise in value if the price of oil goes up. They don’t have to own any oil to sell you this derivative. They can create derivatives based on anything.
But the fantasy baseball metaphor, Leopold notes, only takes us so far. Fantasy baseball players don’t claim they’re “improving†baseball. And they can’t cause any great damage either. If baseball players go out on strike, fantasy baseball leagues simply grind to a halt. No big deal.
Fantasy finance, by contrast, involves trillions of dollars. And the players of fantasy finance have spent decades insisting that these trillions help our economy by “spreading economic risk.†In fact, their derivatives ended up concentrating risk — and wrecking the economy.
At the root of all this fantasy: the concentration of America’s income and wealth that began in the 1970s. With so much money in so few pockets, our real economy couldn’t offer enough lucrative opportunities for the investor class. Wealthy investors would find those opportunities in fantasy finance.
The Looting of America traces how all this unfolded with clarity, wit, and patience. And hope. The bank bailouts and partial federal takeovers we’ve so far seen, Leopold points out, do help clarify the “fateful choices†we now face.
“We can hold onto and supervise the semi-socialized financial sector,†he notes, “or we can return the entire banking system to private investors. We can enact policies that allow workers’ real wages to rise. Or we can keep the wealth flowing upward to the super rich. We can put limits on financial engineering, or we can wait and see what the next orgy of fantasy finance does to our economy.â€
Crucial choices. Thanks to Les Leopold, many more of us will understand them.
–The Council on Public and International Affairs
It’s interesting that someone is reviewing Sam Walker’s book years after it came out, but this is someone who doesn’t have any interest in fantasy baseball or fantasy punditry. What is interesting is that he pulls a couple of quotes from the book in which Sam describes how much money he’s spent to win the league. The first one seems like a reasonable investment, but the second, which comes near the end of the book, when it’s clear that victory isn’t in sight, is an alarmingly large figure.
My first thought, upon reading that, was that it mistake, it drained me of empathy for Sam’s efforts. Raoulraoul goes a little further and says that it makes him care not one bit (which he really didn’t anyway, but that’s not the point). But I think he’s overlooking something that Sam had to do in the book to make it work, whether he won or not. He had to make the mountain high enough, and yet, he couldn’t just say that he opponents were geniuses.
They had to know lots more than him, but not so much that he–with his insider access to the baseball clubhouse–couldn’t overcome it by cramming. The 50k he spent trying ups the ante in the book, increases the drama, and makes it better yarn.
No, it doesn’t make him seem a more sensible person, or one you want to be like–and that may be a flaw–but it serves a purpose other than cluelessness.
The one guy in the Ray’s pen nobody ever listed as a potential closer was Randy Choate, right? Now that’s a committee!
By Jon Mooallem – Slate Magazine
A glowing review of an improbable book, which details the stories of how people died during baseball games. I’ve ordered it. So can you: Death at the Ballpark.
Yovanni Gallardo was tough today, but Chris Carpenter pitched as good a game as any I’ve ever seen. Great control, changing speeds and looks, constantly keeping hitters off balance, it was an incredibly display of pitching prowess. He didn’t go to three balls on any hitter, for instance, until the 7th inning.
 Minor League Ball John Sickels looks at all the starting pitchers with 10 or more win shares in 2008 and looks at where they were at when they stepped over to the professional game. First rounders have a big edge, but what stands out is that successful pitchers come from everywhere.
A similar list tracking the last 20 Â or more years would be of great interest, if anyone has time tomorrow (or the next day), since the list itself isn’t exactly objective. I would assume that the way scouts and organizations work has changed over the years, and this would be reflected. Or, more tantalyzingly, maybe not.
Best Visual Illusion of the Year Contest
Just because changing from a focused view to the peripheral view makes the spinning ball “curve,” doesn’t mean that a curve ball is an illusion. But this visual illusion makes clear that changing your primary focus can create an illusion of curving, and it occurs to me that maybe this explains why some hitters have such problems with the curve.
Keeping your head still during the swing is one of the tenets of solid hitting fundamentals, but it isn’t easy. This would also have some bearing on fielding fly balls on the run. Or it’s just a neat trick among many.