peter

Fantasy baseball advice for those who ask.

For Rodriguez and Yankees, It’s All but Over

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New York Times

“We have put it in writing and sent it to the Yankees,” Rodriguez’s agent, Scott Boras, said in a telephone interview.

That quote makes it seem that A-Rod’s departure from the Yankees is inevitable, and there is certainly no rush in NY today to get the lukewarm superstar to reconsider, but unless I misunderstand the Yankees and A-Rod have 10 days to figure things out. And, maybe, that letter lets Boras talk to other teams while also talking to the Yankees without forcing the Yankees to renounce the $20M the Rangers would owe them if A-Rod stayed under contract.

I haven’t see the mechanics of this addressed so far, but the “All but Over” construction in the hed seems to support this. Boras is a master of finding leverage and his problem here is that unless the Red Sox jump in right away it’s hard to generate much leverage to get the Yankees to bump up their offer.

On the other hand, the booming baseball economy could lead to a perennial also ran making an offer the maritally challenged A-Rod (Selena Roberts suggests elsewhere in today’s Times that Cynthia Rodriguez is behind the whole thing) can’t turn down.

I think the Texas money in the Yankees’ pocket makes it highly unlikely that A-Rod is going to find a good reason to go elsewhere, but the economics in the game are so crazy maybe he will. It certainly didn’t seem possible when the Rangers paid to dump him, did it?

Wahoo …

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Joe Posnanski

Passionate and authoritative piece about the Indians’ team name and logo. I don’t think about banning the team name, but whenever I see the logo I marvel that they still use it. Posnanski makes it clear why they shouldn’t, and gives a nice colorful history lesson in the process.

Appeals court sides with fantasy baseball company

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ESPN

CDM went to the mat after MLBAM jacked up licensing prices (after buying out the Players Association’s rights) for fantasy content. This federal appeals court unanimously agreed that the players’ names and associated stats are news information and can be used by fantasy gamers without a license. It seems like an obvious conclusion, but you never know.

The ruling should free innovators and entrepeneurs to get back into the game, though how stifling the consolidation of the last few years was remains to be seen. This is good news for everyone, including MLBAM (though they don’t know it yet).

Heed the 1-1

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Baseball Prospectus | Unfiltered

I link here to mock, though I don’t know (and this post doesn’t help me) how meaningful it is to get a better or worse count at 1-1. It sure seems like it helped the Red Sox against the Angels to go 2-1 (vs 1-2), but we’re talking skimpy samples.  Even if this is an amazing discovery, this post does not satisfy. And I suspect it isn’t really an amazing discovery at all.

Young Hitters

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Baseball Musings

David Pinto puts together a chart showing the average age for each team’s offense in 2007 based on plate appearances. Interesting to note the Diamondbacks’ youth, since they didn’t exactly overwhelm anyone this year, but even more interesting to see a difference of more than five years from top to bottom. I would have guessed it would have been less, aside from obvious outliers like the Giants.

It would be interesting to see these numbers calculated for a run of years and then compared to a team’s success over those years. Do teams get better as they get older and then crash? Do young teams inevitably get better? Are successful teams getting younger, as this year’s data seem to suggest? Just wondering.

Searching For Answers About the Mets’ Collapse Brings No Relief by Allen Barra

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village voice

Barra has the numbers to demonstrate that the Mets’ problem was the bullpen, which everyone knew, and by how much, which everyone felt. But what he also has is a memory of how the Yankees finished the 2000 season, their last World Series championship. It was a far bigger collapse, only it ended up not hurting for reasons that had nothing to do with the Yankees.