Answers to fantasy baseball questions (and much more) since 1996
peter What is this page in Cyrillic?
I found this page because somewhere on it you’ll find a link to a full version of Michael Lewis’s influentual book Moneyball, which is clearly posted illegally. (Unless I’m wrong about Russian law.)
But what you’ll also find is a variety of Russian baseball love, not all of it IP impaired.
Feel free to comment on the good stuff. And the bad stuff.
I didn’t know about the Player to be Named Later rule, which is good reason to credit this story. At least we don’t have to worry about Brad Halsey being the guy named. Whew.
But I’m not being cranky about that. It’s funny that it’s Halsey, but it’s good to learn new things.
I’m not so sure about the notion of riding the hot hand between the major and minor leagues. While there has to be an advantage to roster flexibility, if only to rotate in the healthiest players you have, I have a hard time believing that anyone can predict that a hot minor league hitter should be promoted because he’s hot.
Hot streaks occur, I think it’s safe to say, generally because in small sample sizes players can get an inordinate number of favorable matchups. Or because in a small sample a player gets lucky. I believe Bill James showed early on that a player’s recent past results had no bearing on his immediate future results. Unless the next at bat, like the last two, is coming against Jae Seo or Jeff Weaver.
I still spend a lot of time in bars arguing this one, so there is money to be won and superstition to be debunked. Sure, there are hot streaks, but by the time you recognize one it’s probably over.
The Official Site of Major League Baseball
Who makes the weather, a reader asks, and I tried to find out. Plus an answer to the musical question, would you trade Maine for Weaver? And why it isn’t time to bail on Ichiro.
Today’s Ask Rotoman at mlb.com (with a weather related question) isn’t posted yet, but my editor sent along this press release from the Red Sox about tonight’s game:
 For Immediate Release
May 16, 2007
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FENWAY AREA WEATHER UPDATE (As of 3:00 p.m.)
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The current weather forecast (provided by the Red Sox private weather service, Meteorlogix) in the vicinity of Fenway Park calls for the possibility of rain showers and thunderstorms in the late afternoon and evening hours that could possibly impact the play of tonight’s Red Sox-Tigers game.
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The Fenway Park gates will open at the regularly scheduled time of 5:05 p.m., and the Red Sox will do everything possible to make certain that tonight’s game will be played. However, the Red Sox want to alert our fans to the current forecast for this evening.
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This forecast is of course subject to change as the day progresses.
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— RED SOX —
We’ll be tracking weather service stories as the season progresses. Somebody has to do it.
It seems that Rollie Fingers is Milwaukee’s No. 1 tax deadbeat, though what he owed was only a lot of money. What he owes now with penalties (fair enough) and interest (blast it!) is daunting.
The lesson is if you make lots of money, make sure whoever “helps” you doesn’t leverage you in unbecoming ways.
I really like boing boing (oh, this has nothing to do with baseball), and I think Digital Rights Management is a fiasco, so when I read this post about the DRM at iTunes being cracked I should have felt excited. But instead I felt a little dirty.
If you don’t like the license agreement at iTMS you can go someplace else. They’re a store, and to say that they’re “evil” for selling stuff is dopey.
And to set out to crack their defense because they believe you’re a sleazy person who doesn’t want to pay for what the creator would like you to pay for (so you steal it) is certainly immoral.
If you’re a cracker and want to beat the iTMS DRM more power to you. But the issue here is one of license. Buy some songs at iTMS and they own the encoding, buy them at eMusic.com and you own them. While that isn’t a solution, it does point to a solution that I think works pretty clearly and fairly:
If you make something you get to sell it, and you get to set the rules. If you really don’t want people to copy your digital stuff you better have some sort of DRM encoding. And they get to choose not to buy it because they think DRM sucks. Or only listen to it on the radio, or in clubs.
That seems fair to me.
The Baseball Analysts: Joe Sheehan
What we’re going to do with all the data baseball is throwing off beggars my imagination, but I know that Joe Sheehan’s excellent survey of pitch location data in this study simply scratches the surface. So for now just let the data wash over you, figure out the perspective on these intriguing charts, and wallow in the possibilities.
My dad was a high school phenom. He was an amazing schoolboy pitcher, as they called them in those days, one of those guys who struck out 14 in 7 inning games. Regularly. He was scouted and signed, this is back in the 40s, and ended up in the Braves organization. The Boston Braves, that is.
I mention all this because the linked story about the Braves in Boston is an excellent introduction to baseball’s local appeal in Beantown (and its amazingly ragtag and robust local history there). And an expression of how important that locality is, even if a team can up and move. And then move again.
Great questions make for fun answers, which is why this week’s lead story is such a smile. Keep ’em coming.
Prof says computers must learn to “forget”
This is not the place for this comment, but this is my place.
I believe that forgetting is an important part of moving on, of being able to compromise in very construtive ways. So I’m pretty sure that this prof’s heart is in the right place.
But I think the issue is much less nuanced. If we have a good and verifiable record of everything all of us do, our public behavior will have to conform to that model. Our lack of information in the past offered countless opportunities for operators to game the system, but if we know who we all are and who everyone else is, all sorts of trusted (and fair) endeavors become possible.
I think much of what the past was built on was a duplicity, and that is going to be impossible going forward. How quickly that’s going to reshape the world is exciting possibiltity today.
Very exciting.