Rotoman

111293534756082631

by

Yahoo! Sports – MLB – Sanchez won’t appeal suspension

I’m not out for blood in this steroid thing, but I think those that say they’re coming clean should actually come clean. The commissioner and many players in baseball have said that being suspended and publicly outed was the big punishment, but with Alex Sanchez’s 10-day suspension for a drug that he isn’t naming but is saying was legal when he bought it, all the maneuvering has been to find wiggle room.

Maybe that reflects the expansive gray area that each individual case was built upon, but if we’re going to endure the hysterics of those crying for PED blood, we need to offer up a less heinous alternative to policing the situation.

I’m not certain how to move forward on this, because I think the privacy of players up to the point they have certainly broken the rules is paramount. But mostly I’m for full disclosure. I’m willing to have my toxscreen made public, and not because I don’t use steroids to beef up my use of adjectives. We do what we have to do, so why shouldn’t players? At least if what we do is legal.

An awful lot of secrets used to be kept by people who derived great power from their access to information. I sympathize with an individual’s right to freedom, but I think in the end the more information that is made public the better able the injured and oppressed will be able to set things right. And the less like the exploitative will be able to get away with their crap.

I hope so.

111281046663019952

by

Batting Comparisons

I was trying to find who the HR leaders were at the end of last April for this week’s mlb.com column. I used to keep a pretty full set of Baseball Weekly around for this purpose, but they got pretty ratty and took up a lot of room and I could find most of what I wanted to find in them more easily online. Like that sort of data stuff was everywhere.

Except looking for it today, all I could find was 2005 data. All the big sites now have the same format. I asked MLB.com stats honcho Cory Schwartz if it was buried somewhere on the site, but it isn’t. They no longer offer past season sortable splits.

Bummer. But I kept looking and came across this page at baseballmusings.com. I haven’t had time to explore, but this front end to the retrosheet database seems to work great. It isn’t fancy, but it’s fast and I suspect will become a most valuable tool in the months to come.

Bravo.

111272765401726813

by

Baseball America: 38 Suspended For Steroids

About equally distributed between pitchers and hitters. This list isn’t limited to performance enhancing drugs. Minor leaguers are tested for recreational drugs, too. But still, if the problem with steroids is the uneven playing field they create, what do we do with all the evidence that pitchers are using, too? (I think it is still true that the only players caught using steroids by the Olympics testing regimen were pitchers, though that could have changed.)

This announcement, as the story makes clear, covers only the players with spring training in Arizona. There will another covering players in Florida, presumably soon.

111271953442488556

by

Shea Stadium

I don’t know if this is going to work, but if you get the Google Maps and see a satellite image it is either of Shea Stadium or my old house out in Orient NY. In either case, you can get from one to the other if you want. This new feature offers all the fun of looking out of an airplane window on a perfect clear day, without the cost or the food. You don’t actually get anywhere, but you can’t have everything.

(Okay, the link just takes you to the Google Maps page. And if you type in Shea Stadium it doesn’t get it. But if you type in LGA you’ll get to LaGuardia Airport. Click on the green park area to the southeast (by the inlet), then zoom in as far as you can. Click on the word Satellite in the upper right corner and bingo, you should see Shea.)

111266696298176166

by

Ask Rotoman FBG2005 Page

Splitting the blog into a few different pages, one for links, one for people who bought the magazine, and the usual home page, didn’t really work. For one, I find few enough blog-worthy things for one blog. Another, even when I posted I sometimes sent things meant for the home page to the magazine page or the links page. So, it’s all a big mess.

Here is a link to the magazine page, where you’ll find the updated projections and bid prices.

I’m going to leave the links page and the magazine page up for a while, but I’m only going to post on the main page and the discussion board. Just so you know.

111221770748053071

by

Baseball Prospectus | Articles | Fantasy Focus: Rethinking Closers

I’m not sure if this is a premium product or not. Rotowire’s Chris Liss comes to the conclusion that paying for closers in mixed leagues is the wrong strategy, and even comes up with a good reason why you might want to do it. I’m going to have to do some work to figure out what’s happening in the pricing formula. Rotowire’s prices used to be a joke, but this at least appears to be trying to do the right thing. More on that later.