Rotoman

Major League Baseball : Fantasy : Ask Rotoman

The newest Ask Rotoman is on the web. Questions about closers, poetry about Luis Matos, and were Shawn Green and Garry Sheffield seperated at birth?

Baseball America Online – Player Finder [KELLY, MIKE]

I don’t like that he ended up in the Yankees organization (and I wonder about the stumbling All Star Stats, who still show him as KC property, but playing in Columbus), but he’s showing all the good signs (apart from his average) that I liked about him in the preseason.

That means he’s taking walks and hitting for power. The AVG isn’t there, but this is a guy who spent most of the past three years watching TV when he wasn’t playing softball.

A star? Not hardly, but a good reason to read the transaction lists. If the Royals still had him he’s be a better addition (except defensively) than Adrian Brown. And I like Adrian Brown, too.

Yahoo! News – Sports Photos Tennis

Bulked up?

ESPN.com – MLB – Schwarz: Calculated maneuvers

Two really interesting things in this survey. Evidence that average 9 inning pitch counts in the 1930s were 115. And Leo Mazzone saying he didn’t pay any attention to pitch counts.

And I’m reminded of a third interesting thing. Rany Jazayerli and Keith Woolner’s evidence that a high pitch count today means more ineffectiveness next time out. It isn’t a universal effect, but the correlation seems strong enough it’s worth considering when making pitching moves.

Yahoo! News – W. Va. Women Symbolize War’s Glory, Shame

I can’t help myself. This is the ripest sexist bs you can imagine. The notion that these two women symbolize anything is an indictment of the the press and it’s ability to parse anything but the most generalized, self-serving hoo-hah (or as my daughter now calls it, horse hockey).

Thanks, grandma.

What we know is that Jessica Lynch wasn’t the Rambo like hero she was made out at first to be. And reading the stories it’s hard not to be uncomfortable with the fact that the only American torturer with a face is this apparently dim paper-pusher.

Maybe she makes a better story, but doesn’t she also deflect a lot of attention from the horrors that went down? After all, she was surely no mastermind.

Horrors, I can’t emphasize enough because I can’t stop thinking about this nightmare, that were ignored by the administration for four months after they were initially reported. That’s the thoroughly awful thing about William Saletan’s list of quotes linked to earlier.

It is impossible to spin the sequence of events in any but the worst possible way.

ESPN.com – Texas-Detroit

The season is underway, but it’s still early. This game is a case in point. There are teams that have been crusing on the accomplishments of Mike “Lost 20” Maroth and RJ “No Ligaments” Dickey. Early in the season that’s possible.

No longer, at least for these two. Sanity is starting to set in.

Rape Rooms: A Chronology – What Bush said as the Iraq prison scandal unfolded. By William Saletan

I hope you know I’ve not been a fan of the administration’s reasons for going to war in Iraq. Or you prefer my baseball advice enough to overlook my rather strongly held beliefs.

But I don’t think I’ve given over this space to propaganda.

Major League Baseball : Fantasy : Ask Rotoman

The latest column has some fun with the songs of Lieber and Stoller, the names of Jake Peavy and Brad Hawpe, and perhaps an incomplete explanation why getting off to a bad start in the ERA doesn’t have to be the end of the world.

I failed to point out that improvement in ERA often comes with improvement in Ratio, so progress (while costly) can be more dramatic than you might think.

Baseball Prospectus

Here is something Will Carroll wrote today:

Randy Johnson hasn’t had any knee problems so far this season, but he will begin a planned series of Synvisc injections later this week. Synvisc is the synthetic lubricant that Johnson first began using last year. The injections come in a series of five, one week apart, but he is not expected to miss any starts during the process.

I hadn’t heard this before. And now that I have I further wonder about the whole prohibition about performance enhancing “drugs,” and out ability to differentiate between various regimens. And our motivation for doing so.

If our goal is to see the most best performances, shouldn’t we allow anything that would make for better sport? Certainly the Romans would have.

And if not, what is our goal? I enjoy watching beer besotted yuppies play softball sometimes. I enjoy being one of them, sometimes. But I have a hard time imagining how my “regularness” has anything to do with my entertainment. Well, I do enjoy Ken Loach films.

But that’s the point. For the most part these rules are legally and morally arbitrary. They pretend to be fair, but in reality they discern moral divisions even St. Augustine would find inscrutable.

By the way, as irritating as I find his self promotion, Will Carroll delivers the goods. And as best I can tell he’s the only reason to buy the BP subscription. Not that there isn’t other stuff of some value, but that the only thing that you can’t buy anyplace else are Will’s natty notes.

SportsBlurb.com

Guide veteran Mark Allen Haverty has launched a new website and asked me to contribute a story, which I’ve done after years of failing to contribute a story to support the Mixed Nuts League.

You’ll find it here.

Mark’s best thing I think are short interviews with various people in baseball who don’t often get published in a Q+A format. These are minor leaguers, scouts, assistant GM, etc. These will be appearing at the new site, along with various other writing about baseball and football for the fantasy player.