Rotoman

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Yahoo! Sports – MLB – Box Score

In this past week’s column at mlb.com I suggested that owners should reserve Kevin Brown if they could, because clearly something wasn’t right, but they probably shouldn’t drop him if they could avoid it.

As chance would have it, Brown pitched before I could special him, and did a fine job against Oakland. Will I special reserve him tomorrow?

I’m not ruling out the possibility. Oakland’s offense has been pathetic so far, and Brown avoiding trouble in a game against the A’s is hardly an endorsement.

So, if I find a reasonable alternative tomorrow (the only real choices are Pete Walker and Chien-Ming Wang) I’ll reserve Brown. But his next start will come in Oakland against these same hapless A’s, so I’m not going to get too aggressive. If I have to I’ll risk Brown another week.

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Those of you who frequent the discussion board are familiar with the stylings of Steve P. He’s a knowledgeable provocateur who isn’t afraid to do a little research to pin down the record.

Steve recently mentioned that he was thinking of starting a blog and I suggested that he post at Ask Rotoman, since I’m far too inconsistent a poster. I’m not sure how co-blogging will work, but we’ll see. In the meantime, I hope SteveP as a blogger is an inspiration to us all.

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Ron Shandler Says: "Let's look at some possible reasons that Mussina is struggling in the early
going. First, he's had the misfortune to face three of the top
five offenses in the AL: BOS (3rd in R/G as of 4/25/2005), BAL
(5th), and TOR (4th)."

I kind of buy this, but it occurs to me that the potent offenses of the Orioles and Blue Jays have feasted on the depleted pitching of the Yankees and Red Sox.

Mussina may improve when facing the less potent AL West teams, but then again they may get more bopperish facing the Yankees. The Devil Rays certainly did.

The lesson: Be wary about sweeping statements based on sliced information. There is always another side.

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The New Discussion Group has been a great success, except that the hardware hosting the database side of it has been spotty of late and this afternoon seems to have crashed totally. They’re rebuilding the drive, apparently have backups and expect we’ll be operational this evening sometime.

I’m sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience. This new hosting service is so on the ball with customer service that I’m giving the benefit of the doubt for what has been a fairly nasty run of failures on this one server. If the pratfalls go on for too long we’ll have to change things again. Yuck.

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The New York Times > Sports > Baseball > Keeping Score: Baseball’s Leading Man of Math Has Some Second Thoughts About the Numbers

In February SABR’s Baseball Research Journal published a Bill James story called “Underestimating the Fog” in which he racants his previous assertions that there are no such things as clutch hitting and hot and cold streaks. His reasons are mature, humble, and well worth noting, especially because they illustrate all sorts of problems SABRmetrics have encounted because of small sample sizes and the “fogginess” of the baseball data.

James wrote: “We ran astray because we have been assuming that random data is proof of nothingness, when in reality random data proves nothing.”

If the intensely complicated calculations required to translate player performance in each stint in each ballpark is used to rationalize entire careers, but if much of that data (or the resulting translations) is actually noise, how conclusive can any conclusions be?

The NY Times link above will turn into an advertisement for you to pay to read the story in their archives in a couple of days. University of Nebraska publishes BRJ, but their website doesn’t seem to have a link to this edition. One reason to get quickly to the Times’ story is because David Leonhardt’s conclusion strikes me as right, in re clutch performance.

I think so because John McEnroe once said to me in an interview about rising to win the big points, “The best players win the big points, because they’re the best players.”

James is probably right about the fog, but oddly that really illustrates more of the problems with Win Shares than it does the existence of clutch hitting.