MLB

Walt Jocketty and the Search for Golden Arms

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Squawking Baseball

This somewhat rambling analysis of how to stock your pitching staff (if you’re a major league GM) strikes me as very smart. Don’t pay a lot because you need a lot. Pay a little because if you take enough small chances you can find a lot in the pool.

I think we need some real studies of what happens (namely, where the good pitchers on good teams came from) to buy into this fully, but given Rany’s survey of drafts it makes total sense to me that the best investment is in hitters.

And certainly major league teams are going this way now.

Web based PITCHf/x tool

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The Hardball Times

Josh Kalk has taken the first big step toward taming the PITCHf/x data that MLB collects and allows researchers access to. MLB’s freeness with the data promises to be a boon for sabermetrics and Kalk’s database front end, which allows you to compare how pitchers throw to different hitters and vice versa, with results displayed graphically is an inspiring beginning.

Kalk is talking about having splits ready by Christmas, and non-graphical data sometime soon, too.

I don’t have time right now to sift through all of this, but it’s potential importance makes me give thanks.

Thanks, Josh. Keep up the good work.

The Bill James Handbook

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Baseball Info Solutions

Every year I get a package from my friend Steve Moyer. Sometimes it comes when we’re together in the beginning of November at Ron Shandler and Rick Wilton’s First Pitch Arizona conference (which is a blast, a chance to see many of the next year’s rookies up close, and did I mention it was fun?) and sometimes it comes in the mail at home. What I know is that if it’s the first week of November it’s the Bill James Handbook.

What I remember, back in the day, was the Red Book from Stats, which also had Bill James’ name attached and which, for a while, Steve worked on, too. But Stats was sold to Fox and niceties like really useful baseball reference books became too small scale for them.

Steve has made a business off of the opportunities Fox threw away when it bought Stats, which isn’t to say that Fox was wrong, just that as a baseball fan I really much prefer what comes from Steve’s company, Baseball Info Solutions.

The Bill James Handbook, under the BIS aegis, has become a comprehensive statistical review of the previous baseball season, and it comes out less than 30 days after the season is over. It now has fielding rankings, managerial tendencies, home-road splits, batter and pitcher splits, projections for hitters and pitchers, and an assortment of other really interesting baseball data.

You can support this site by buying the Bill James Handbook from Amazon through the link below, or you can buy it somewhere else. My point is that there isn’t another baseball book that is more useful all season long.

If You Purchased MLB Game Downloads Before 2006, Your Discs/Files Are Now Useless; MLB Has Stolen Your $$$ And Claims “No Refunds”

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The Joy of Sox

This is a woeful story of mlbam’s apparent disregard for the customers who bought mlb.tv games and the digital rights management that is keeping them from watching those games.

If this is a true story it is an abysmal breach of faith by MLBAM, the sort of thing that undermines the basic compact between seller and buyer. But the funny thing reading this blog entry and the comments after (and at the Baseball Think Factory) is that there seems to be no corroboration.

If you’ve bought baseball games from mlb.com are you having this problem? It may be that Joy of Sox is one of just a few who felt the need to plunk down cash for games, but it’s also possible he’s having a problem that isn’t affecting everyone who bought games. Before ripping the Lords of Baseball a new one I’d like to make sure they’ve done it yet again.

Yankees, A-Rod, and Game Theory

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Sabernomics

JC Bradbury explains quite credibly why the Yankees won’t be signing A-Rod (it has something to do with beer at kids birthday parties), but doesn’t get into why A-Rod (led, no doubt, by Scott Boras) opted out so quickly. I think I have a good idea.

Given the 10 day window for opting out (and negotiating) with the Yankees, Boras/A-Rod were looking at intense scrutiny and no leverage. Sure, the Yankees bid would be subsidized by the Rangers, but Boras would be unable to counter it with other offers he was receiving. He won’t know how high the Yankees would have gone, but given the overall numbers he’s seeking, $21M is a rounding error (nearly). And if they didn’t go high enough he’d be looking at an offer that would surely have been made public and would be seen (probably) as something of an upper limit in his negotiations with other teams.

So, Boras/A-Rod rejected the Yanks before they had a chance to define the negotiations (and possibly reject A-Rod), and thus opened up a competition among all the other teams for A-Rod’s services. I think this surely means that Rodriguez wasn’t serious when he said how much he wanted to play in NY, and I will be surprised when some team signs him for more than it appears the Yankees were offering (a bump up in the final three years of his current agreement to $31M or so, and an extension for five more after that, or $248M, is what I heard). [link thanks to baseballmusings.com]

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.