Answers to fantasy baseball questions (and much more) since 1996
Sal Baxamusa — The Hardball Times
Sal looks at the way the Marcel the Monkey projections change based on a ballplayers’ (in this case Torii Hunter and Andruw Jones) recent hot and cold streaks. His charts do a particularly good job of showing how short-term changes shape our overall picture of a player’s skills and future value.
His conclusion is pretty dull, considering how much fun the charts are (if you like charts), but that’s probably right, too.
Would anyone like to see more of these?
It’s hard not to agree with this. Cashman is trying to show he’s smart with the money, when all he needs (all he’s needed for the past seven years, really) is to prove that he’s smart with the bludgeon. He’s not. Maybe not either way.
My friend Steve Hubbell and his host, John Patterson, debated on January 18th whether a Santana trade would be good for the Mets, or a disasterous miscalculation. The die is now cast, apparently, and the Mets made a slightly better deal than Patterson anticipated (Gomez not Martinez). I suspect this debate will have entertainment value for years to come. Nice job, guys.
The Baseball Analysts: Rich Lederer
The official numbers are out and Rich Lederer does us the favor of plotting the team salaries and games won on a chart, along with a sensible discussion of the implications. I’m assuming that revenue sharing numbers aren’t included, which would skew the chart in interesting ways. The Yankees would spend more per win. The Marlins would make more money per loss. But that’s not what’s at play here.
Click the link and find out how your team did converting dollars to wins.
On the other hand, the final numbers show that player salaries were less than 45 percent of total baseball revenues, a drop of nearly 10 percent since 1994’s cancelled post season, which was in large part a fight over a salary cap at something like 50 percent of revenues.
Doug Glanville – New York Times
Yes, the former centerfielder, not only says what’s in the minds of ballplayers as their careers progress, but writes it beautifully.
Yesterday Miguel Tejada’s brother died in a traffic accident in the D.R., which turned a bad day for Tejada into a nightmare. A potential investigation into his alleged perjury before Congress was announced early in the day at the Congressional hearings. Last time, Tejada testified that he’d never taken steroids, while the Mitchell report includes cancelled checks made out to Adam Piatt, who said he sold Tejada drugs in 2003.
An item of interest in all this is that Rafael Palmeiro said he tested positive shortly after also testifying in front of Congress that he’s never used steroids because, perhaps, he’d used a contaminated needle when being injected with Vitamin B12 by Tejada. Since this is the same defense Roger Clemens is using, there is some question how pervasive the practice of players shooting up other players with B12 is?
The more common the practice the more likely Clemens’ big defense will hold up, absent documentary proof.
A nice trend chart from the Baseball Crank shows that the longer you stay on the ballot the more writers support you for the Hall, though I can’t think of a good reason why that should be. I don’t take the Hall seriously enough to worry about the borderline cases. They make it or they don’t, and that’s fine.
I do find it hard to see why Tim Raines or Mark McGwire look like they should be in, if only there wasn’t the cocaine and the steroids. Based on the numbers both were very good ballplayers who were at best borderline when it comes to induction numbers. Given their questionable pasts the voters’ reluctance to enshrine them doesn’t seem that crazy.
Over three seasons the White Sox were better (they won more games, many more games) with Scott Podsednik in the lineup than not, even though Podsednik’s replacements generally played better. Sox Machine may have discovered this paradox, and attempts to explain it. His conclusions aren’t flabbergasting but his approach hints at baseball’s majesty.
Now it gets interesting.
I may have written about David Pinto’s story earlier, but I know that spent much of tonight arguing the same thing. Discipline in this case is futile, for the most part, and counterproductive. The right thing would have been to embrace the information anyone would have given without threat of punishment, the better to judge what happened.
We still want to know what happened, because so many players who feared punishment didn’t talk to Mitchell.
That was a mistake.