Players

This Week’s Ask Rotoman

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Major League Baseball : Fantasy : Fantasy

I’ve been traveling some of Appalachia’s blue highways this week, which has brought the blog to a complete stop, though Ask Rotoman appeared Wednesday as usual. Will Travis Hafner sit again during interleague play? How much difference does it make having Roy Oswalt rather than Mark Buehrle? How do you sort our oddball categories and pick players who suit them? Clemens? Podsednick? Betemit?

Introducing Heater Magazine

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Heater Magazine – Home

John Hunt, who should need no introduction, Deric McKamey, the minor league expert at BaseballHQ.com, and Dave Studeman, of HardballTimes.com, have joined Graphical Pitcher author John Burnson to create Heater, an online magazine about baseball. While in the first issue Hunt and Studeman write fine “early season roto” columns, the heart of the Heater are the 30 pages of team statistical profiles and charts, and the umpteen more pages of position breakouts (as well as a page tracking minor leaguers).

Heater will be coming out each week, and for the fantasy player or the hard core baseball fan the wealth of charts, graphs, timelines and other details about this week, last week and next week, as well as a whole lot more stuff (I’m really just scratching the surface) is organized in an exacting and pleasing way. It’s like the back stats pages of Sports Weekly were totally rethought and reorganized to actually present the data in a way that made it easy to find trends and nuggets about players and teams. Radical.
In a word, all of it is useful, all of it is easy to understand, none of it is presented anywhere else in so fine and complete a manner. Don’t take my word for it. There is a sample copy at the link above. You’ll then have to decide if your money is well spent for this sort of thing. I’m hoping it is, because as long as they keep putting this stuff out my job is going to be a lot easier (and I’m going to look a lot smarter).

This Week’s Ask Rotoman

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Major League Baseball Fantasy

I didn’t anticipate that with Ian Kinsler going down with a bum finger that Gary Matthews would be called up right away. Knowing what I know now, especially given Matthews’ three-run triple tonight, take him over the recommended Kevin Millar. . . Wait! I recommended Millar instead of Matthews and Millar hit two homers, drove in four runs. Sweet! As usual, you should sort it all out for your league.

Elsewhere in this week’s model, frank discussion about Jeff Francoeur, the breakout (break down?) of a trade of big players (for educational purposes only), and some chatter about some Hots and Nots.

Be there! As some of us used to say in college.

BBTF’s Game Chatter Discussion

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Cleveland 91-63 at Kansas City 52-101 7:10pm ET
In the Guide I wrote about Cleveland farmhand Jason Stanford: “He was arrested in September for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, and then missed his court appearance. It’s too bad, since control was always one of his bests qualities.”

Today Stanford called the magazine’s publisher and said he hadn’t missed the court date. The Baseball Think Factory page above has links to Cleveland Plain Dealer stories about the original arrest (JS made disparaging comments to a man wearing a pink shirt, apparently, which led to a bit of a brawl) and the court announcing after Stanford apparently missed his court date that they’d written the wrong date on his appearance ticket. So it wasn’t his fault. The links don’t work, however, so I’m basing this on the postings on the BTF page.

I’m certainly sorry for drawing on the mistaken AP story originally and am happy to point out the error while wearing pink (actually salmon) slacks.

A Willie Randolph Lover

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New York Mets

This story for mlb.com isn’t hard hitting journalism, but Marty Noble’s thing is getting into ballplayers’ heads. Cliff Floyd’s head (as well as his injured parts) has always seemed to get in the way, and now we know that Floyd has had a meeting with Randolph like the one Mickey Mantle had with Ralph Houk nearly a lifetime (if you’re me) ago. Floyd’s redemption is emotionally told, and if he can hold up all season long again he’ll make fool of those of us who thought he could only do that in one season out of four.

Cory Sullivan Triples Twice in One Inning

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Major League Baseball : News : Major League Baseball News

I mention this only because yesterday, when Chris Shelton tripled twice in one game, I wondered how often that had happened. Last year’s triples leader, Jose Reyes, had 17 triples. That’s one every 10 games or so. Today we learn that it’s been 50+ years since someone tripled twice in the same inning, a much more difficult feat.

The BPification of the Baseball World

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STLtoday – Sports – Columnists

We used to get pissed off at baseball writers who wrote dopey stuff informed by the game’s common wisdom, much of which wasn’t all that wise. Now we continually find, and this example is one of many, writers whose main talent seems to be to be able to convert the various Baseball Prospectus metrics into somewhat-analytical prose. He analyzes Juan Encarnacion’s prospects using Eqa, criticizes his fielding based on his Davenports, and then questions the sabermetric wisdom of the Age 27 peak, since Encarnacion posted his highest Eqa as a 29 year old.

I’ll let you (and the good citizens of St. Louis) judge if this is worthwhile information. My problem isn’t that it is or isn’t, we’re still trying to sort out which objective information is useful and which isn’t, but that these tools in the hands of the lazy or the dunderheaded end up the basis for all sorts of thoughts that are just as wrong as the old ideas.

Like writing a column about Juan Encarnacion four days into the season that judges him based on some hypothetical ideal ballplayer and how his four-day stats compare, rather than describing what he does well and what he does poorly. Encarnacion may not be all the player he could be, if he did things differently, but he does enough things right to be a legit major leaguer. Getting all high and mighty about his style of play is goofy, probably lazy, certainly dunderheaded.