calendarlive.com: SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW
A friend in LA turned me on to this lovely essay by Arnold Hano, about the writing and afterlife of his classic, A Day in the Bleachers. I’m embarrassed to say that I haven’t read it, but I will now.
Recommendations
Things Rotoman likes.
Eric Munson
Rotoworld.com – Eric Munson Biography
The notion that Eric Munson is going to be a suitable reserve for the aging Brad Ausmus seems, on the face of it, to be crazy.
The notion that Munson will hit enough to hold the job, much less play the position well enough, is absurd. We have plenty of history to back that up.
Which is why Humberto Quintero is an interesting reserve play. With Raul Chavez out of the way (waived, then claimed by Baltimore) Quintero is the only real option the Astros have if (when!) Munson is discarded.
Quintero hasn’t developed as a hitter the way we (meaning, I) expected, so there are reasons for the Astros’ reluctance to promote him. But as a late in the game reserve pick sleeper, he’s golden.
2006 Commercials
My oh my. Very nice.
Alex Patton’s Notes for Masochists
A few years ago a regular scanned all of the non player profile pages of Alex Patton’s roto ouvre. They were posted for a time at rototouts.com, but when I let that site lapse I didn’t get them reposted until this week. They’re classic, funny, smart, sometimes exciting and sometimes aggravating. I can’t think of a better place to get into the murky theoretical issues in fantasy baseball, and haul them out into the daylight. Prosit.
Do-or-Die Baseball – The World Baseball Classic proves baseball seasons don’t have to be endless. By Seth Stevenson
I love it. A completely different perspective on the nature of the game of baseball. I’ve long thought that basketball might become a much better game if they dumped the transition and the game became a series of set plays launched from scrimmage, like football. No tackling, though, I don’t think. Stevenson’s thought experiment recasts the nature of the baseball schedule, and suggests how it might change our perceptions of the role of luck and small differences. Good stuff.
Hardball Dollars
Lots of information here about contracts and salaries, set up in such a way that you can scan a team’s coming obligations. I get lots of calls for lists of upcoming free agents. This site will let you find your own.
Minimum Horizon Two Years
This site books bets on public issues with a long time frame. Today the lead bet is whether there will be bioterror event of 1M or more casualties by 2020. At first I thought this might be a good place to set up a discussion about Barry Bonds’ Hall of Fame chances, but I suspect that wouldn’t pass the importance threshhold. So I link to the site simply because it’s out there.
An Unsettling Feeling
Hate the Sin, Love the Sinner – Remembering Kirby Puckett. By Jeremy Derfner
After hearing about Kirby Puckett’s death from a stroke earlier this week, I was struck by how torn I felt. He was a fun ballplayer to watch, but since his retirement we’d learned things about his life that made it hard not to end every praising statement with a great big “but.” Jeremy Derfner was a far bigger fan of Puckett than I ever was, and he doesn’t really nail the problem here, but his description of the 1991 World Series reminded me just how great it was (and how my regular poker game suspended for about an hour while we all sat on our host’s bed and watched transfixed as Jack Morris spun his magic that night) and how big a part of those years Puckett was. Well worth reading, in other words.
Forecasting 2006 — Tom M. Tango and Marcel the Monkey
It has been clear for years that the science of player projection is something of a scam. There is a finite amount of stuff we can know about a player’s performance the next year and a certain amount that is stochastic, random, unknowable. I’ve put the unknowable part at about 25 percent, based on various ways of measuring the accuracy of my expert projections.
This big random component means that the lens of a single season tells us only a little about about a player’s actual abilities. And while we use these small slices to tell us more about the player’s game, as a player ages his game changes. The measures that matter for a 25 year old are different for a 30 year old and different still for a 35 year old. The very smart Tom Tango set out to see how much of the potentially knowable 75 percent he could project using a very raw set of weighted averages building in regressive factors, and writes about it here.
The Amazing Fan Graphs
Baseball Stats, Graphs, Analysis | Fan Graphs
Have a month or two to do nothing but click on links on a website? Visit Fan Graphs. You’ll find stats here, but you’ll also find 70 charts for every player tracking daily and seasonal trends. Most immediately interesting to me were the daily graphs tracking AVG, OBP, SLG, K/9, BB/9, and on and on. Stats are compared to a ML average, so you can visually judge relative improvement or decline. Plus righty/lefty and home/away splits are also graphed. Simply awesome.