Ask Rotoman

2003 First Pitch Forums

At the end of this month I’m making appearances at two of Ron Shandler’s First Pitch Forums, in New Jersey and Long Island. I’m supposed to make a 20-minute talk about something roto related and I’ve come up with a concept:

Rotoman’s Top 10 Most Misunderstood Fantasy Baseball Concepts

The idea is to count down quickly, David Letterman style, shouting out the misunderstood concept, why it’s misunderstood and offering an idea that makes better sense.

I have twenty minutes to speak, so this isn’t a heavy talk but rather a fun way to cover a lot of ground. I hope.

Here are the questions:

Interesting idea?

What concepts to you think are misunderstood, or you misunderstand?

Is there another topic you’d rather hear about?

I appreciate any thoughts you might have about this. Write to me at peter@askrotoman.com.

BTW, I need to nail this down by noon on Wednesday.

Fantasy Baseball: Fantasy Baseball ’01 Stadium Stats

Now that the Stats Red Book is no more, established ways of finding important information have to be reprogrammed.

Today, when I saw that Rick Helling had been signed by the Orioles, I was curious what difference the new ballpark might make for him. While I’m sure somewhere out there someone has complete park effects, I don’t know where that is.

So for now, I turn to this page at ESPN.com, which gives you some tools for evaluating the differences between parks. Not as many as the red book, mind you, but enough to let me feel comfortable saying that Helling isn’t going to get killed this year because of the change.

The American Book Center

The other day a longtime reader now living in the Netherlands asked if the magazine was available online. It isn’t, because shipping costs either raise the price too much or eat away any profits. But I offered to send him a copy if he’d pay the hefty freight overseas. Instead, I heard back this morning:

Peter:

Bo

I think it’s very cool to be found on the rack in Amsterdam. I’m wondering if the regular Rotoman readers in Kazakhstan, Vietnam and the Phillipines (or other points abroad) have had similar luck.

YOU SAID IT HERE FIRST

Want more info about PattonAndCo.com? Take a look at this.

Welcome to Player Profiles at Patton & Co

Okay, the new site is up and running again. There are details below. Check it out and feel free to contribute. We think you won’t ever want to leave.

(Hmmm, I wonder, is that a selling point? For Barbados, maybe, but I’m not so sure about a web site.)

Amazon.com: Music: Pink Flag/Chairs Missing/154 [BOX SET] [IMPORT]

So, I’m assuming you know that if you buy stuff from this site through Amazon the site earns a commission. And you no doubt know how much I appreciate it. I think the commissions last year earned about $50, which thanks to the good folks at your-site.com (if you sign up with them tell them I sent you), covered most of the web hosting.

What you might not know is that if you buy, let’s say, Ron Shandler’s latest Forecaster, and you buy something else, I get to see what it was. I don’t get to see who bought it, rest assured there are no Admiral Poindexters here at askrotoman.com, but I do get to live vicariously.

And today I happened to be going through the logs and what did I find? A reader bought a Wire box set.

All I can say is, Bravo. Wire isn’t to everyone’s taste, to be sure, but there was no more economical yet extravagant, abstract yet organic, punky but arty band to come out of anywhere than Wire.

I’ve got the vinyl versions of Pink Flag and Chairs Missing down in the basement, but I don’t know the music on 154. I’m not even sure why not.

All I know is that there aren’t many days that go by when I don’t start humming, “Saw her in a mag, kissing a man. Saw her in a mag, kissing a man,” which inevitably leads into, “I knew a girl name Nikki…” But that’s a different band.

Player Profiles at Patton & Co are coming. [I posted yesterday, a bit prematurely, an invitation to the site, but some problems have come up that our crack programmers are dealing with. I’ll post a message here when the site is back up.]

This is brand new and very exciting. Essentially it’s 1,800 individual message boards, one for each of just about every player you can think of having any baseball presence at all this year.

You can ask questions about them. You can report the latest news on them. You can banter about them. This is RotoWire and RotoWorld, in a way, but instead of being a spectator you’ll get to be a part of the information processing.

Hear a rumor? You can post it. Have an insight? Run it by some of the smartest baseball fans we know. At Patton and Co. you are in the mix, and the mix is all the richer for it.

Plus you get Alex Patton’s bid prices and price scans.

The idea was Alex’s, and I’m chipping in because I think this is the next wave of baseball information. So Pattonandco.com will be where you’ll find me writing about players during spring training and the season.

Check it out. For now all it takes is a login name and password to get access. Starting on March 10 there will be a small fee, $10, which Alex hopes will pay for the rather large bandwidth charges he ran up last year.

In any case, you have a month before you have to decide. Come read, come write. I think you’ll enjoy it.

ESPN.com: MLB – Yankees’ payroll reportedly comes in at $164 million

Move the Expos to New York!

I don’t remember where I read this idea first, it certainly doesn’t originate with me, but the events of the offseason certainly support the idea that the market most needful/potentially supportive of a franchise is New York.

And heck, it makes sense for a third NY franchise to split time between the city and San Juan.

ESPN.com: MLB – Acevedo’s deal with Yanks: caught in numbers game

$900K this year if he makes the team? A big contract next year with a tiny buy out? This looks like a spectacularly bad deal for Acevedo, unless he wanted to be a Yankee more than anything else.

He’s only ever been successful as a closer and he’ll have no chance of closing in NY.

New Scientist

Nothing earthshaking here, not enough to even change projections of Cincinnati players this spring (and Cardinals, Padres and Phillies in 2004), but if Ken Griffey Jr. experiences a 60 percent testosterone surge, watch out.