Baseball Toaster was unplugged on February 4, 2009.
Jon's other site:
Screen Jam
TV and more ...
1) using profanity or any euphemisms for profanity
2) personally attacking other commenters
3) baiting other commenters
4) arguing for the sake of arguing
5) discussing politics
6) using hyperbole when something less will suffice
7) using sarcasm in a way that can be misinterpreted negatively
8) making the same point over and over again
9) typing "no-hitter" or "perfect game" to describe either in progress
10) being annoyed by the existence of this list
11) commenting under the obvious influence
12) claiming your opinion isn't allowed when it's just being disagreed with
Well, Spring Training games have been going for under a week, and already three Dodgers will be right back after these massages.
Battling ailments that will no doubt take longer to recover from than we are initially being told are Marlon Anderson, Rafael Furcal and now Joe Beimel, according to Ken Gurnick at MLB.com. Just serves as the annual reminder that the 25-man roster you lay out in February doesn't hold up for long come March.
This is as good a time as any to remember that the first week of Spring Training is like Vegas: Whatever happens there, stays there - or it should if anyone has any sense. That means, wake me when Larry Bigbie is banging out three hits a game in April; sedate me when Wilson Betemit has more errors than hits in May. Past heroes of 21st-century Dodger Spring Training include Jason Romano and Terry Shumpert - need more be said?
Additionally, don't take the positioning of the Dodger starting rotation in April as an actual ranking of the starters. Given that the Dodgers have explicitly stated that they are arranging their pitchers to gain or avoid certain matchups with opponents, it's obvious that we shouldn't try reading between the lines. Basically, the Dodgers are lining up for their opening plays from scrimmage, like Bill Walsh in his heyday with the 49ers. First down, Derek Lowe right. Second down, Randy Wolf left. And depending on performance and offdays, they'll audible. The pitchers seem to understand this, so it's a non-story.
* * *
Many find it hard to understand how pitchers can walk batters in exhibition play, when they have nothing to lose by throwing it over the plate. But Spring Training is a time to get your groove back, Stella - and if you're in that groove, a time to experiment with your pitches without fear of the walks really meaning everything. Further, don't forget that walks come on a two-way street - batters actually can draw them, too. As I've stated in the past, during Spring Training, eyeballing performance can be more valuable than stats ...
How To Make Spring Training Stats Meaningful
... in just five steps.
Step 1: Include walks in box scores and batting statistics distributed by Major League Baseball and The Associated Press.
Step 2: Record and circulate play-by-play logs of Spring Training games.
Step 3: Compute a value, based on regular season statistics from the previous season or from previous seasons, to each player in the major league camps. With Win Shares, EQA, OPS+ and ERA+, the foundation is already there. Put Barry Bonds at 100 and Garth Brooks at 0.
Step 4: Adjust every exhibition statistic according to these values.
Step 5: Circulate these adjusted Spring Training statistics, which, while not perfect, would account for the vast differences in the caliber of competition of any exhibition game.
This process is long overdue, yet seems within reach.
And thus, we could prove such critical facts as whether Jason Romano's eyebrow-raising spring was merely something to be tweezed.
Longtime and even shortime readers of this site know that I put little credence in exhibition stats and am much more likely to evaluate Romano based on his regular season numbers throughout his career, which are pitiful.
The interesting thing about Spring Training at the outset of the Moneyball era is that Spring Training produces performances that are probably best evaluated by observation, rather than statistics. Spring Training leads people to use statistics in a most unsystematic manner – because the statistics are fundamentally flawed.
The time has come to improve Spring Training statistics so that they can be used as a compliment to observation. (And again, Moneyball advocates don't seek to eliminate observation, but encourage us to question what we are observing and place those observations in a quantifiable context.)
Until the statistical powers that be decide that Spring Training is worth the effort, however, I'd rather use regular season statistics, adjusted for level of play, to determine who the best prospects are.
* * *
Chavez Ravine Idol: The Dodgers and 93.9 FM are staging a contest to choose the National Anthem singer for Opening Night (Opening Night at Dodger Stadium being the first home evening game after Opening Day at Dodger Stadium, which is the first home afternoon game after Opening Day in Milwaukee. In other words, April 10.)
Emceeing the competition and playing Celeste Talbert to Ryan Seacrest's Lori Craven is longtime Los Angeles disc jockey Rick Dees. Fans in attendance on April 10 will also have the privilege of seeing Dees throw out the first pitch.
* * *
Finally, some of you might know Molly Knight from her participation in the Dodger Thoughts comments. Knight, a writer for ESPN the Magazine, has been dispatched to Florida to cover Spring Training and is also contributing to Blue Notes.
I MISS THIS SITE.
Nobody, but nobody, talks baseball in high school unless they're ten years older than me. And I ain't young.
Nelson lasted six games with the White Sox before injuries ended his career.
Brock avoided that post about the UCLA grad below quite adroitly. Hmmm...
Elisabeth Shue reference in this post triggers SB's return ... SB must again be thinking about what might have been.
6 I had a real humdinger of a response, but I let restraint take over. Shame on me...
what does this molly knight look like?
The entire original Karate Kid cast got together for this music video...It's about 47.6 kinds of awesome, even if the music is, er, not. But how cool is this? Directed by William Zabka!
http://www.retrocrush.com/archive2007/zabka/index.html
Like, totally dude
It's scary. Cloning will get out of control, people will be able to choose various features of their super-babies, Big Brother will read our minds and spy on us even more so than they already do, etc. etc. etc. The world is only going to get worse from here on out.
All these scientists are ruining the human element...
In the Shimmin/D4P Wars, I'm a Shimmin Warrior...And you're an analrapist.
I am just saying it is sad in the future that no one will know who Cobra Kai is. Heck, there is even a chance they won't know who Mr. Belding is. That scares me.
xeifrank@yahoo.com
I find the whole thing entirely too much work. I just like watching sports.
I watched "Deadliest Catch" on the Discovery Channel tonight for the first time. Those crab fisherman are really tough. That's a lot of work. I would not like to do it.
Scientists also invented the technology that permits DT and the like to thrive, and for you to participate. You can credit/blame scientist for allowing you and Greg Brock to cross paths.
What I want is to finish my dissertation. Watching sports is not conducive to said want. The conducivity of DT is debatable, in that it is both a time-suck and a needed diversion.
Even though I've been reading almost every day, it's been a really long time since I've posted anything.
http://tinyurl.com/2t9v5s
I have no desire to track statistics as a competitive activity. I have made wild stabs at bracket pools, but the Griddle's is the first contest I've tried - with first thought picks.
Geekily enough, I have, in the dim past, participated in Strat-O-Matic baseball leagues. (The 1986-based season, I drafted Pedro Guerrero and flipped him between 3B and 1B [defense be damned] with a wacky platoon of Jim Presley and Pete O'Brien. Lost our World Series. Ahh, innocent times.)
Assuming we're still talking sports, I can see that being the case.
But yeah, drafting is the most fun part of a fantasy league.
Trades rarely go through in fantasy because people only like to do lopsided deals. It is like they are the GM of the D-Rays.
Same here. And yet I always thought my tastes were very dissimilar to Nate's. You never struck me as a Josh Ritter/Wilco kinda guy, Nate.
Coletti: That may be true. Because men are weak, they lie to deceive themselves.
Boras: Not another sermon! I don't mind a lie if it's interesting.
"Kick him in the nads, Steve!"
As if this some new story.
The Earth is:
A) 4,000 years old
B) 6,000 years old
C) 7,000 years old
D) Make of a creamy carmel filling
How much of the MLB's stats are in the public domain? I'm trying to start a site that will let you browse the results of every pitch in the last three years, but I'm not sure how much I can get away with. For example, this is what I've pulled from one at bat:
Batter: 408213
Pitcher: 451491
Inning: 8 Balls: 2 Strikes: 2 Outs: 1
Desc: Hank Blalock flies out to left fielder Craig Monroe.
Batted Ball Type: 1 Result: 1
Pitch 0: x: 116.74 y: 131.24 Quadrant: 8 Result: 1
Pitch 1: x: 73.82 y: 170.96 Quadrant: 14 Result: 3
Pitch 2: x: 87.55 y: 125.20 Quadrant: 2 Result: 4
Pitch 3: x: 132.19 y: 94.12 Quadrant: 21 Result: 3
Pitch 4: x: 115.02 y: 133.84 Quadrant: 8 Result: 5
I know that simple things like batting average are freely available, but will the MLB be unhappy with me if I start posting the exact locations of every pitch?
We're people who comment on a blog, we're not intellectual property lawyers.
http://tinyurl.com/3ymh6n
No apologies!
Well, someday we're all going to look back on this night, and all we'll remember is that D4P added a Top Gun reference to his already questionable repetoire. This is worth another week of comedy gold. D4P is truly, at heart, a uniter.
Oh, and BYU sucks.
The stats regairfield cites are not ones he could have gathered on his own. Obviously someone else used some technology and put some work into it.
But what is a fact?
What is truth, said jesting Pilate?
I have new respect for Jeff Francoeur.
Did you ever think about this from the sandwich's point of view?
Or you could give it to Zappala, and he could claim that since it was for Academic purposes, it was fair use.
Or you could move to Sealand and hope that there's enough aluminum foil in the world to protect you from MLBAM's laser-armed satellite fleet.
"Where do you get this data? The Minor League Baseball official site publishes game logs of every Minor League game. I wrote a program to parse those logs into something that closely resembles Retrosheet game logs. I wrote another program to generate these stat tables from those game logs."
And it doesn't say anything about a licensing agreement. So, I could be completely wrong.
I wonder if East Coast baseball fans realize how stupid they sound. I doubt it.
http://tinyurl.com/2l76u6
There's nothing gay about it in their eyes. It's guy love, between two guys.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/TV/03/06/television.scrubs.reut/index.html
Yep. I feel the same way about Scrubs that Andrew feels about The Simpsons. It's just not as good as it used to be, but it's still good for a few laughs. The most recent episode (a "clips" episode) was quite the cop out.
1. Tigers
2. Indians
3. Angels
4. Padres
5. White Sox
Regarding the Dodgers they say: "The Los Angeles Dodgers' trio of Derek Lowe, Schmidt and Brad Penny combined for 43 wins and more than 600 innings last season, but behind those three, there are potential health (Randy Wolf) and youth (Chad Billingsley) questions."
More important to me is integrity of process. Here, Ned deserves an F. He failed to stay up to speed. He failed to communicate. He failed to be proactive regarding a core player.
It is inexcusable for any GM to have so little clue as to what's going on with his own player, to not even bother to talk to him. Further, Ned obviously didn't have a feel for where the market was going.
That Ned got "surprised" was his own fault. Back in June he should have been talking to Drew. Information is power and Ned was derelict at getting it. For him to then to depict Drew as a religious hypocrite reflects poorly on Ned.
The real story here is failed process, followed by a childish, mean-spirited tantrum by a person in a leadership position. Maybe Ned was emulating the McCourts.
Independent of where Drew ended up and the sum he is getting from Boston, does Ned fully realize how badly he goofed? That's the followup story for this spring. Will we read it? You be the judge.
vr, Xei
not so much wilco, but arcade fire, some rilo kiley, ben kweller, stuff like that. I listen to a wide range of music though.
A) I felt that considering his health etc, that 3 years and $33 million was fair and all we could do. Good luck to him.
or
B) Wow did I mess up. I wasn't minding the store. I am sorry and it won't happen again.
Either of those would have been OK. Blaming JD and questioning his character for exercising an option in his contract reflected more poorly on Ned than on JD. Let's hope it gets better.
Regarding his deals, I like the Schmidt and Wolf deals. Much as I hated to see them go I understand the Gagne and Maddux decisions. Pierre is a little tougher one to understand but I want to reserve judgement for a bit. I sure wish we still had Edwin Jackson and Joel Guzman though.
This post turned out longer than I thought it would. Just some stuff I have been thinking about.
why is kemp seeing so much spring time in centerfield?
i thought we had established that he couldn't play there. i'm confused . . .
well i do. Im actually really picky about the specific bands in each genre i like. but the range of genres is really large. Im actually a huge decemberists fan as well. The crane wife did get alot of play in my ipod last year but still not as much as picaresque.
When I was in high school I was really into hard rock, though probably only in a limited way (I wasn't goth and I didn't go to concerts), but now I can't stand it. But I listen to Wilco, Ryan Adams and the Decemberists so obviously I have softened in my old (23) age.
"Three lefties and two right-handers. Five guys who answer the bell, with the fewest missed starts of any team in baseball last year, and a proven ability to succeed at the Major League level. The Indians have all that in C.C. Sabathia (12-11, 3.22 ERA, 192 2/3), Jake Westbrook (15-10, 4.17 ERA, 211 1/3), Cliff Lee (14-11, 4.40 ERA, 200 2/3), Paul Byrd (10-9, 4.88 ERA, 179) and Jeremy Sowers (7-4, 3.57 ERA in 14 starts last year)."
i think the arcade fire is probably the single most overrated indie band of the past few years.
Sabathia's a nice anchor to the rotation, but after that you have a soft-tosser with one good year (Westbrook), an inconsistent but promising lefty (C. Lee), a total has-been (Byrd), and a youngster with even more question marks than Billingsley (Sowers). I don't think they'd even make most top-10 lists.
Im around two years younger then you and it seems im heading in that direction already. But then I put in my old botch and converge albums and im right back in high school with a smile ear to ear.
I don't think there was any way that Drew was going to give up the option to opt out given the contract.
Most here, hate any deal that involves a no-trade clause and that is what both Drew and Boras said they wanted from the Dodgers though ultimately they made a deal with Boston that only allows them the chance to veto a trade to 2 teams. Now Boras has said that there is no way that Boston deals Drew but how can he be sure and if so, why not get in writing.
Did Ned say somethings maybe he shouldn't have said, sure but I think its really a non-story.
BTW, who is Molly?
You've got another 8-10 years before you've moved on to Dido
I think we all want a girl who listens to good music, loves sports (especially the dodgers), and writes for espn the magazine.
And it would be nice if her skirt is short and her jacket is long
1. Angels
2. Red Sox
3. Marlins
4. Tigers
5. Dodgers
When the answer is so obviously going to be D4P?
if it were me:
1. boston
2. detroit
3. philly
4. dodgers
5. angels
for sheer enjoyment factor though, minus the bear beats all.
maybe kemp is seeing time in cf because we're giving actual thought to carrying him on the bench instead of repko.
or we're shopping him.
or we're planning on moving pierre to lf next year :)
I guess he can get better after all. In your face, Nate Silver!
indeed, minus the bear can be listened to any time. love those dancy grooves.
Last year and again this spring, when Matt Kemp and Jason Repko are both in the lineup, Little plays Kemp in center and Repko in right. This positioning seems backwards to me -- can you explain Little's reasoning?
-- Don C., Goshen, Conn.
My best explanation is that, because it's Spring Training, he wants to see if Kemp can play center field. He already knows that Repko can. If it continued to real games, I'd agree with you. I don't see Kemp as a center fielder. Pierre is signed for five years and center field is his position; however, maybe the long-range plan is to move Pierre to left because of his throwing arm and put up with Kemp's flaws in center because of his potential.
God help us all if that is the plan.
Here are my ETAs on our prospects and when they will be ready
LaRoche: Now
Loney: Now
Billingsley: Now (bullpen)
Kuo: Now (Starter)
Miller: 2008 (SP/RP)
Kemp: 2008
Meloan: 2008
Elbert: Mid 2008
Kershaw: 2009
We only have 25 roster slots. Where are we going to put all of these guys? I think that the ranks should be thinned a bit (though Kershaw, LaRoche, and Kemp should be considered untouchable unless A-Rod is involved) to bring in Carl Crawford or a hitter of similar skills.
LaRoche: 3B (Betemit becomes utility, Martinez is DFAd)
Loney: 1B/OF
Bills: Rotation/Bullpen
Kuo: Rotation/Bullpen
Miller: Bullpen (replaces Beimel)
Meloan: Bullpen (replaces Dessens)
Elbert: Rotation (replaces Hendrickson)
Kershaw: Rotation (replaces Lowe)
So, plenty of room avaialable.
25 roster spots and pitchers will be 12 of them by the 3rd week if not earlier.
13-24 (not in any order except that I think barring injury they will be on the roster)
13 Martin
14 Lieberthal
15 Garciaparra
16 Kent
17 Furcal
18 Ethier
19 Pierre
20 Gonzalez
21 Anderson
22 Repko
23 Saenz
24 Betemit
25 Martinez, Loney, La Roche, Kemp, Young (pick one)
If you like more than 1 guy in the 25 spot you have to get rid of someone above them. No fair picking Pierre because it isn't going to happen.
What would you do?
3.5 and Lucille each hit 2-run singles
Although Drew, 31, said he was aware he had an option in his contract, it wasn't until he was approached by agent Scott Boras after the season that he considered invoking it.
"I honestly never thought about that," he said. "I kind of laughed it off thinking, 'We're happy in L.A., we're not really thinking [along] the lines of leaving.' [Boras] said, 'I need you to seriously consider this' and he kind of laid out some options for me and said, 'Hey, this is what I think could happen. With a young family and thinking about having additions to that family I want you to have some job security. I want you to be able to kind of dictate where you're playing for a few years.' "
Drew said he and his wife, Sheigh, agonized over the decision for two days before finally agreeing to exercise the contract option Nov. 9. That was two days before the deadline but three days after Boras told Colletti over lunch that his client could be leaving."
No hard feelings to Drew from me - he did what was within his right, but I can see that Ned let his emotions out a bit much, but moreso toward Boras, than anything Drew did. Did Boras have a buyer in place before JD opted out? We'll never know, but there is a slight stink to things since the rumor at the time was Boston, and that's where he ended up.
http://www.slate.com/id/2160585/&#pushypriuses
The only disappointing thing about not having Frank around is that with this pitching staff, he'd likely, by May, go out to the mound and kill one of the pitchers with his bare hands.
Nats losing 9-6 to the Braves.
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/nationalsjournal/
It seems that Drew was not going to be a Dodger in 2007 no matter how it would have played out. Either by trad or opting out cause 152 is right; you don't treat your most talented player like that unless you didnt want him.
Really.
Go read it right now.
Or both.....
I would take that bet any day of the week because I firmly believe that Pierre is a net negative and five years of him will be so detrimental that Drew will only have to have to be healthy every other year to be a bargain by comparison. I would rather pay Drew an extra 5 million any day of the week, because at least you get something back. Plus, since Boston has injury provisions in the contract it is less risky (less money on the line) for infinitely more reward.
The whole thing was handled poorly, which will happen, but to publicly criticize Drew for something that seems to be your own fault is both inept and unprofessional (to me anyway).
I agree...and the fact of the matter is, we'll never know exactly what went on between Ned/Boras/Drew. But, as a fan, the one thing that irked me is that during the season Drew alluded to the fact that leaving wasn't really an option for him. If he just shut his mouth, or even said he wasn't sure, then I wouldn't be irritated at all because he has the clause in his contract and it's his right to opt out...but don't mess with the fans like that.
Completely agree on Pierre...but that horse has been beaten to death, brought back to life, and beaten to death again. I'm just hoping to god Pierre can play some pretty good defense and get his OBP up.
Comment status: comments have been closed. Baseball Toaster is now out of business.