It's the time of year when managers start thinking about games that will actually count. Positional battles are heating up, because decisions need to be made. Opening Day starters are being named. Variations in lineups are being considered, for facing righties, lefties, and Pat Venditte. Your favorite team has spent the spring trying to decide between two players, both of whom are relative unknowns. Due to the 50/50/90 rule (when you have a 50/50 chance of getting something right by chance, you will get it wrong 90 percent of the time), they will pick the wrong utility infielder and the other guy will become a decent starter for some other team.

Well, this year's Sloan Sports Analytics Conference has come and gone, and I wasn't able to attend. Worse, I couldn't go to the SABR Analytics Conference either. Of course, I've followed along as best as I could, but there's no substitute for actually being in the room.

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My wife and I have been married for seven and a half years. We dated for four years before that. There are days when it's eerie how in sync we are. We've gotten to the point where someone will say something and we’ll both look up and smile knowingly at each other because we’re both aware that the other's mind just went to the same obscure song lyric from 15 years ago. Yeah, I think we have some chemistry going.

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A couple of weeks ago, I took on the "Verducci Effect". Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated has hypothesized that a pitcher who is under 25 years old and who had an increase in his workload of 30 innings or more in the previous season is at greater risk for injury or for a steep decline in performance. This is a great hypothesis, but for the fact that it is not actually true.

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This one is dedicated to the memory of my father-in-law, himself a biochemist. I once tried explaining baseball and sabermetrics to him (he was from Russia). He thought it was nice that I had such an interesting hobby. He will be missed.

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Last week, Sports Illustrated writer and Jason Parks man-crush Tom Verducci put out his annual column warning about a specific type of player: A young pitcher (25 or younger) who saw a significant increase in his workload in the previous season over the season before that (defined as an increase of at least 30 innings, including postseason and minor-league work). Verducci claims that this sort of pitcher is in danger of either a significant injury and/or a performance decline in 2013 because his 2012 was much busier than his 2011. It's a proposition that's become known as the Verducci Effect.

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Last week, my colleague Sam Miller ran a few numbers on the pointless, yet poignant play that is the pitchout (a billion points to whomever catches that reference) and concluded that pitchouts are actually a net loser: they cost the defense/pitching team more in runs than they gain. Sure, individual pitchouts sometimes nab a would-be base stealer (and that's a good thing), but overall, managers guessed wrong so often that the expected payoff wasn't high enough to justify the strategy. Rule number one of strategic thinking is that just because you got lucky on a stupid bet, it doesn't negate the fact that it was a stupid bet.

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Last week, I wrote a piece on the social development of young baseball players (and humans in general). In the piece, I suggested that one reason that teams might employ older players who are well past their prime, to the point where they are barely replacement level, is that there might be something to the "clubhouse guy" effect, particularly on young players. Players in their early 20s are going through a seldom recognized and only recently understood period of neurological development, and in addition to being baseball players are also trying to figure out how to be adults. There might be some value to having a guy around who is... well, already an adult. Someone who could take a young player under his wing.

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So... the Hall of Fame vote happened. And no one got in.

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In my most recent chat here at BP, a subscriber asked me about Cubs prospect Albert Almora, whom he called "polished" for an 18-year-old. I know very little about who's who among prospects, so I'll assume that Almora really is "polished" (he did get a taste of low-A ball last year), and as a former Lakeview resident, I should be overly excited about him. History has shown over and over that this will certainly end well for the Cubs.

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It's been a frustrating offseason thus far. There haven't been any moves that have been so outrageously silly that I’ve felt the need to skewer the offending team. For the most part, the moves that I've seen this winter have been of the "I get it" variety.

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