If you're like me, you've played something called 'The Steroids Game.' The Steroids Game takes place when you sit around a bar, or a rec room, or a ballpark, with a number of baseball-loving friends, and try and guess who is on performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs). Perhaps, if you're particularly deranged, you've even played Rotisserie Steroids, which is just like regular rotisserie baseball except that the categories are games suspended (GS), cameramen kicked (CK), testicles ruptured (TR), days spent in the company of Jose Canseco (DSJC).

Stress tests are not just for cardiac patients and big failing banks: we can also apply them to baseball players. What if Tiny Tim Lincecum were really Tall Tim Lincecum? What if Albert Pujols was older than purported? What if we took a right-handed pitcher and magically turned him into a lefty?

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We're less than two full years removed from Barry Bonds' somber, strange, and soulless quest to break Henry Aaron's lifetime home-run record. It was a spectacle that most sports fans-even the few like me who were relatively sympathetic towards Bonds' plight-would go to great lengths to avoid having to experience again.

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This is Part 2 of yesterday's Lies, Damned Lies: The Ultimate Fantasy Draft, which included players ranked from number 26 through 50, as well as honorable mentions.

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Welcome, ladies and gents, to the third annual Baseball Prospectus Ultimate Fantasy Draft. What, you are probably wondering, is the Baseball Prospectus Ultimate Fantasy Draft? It is the answer to this question: If you were starting a baseball team from scratch, which players would you want to build your team around? That is, which players would you take-and in what order would you take them-if your goal was to win as many championships as possible over the medium-to-long-term?

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Having dropped 10 of their last 13 ballgames, the Tigers have gone from longshot to no shot, with now barely more than a three percent chance of reaching the playoffs. While the Tigers have not officially waved the white flag, I am going to do so for them, by unveiling our first "Tufte Takes On…" piece of the season.

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Oh, it was going to happen. It was just a matter of when. Not in March or April, maybe, and probably not in May or June. As the trade deadline approached, some team was going to look out at the trade market, realize they were going to need to give up three or four quality prospects to acquire a good outfielder, and realize at that price it was worth signing ... Barry Bonds.

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Trivia question: Yankee Stadium seats 57,545 fans, which is presently the largest capacity of any park in Major League Baseball. When it closes this year, and is replaced by a ballpark that seats roughly 6,000 fewer fans, which facility will take its place as the largest stadium in MLB?

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We've become far more sophisticated over the years about performing financial analysis on trades. We now understand, for instance, that there is a very measurable financial benefit to a team when it makes the playoffs. We also understand that the way you create long-term value in baseball is by employing players who are still in their reserve-clause or arbitration seasons, and paying them a fraction of their market value. It is the interweaving of these two factors that creates most of the trade market.

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It is rare in baseball to talk about team cohesion. In contrast to the other major sports, there are relatively few interactions between players on the same club. The pitcher stands out there on the mound all by himself and throws the ball; the hitter stands there in the batters' box all by himself and hopes to hit it. There is no baseball equivalent of John Stockton passing to Karl Malone, or Peyton Manning to Reggie Wayne.

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Home-field advantage is making a little bit of a comeback this year, with the home team thus far having won 56.2 percent of major league baseball games. This is actually down a few ticks from where it was several weeks ago; at the beginning of June, home teams had won almost 58 percent of their games. Nevertheless, this is quite high by the standards of recent history. Prior to World War II (when travel was more burdensome and road trips much longer), home-field advantage was more profound in baseball, but since then it has been exceptionally stable, with the home team winning about 54 percent of games each season. So, is there something systematic that is causing the home-field numbers to increase this year? Or has it just been some kind of statistical fluke?

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In playing around with the McCain-Obama polling data over at my political blogging project, I came across a procedure known as a LOESS regression. LOESS is a way to create smooth-looking curves out of sequential data. Some of LOESS's virtues are aesthetic; the curves it produces seem to look and feel just right. But it can also be considerably more robust than something like a moving average in handling time series data, performing more strongly in the presence of outliers. Since we look at all sorts of time-series data in baseball, LOESS ought potentially to have all kinds applications to the game.

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