One of my favorite stories Chris George, a royals pitcher who, in 2003, was sent down in mid july even though he was 9-6. He had an ERA of 7.11 He gave up 22 HR in 93 IP.

The Sox coaches generally serve tea and get the pitcher and catcher to sing Kumbaya. I'm sure the guidance was more "ok, let's go over the game plan for thes guys - Salty - have you talked the pitchers yet?" It's AAA, not rookie ball. These guys are supposed to have a clue.

YOu should do a Ralph Houk All stars. Might be the only team to have a ton of Sox and yankees on it.

Before the season, Theo was pretty open that there wasn't a lot in the minors to help the major league team this year, which is why they went out and got Bill Hall and made sure to keep 6 starters. The guys they have brought up haven't been too bad at all - McDonald, Nava, Doubront and now Bowden.

Super Nava. Article in the globe about his debut: http://www.boston.com/sports/baseball/redsox/articles/2010/06/13/nava_enjoys_a_debut_loaded_with_excitement/

An interesting way to view this might be to figure the league leaders in difference between SLG and OBP every year.

The Fabio Castro callup was solely because the arm's in the Sox pen were about to fall off. Had Buchholz not been outstanding, he would have been the first guy out of the pen in the 2nd-6th or 7th inning.

If .260 is league average, I'm not sure I believe these numbers. For one thing, only SS are below average, which seems suspicious. For another, to make the overall average .260, you have to add over 1000 pitcher AB with no value whatsoever (assuming that you can weight it the way I did) Maybe .260 isn't league average, I dunno.

How big a problem do you guys see this as being? Just from a naive point of view, 87% seems in the ballpark. I mean, Mariners needed 2 runs. Sweeney did half the job of scoring one (getting on base), Ichiro did the other half of scoring it and all the job of scoring the other one. Are you guys worried about the 12% difference? or are you guys thinking it should be more like 50/50?

Seamheads article doesn't actually support the idea that Pujols is a top 20 player. It supports an idea that AFTER THIS YEAR, he'll be a top 20 player all time, and 3rd among 1B - but right now, he's not top 20 over all and he's 4th among 1B. His conclusions are based on projecting Albert to have a normal Albert year this year.

Lopez is now on the DL.

On Jackie Robinson day: It seems like players are still wearing #42 - I am sure I saw two guys wearing it last night. Was I seeing things? I had thought it was a day - is it longer?

Wake may go to long relief. There is no chance he is released. Last time the Sox traded away a starter "because they had enough pitching" was 2006 and they were hurting for rotation help all year.

My guess is that Ellsbury isn't yelling loudly enough, since he nearly collided with Hall earlier in the game.

Here's a question: As a fan, is a statement like this actionable? Can you imagine going to a play and seeing a less good play than you expected, because the director "wanted to get an actor some experience for the next play?" I mean - you paid to see this play - don't you expect the best you can get? I thought about this when thinking about the Sox the day after they clinched a playoff spot. They sold out Fenway that day and put a lineup that wouldn't have passed muster in ST, against Roy Halladay. They basically were non-competitive that day - played a lot of guys who got 400 AB for pawtucket. If that was the game I was going to that season, that would be kind of disappointing to me.

I have to say, I had a hard time understanding a contending roster where opening day had Vincent Padilla, both Ortiz's AND Jeff Weaver pitching.

The big problem I have with OPS is that it has no natural meaning. What does 1 point of OPS mean? OBP is simple, conceptually - the % of time a player gets on base. SLG isn't all that simple, but it's definable. OPS, though - it's just two values added together. that said, there is value to it - clearly, a .900 OPS is a lot better than a .700 OPS - so it's good for crude comparisons. It's not at all clear whether a .710 OPS is better than a .705 OPS, though, without looking at the underlying stats.

Can you defend the statement that "This is assuming a normal distribution—most baseball stats are at least a good approximation of this." I believe that, in fact, most baseball stats are an approximation of one tail of a normal distribution curve, not a normal curve at all, for nearly all stats, there are more players below the average than above it. Look at wins - there are a lot more pitchers, with 0 wins than 1, more with 1 than 2, more with 2 than 3. At some point, you start getting some fluctuation - in any given year, you may have more pitchers with 13 wins than 12, for instance.

Jacoby Ellsbury has played 80 games in LF, back when Coco Crisp was around to patrol CF. He'll be fine out there. Dice-K did have 18 wins and an ERA below 3.00 in 2008. I know that it was partly illusion, but still.

Clearly, the predictive power of "being hot" is pretty low, which has been born out since Bill James and has been shown to not really exist in other sports, either. I think that this is a terribly important thing for people to understand - ARod is a better hitter than Marco Scutaro and so is more dangerous whether Scutaro is 8-12 and ARod is 2-12 or it's the other way around. But I also think we do ourselves a disservice to dismiss variations as mathematical or statistical noise or call them randomness. We don't know what causes BABIP (for instance0 to fluctuate, for instance, we just know that it does. All we know is that we can't measure what it is that causes it to fluctuate and we (currently) cannot predict a year to year fluctuation. I believe there is very little about the game that is random - no one throws dice in the air and says "oooh - Papi hit a HR"

The Yankees are going to score 100 fewer runs in 2010 than 2009? You guys have projected the Sox to score 60 fewer runs or so and that gets a mention, but the Yankees look to have what I have to assume is the biggest drop in the league and no one says anything?

Victor isn't batting 7th. He's probably batting 3rd... where he hit last year. I think the order will be: Ellsbury Pedroia Martinez Youkilis Ortiz Drew Cameron Beltre Scutaro You might see Cameron and Drew flip flop, and if Ortiz struggles, Drew will probably move up to 5th.

I think the idea of payroll efficiency is important and interesting. I don't think that any study that shows the Yankees as one of the 5 worst run franchises of the 90's, with the Pirates as one of the best, is showing what it thinks it is showing. More precisely, the conclusion that payroll efficiency is the sole way to evaluate how good a team is run seems to be missing something.

I think stuff like this is really interesting. I'm not sure how it applies to baseball, unless the Mariners are planning on trying to slip Ichiro up to the plate for every at bat and assume no one will notice.

Austin Jackson, Andrew McAllister and Brett Gardner for Curtis Granderson. This is a fan post from a chat forum, not a journalist or blogger.

Never mind. I don't know how i missed him....

What happened to Michael Bowden? Man had a 3.13 ERA in AAA and was in the top 11 last year - I think he was 3rd or 4th. Yet not even a mention this year?

I wonder if that's the source of the "hop" that a lot of pitchers have. Maybe for most pitchers, a 90 mph comes across at 83, but for pitchers with "hop" on the fastball, it comes across at 87, so it seems to be faster.

Hey PSUInNYC312 :) While I agree that Rivera is a potential weakness... I've been saying that for years on chat boards. It hasn't happened yet ;) What is known is that, at some point, Rivera won't be the closer - either he'll retire still effective, or he'll suddenly lose it - but there's no way to know if it's this year or 6 years from now.

The current Pirates Depth chart has Morgan batting 3rd and McClouth leading off, which is backwards.

I have no problem believing that closers do worse in non-save situations than in save situations. Maybe in save situations they have more adrenalin and they use that adrenalin effectively. And they are used to it, so their muscle memory is tied to the adrenaline... thus, when it's not a save situation, they are less effective, because they don't have the extra jolt.

Ransom would get 55 RBI if he had the same number of AB as ARod, not more than ARod. Ransom has a stat line broken up into two spots, 3B and SS - they don't break down the stats by those. All those predictions seem reasonable - I might think that Wang is likely to pitch more innings and Burnett fewer, but what the heck. I'd like to know what's going on with the VORP for Cano - doesn't make much sense compared to last year to me, either. I don't know that these predictions will be useful, though - yankees are still an old team, though they are younger. If Jeter gets hurt again, there is no good replacement. btw - if Mark Teixeira puts up a sub .500 SLG, the NY media is going to roast him and the Yankees.

Interesting point about Phillips. LaRussa can't really be trying to do that, can he? I mean, either Phillips was an aberration (he only got good at age 33) or he was one of the early roid users. either way, it seems silly to think that he can mass produce guys like that... doesn't it?

While I agree that Bug has presided over a great growth in the game, and that the wild card, as much as it is disliked by purists, is very good for the game, I am left with such a bad taste about the steroid era. Yes, I think the player's union are highly to blame - but I cannot shake the belief that the owners knew and turned a blind eye to it, in an attempt to bring the game back from the disaster of the 94 season. This is the Selig legacy, in my mind - 10 years of baseball, with some important records being set, all tarnished. Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire happened on HIS watch. Roger Clemens, possibly the greatest pitcher the game has seen, is marred by scandal. This is the game - long term, what makes baseball great is the legends, the players. it is a game in our soul, in the poetry of the nation, and under bud's watch, the game was damaged, probably more than it has been since the 1919 Black Sox. Of course, baseball will recover - it always does.

I can\'t agree. Fox has their issues, but TBS consistently gives a performance that is below professional standards. Last year, it was coming back from commercial late and missing plays - this year, it\'s losing power and taking 1/2 hour to get it back. I don\'t like Fox, but you get competance.

no. Manny has been unreal in LA, which is why they are driving in more runs (cause he\'s on base all the time) and scoring more runs (cause he hit 17 HR in less than two months)