Though EqA is derived from results, not batted ball types, so there's more noise in the signal on a player-by-player basis. And, as Tango points out in his rebuttal, the wOBA published at StatCorner is park-adjusted - both are available so users can choose which they prefer. Is BP actively trying to alienate the knowledgable audiece, here?

Umm, why? You went to all this trouble to change the label on a stat line? There's no new information here. What a colossal waste of time.

It's not that I don't want other people here, but that I'm completely indifferent to whether other people learn what I learn. And if BP is going to spend a bunch of time and resources trying to appeal to a broader audience, that's resources that, from my point of view, are wasted. Given that there's so much excellent free baseball analysis on the internet, hiding behind a pay wall should require better analysis. If instead they're aiming for more accessible analysis, then perhaps I'm not their target audience and I should instead donate the StatCorner.

If I may, I think the goal of places like BP should be to be right, with informing the masses as a secondary concern at best. I recognise that a broadcaster's job is to be entertaining, but I don't see why those of us who are already enlightened to care. So what if the majority of fans don't understand the game? Won't that just create more inefficiencies for us to exploit in Vegas or fantasy leagues? How do we benefit from teaching the masses how baseball works, and if we don't, why should we expend any effort at all doing it? Why should be accept dumbed-down analysis of the sort Will described in his "Be Stupid(er)" post if its goal serves no purpose that we value? No. I want detailed baseball analysis. I want advanced metrics. I want to LEARN THINGS. I'm not here to teach others.

Whereas, the product is just gold for Canadians. Only Blue Jays games get blacked out, and they're all available on basic cable anyway.

Yuniesky Betancourt is truly the gift that keeps on giving.

Godo to see Ichiro get a Green light despite seeing his first DL stint last year.

PECOTA is obviously broken. You really shouldn't be writing these articles util your prejections are fixed. This is also terribly misguided analysis. Don't compare to last year's performance, because last year's performance has statistical noise in it.

I must correct you: 1) “Albert Pujols‘ 10.8 WARP1 was highest in the league, topping Zack Greinke’s 9.0, unadjusted.� 2) “Albert Pujols was two wins better than Zack Greinke last season.� Statheads see a pronounced difference. Sentence 1 contains a lot more information than sentence 2 does. Look, I'm not interested in convincing the mainstream how baseball works. I'm interested in how baseball works. Dumbing down anything to appeal to a broader audience doesn't do that for me.

Rob Johnson on the DL only helps the Mariners. He can't hit, he can't throw, and he can't catch (honestly, I've never before seen a major-league catcher just flat-out miss balls thrown at him like Johnson does). One wonders why the Mariners even employ him.

The M's were well known as an arm-killing organization. See the series "The Attrition War" as USS Mariner - there's actual data supporting the moniker.

Gaby Hernandez is 24? His picture makes him look like he's 12.

One problem with the approach is it puts two pitchers in your batting order, so unless you only intend to do this for an inning or so you're badly harming your offense.

This is the second Will Carroll as guinea-pig test that I can recall. Remember that time you intentionally tore your trapezius muscle? Good times.

Couldn't the Marlins argue (I recognise that they didn't, but they could) that they're stockpiling funds to spend on players in the future? There's no requirement that teams operate on a one-year financial cycle.

This is idiotic. The reason relievers are forgotten on election day because they're far less valuable than starting pitchers are. You're doing a great job of reminding me why I'm not renewing my BP subscription this year.

The Mariners are well aware that Griffey provides less value the more he plays, and will likely be using him sparingly.

I disagree. By including his last two arbitration years, they reduced the overall value of the deal, and its length. There's no way Felix would have agreed to a 3-year FA deal after the 2011 season, but that's effectively what that is. The reason all FA deals end badly is because the winning bidder necessarily overpays. By signing Felix now, Seattle has subverted that bidding process and assumed far less risk.

One thing the article glossed over a bit was Jack's immediate recognition that Safeco is kind of an odd stadium, and the team needs to built to suit it. The park inflates strikeouts. The park just murders right-handed flyball hitters. The park rewards a good outfield defense (especially with a lefty pitcher on the mound). So now they have one guy on the team with any power to LF, but Jose Lopez only hits line-drives right to the corner (check out HitTracker - all of his home runs are identical). Unless you're Richie Sexson in his prime and everything you hit goes 450 feet, Safeco is a terrible place to hit as a righty flyball hitter. And that gets inside a player's head, making him worse. Nietzsche would have liked it: "As you gaze long into left-centre field, left-centre field gazes into you."

$15.35 million

The Canadian government is also matching donations by individuals (Canadians only), so if you happen to live north of the border there's also that.

I'd suggest playing the games in Hawaii. It's central and temperate. Late October is bad enough in some MLB cities, but imagine playing past mid-November in Cleveland. Or Denver. Some of these cities could get enough snow to close their airports. Toronto certainly could.

That was back when Spiezio was on the team, so it shouldn't be hard to work out what year it was.

Terible idea. You're basically saying that the league can decide later which drugs are illegal now. So I could take something no one has ever told me is disallowed, and find out 10 years from now that I've been banned from baseball because someone since then has decided that something I took shouldn't have been permitted (on what grounds, I have no idea). Rules are rules. Rules should be enforced without exception. But the people those rules govern need to know what those rules are in order to follow them. If you're going to change the rules later then they can't possibly influence behaviour. I can't know now what the rules that govern me now are going to be.

The law of the United States, sure. Assuming they took the drugs in the US. But the law of the US is irrelevant to the rules of baseball. If they weren't violating the rules of baseball then baseball has no grounds to punish them.

Steroids were not illegal. Fay Vincent's memo was not sufficient to ban steroids because it wasn't negotiated with the MLBPA.

No, they should have called the DEA. But they should not have called him out.

They're not victims. They're people who made a choice. Was Tony Gwynn a victim of players who worked on their cardio? Of course not. Everyone vilifying McGwire is making an implicit value judgement that using steroids was somehow wrong. And if you really think that, I'd like you to back it up. Make the judgement explicit, and justify your assertion. Otherwise you're just spouting an opinion, and your opinion alone is not persuasive.

No, we don't need to continue that search, because his motives aren't knowable to us. The hearing purported to be forward-looking. McGwire looked forward. End of story. Every other person in the room, players and senators both, completely disregarded the purpose of the hearing in order to score cheap political or PR points. They're the ones who deserve our scorn and derision, not McGwire. I don't care why McGwire elected not to talk about the past. But given the forum, I thoroughly appreciate that he did.

The purpose of that congressional hearing was explicitly NOT to talk about the past. I applaud McGwire for being the ONLY GUY IN THE ROOM who appeared to have read the rules before opening his mouth.

His name is printed right under the picture. There's no cause for confusion.

OBP scores runs just as well as power does. Given how badly Safeco hurts power, doesn't it make sense to design the team to score in other ways?

It's not a naive view of human nature. It's disappointment with human nature. Yes, the voters will use the tool available to them to rank the players, but that's not the task they're being asked to perform. Each of us has the capacity for rational thought (that's what makes us people). I'm asking the voters to use that capacity.

With the OBPs at the bottom of the Mariners' lineup, I suspect Ichiro very rarely came to the plate with runners on base.

That extension is a massive discount for Halladay. He's worth far more than that.

I studied rational decision theory at university, and your description of the Ultimatum Game is accurate. Unfortunately, anyone who understands the Ultimatum Game immediately loses faith in humanity, because the way humans behave is fundamentally irrational.

Right, Thanksgiving. I always forget about that one. Silly Americans and their late harvest festivals...

I didn't know Arnsberg left Toronto. He was the only reason that team was at all good over the past few years. The Jays have some dark days ahead. Say hello to fifth place.

Griffey's position with the Mariners at this point is mostly "Designated Hugger" - he's there because the players (Ichiro in particular) like having him around.

That's an entertaining chart. Note how Toronto is below the median in days lost, but lost only a tiny portion of their payroll - presumably because they kept injuring young pitchers earning the minimum.

Really, doesn't everyone go both ways in college?

When I saw the schedule for this year, I hoped Colorado would make the world series so the November weather in Denver would teach everyone a lesson (more than just postponing games, it could close the airport). I don't really expect MLB to learn anything from rain and wind.

Of Adam Moore and Rob Johnson, I think you'll find that Johnson has the bigger problems catching the ball. Coaches love him and think he's a great receiver, but the rate at which he allowed passed balls is staggering.

I thikn the concern is that in the PitchF/X data is used in ways MLB does like, then MLB will take away the PitchF/X data. This has happened before. A Canadian think-tank decided to use the publicly available standardised test scores (among other things) to evaluate schools in Ontario (both public and private schools). The government on Ontario really didn't like that, so they stopped making the data available. MLB could do the same thing if they don't like how people use PitchF/X (though it blows my mind that anyone would think it wouldn't be used for this). I hope some analyst produces regular umpire stats.

Pinch-running for A-Rod made mo sense at all unless A-Rod was hurt. The most likely outcome that didn't involve the game ending was the Yankees scoring a single run, which would leave the game tied and headed into extra innings with the Yankees' best player no longer in the game. It was moronic to pinch-run there.

Bring on the robots. There is no reason to have humans calling balls and strikes anymore. None. Let's stop. We can probably also get robots to call out and safe at the bases, too, using technology very similar to what's been used in Olympic fencing for the past dozen years. With MLB's money behind it, I'm sure they could improve it and make it wireless pertty quickly.

We have to pick some point in the flight path to measure the speed. It doesn't matter if we choose one end or other as long as we consistently pick the same one. Unless some pitchers have the magical ability to have their pitches lose more or less speed in flight, we're still getting the same data. Pitches that leave the pitcher's hand at 97 mph give Jeter trouble. Whether we call those 97 mph or 90 mph is immaterial. It's just a label.

I can't seem to get EqA measurements from 1998, but by VORP the 1998 lineup was stronger top to bottom.

I'd heard people before that umpires were clearly favouring the Red Sox, or clearly favouring the Yankees, because MLB told them to. It always seemed like such an abusrd notion. Even if MLB gained something rom favouring those teams, the fallout from such a scheme being exposed would far outweigh any concievable benefit. But then came Mauer's foul ball, and my first thought was that somebody bribed Phil Cuzzi. He was in a perfect position. His view was unobstructed. Cabrera actually made contact with the ball just to make it more obvious. Given how easy it would have been to make that call properly, that has to be the worst call in the history of baseball.

I'm confident I've seen Ken say "hope is not a plan" before, and I love it.

You might want to park-adjust those numbers before waving them around so defiantly.

Then every ump would fail that test with left-handed hitters. Umps are actually really good at calling balls and strikes with righties at the plate, but as soon as a lefty stands there the strikezone gets shorter and wider.

I am seriously considering letting my BP subscription lapse this off-season, but articles like this might convince me to renew. Great work.

You say that lowering bonuses would be a side-effect of hard slotting, and I don't believe that for a second. Capping bonueses (or salaries) serves to transfer wealth from the players to the owners. This is why thge owners like the idea. That they can sell it as a competitive-balance issue has nothing to do with their motives and everything to do with marketing. If the MLBPA values the mostly free market in which their players currently exist, they will oppose hard slotting as vigorously as they opposed a salary cap. Trading draft picks solves all of these problems without the transfer of wealth. You write that it would create as many problems as it solves, but you don;t mention any of those problems. And I just don't see any. The problem-creation angle sounds like Selig's talking points, and not any sort of serious analysis. And the benefits of trading come regardless of whether there are hard slots. Selig wants slots to save money. As long as the league is profitable and seen as fair, he has no incentive to care about whether it is actually fair, so his line about competitive balance just doesn't hold any water.

Silly Rany thought he was finished writing about the Royals.

CC's wins aren't being forgotten. They're the reason he's going to win the Cy Young award (over at least three more deserving pitchers).

That Greinke situation does two things. First, it makes it more like the sabermetric community will universally select Joe Mauer as AL MVP (really, Greinke was the only other guy in the discussion). Second, it makes me want to see if Rany's already ended his hiatus to complain about it.

Peter Angelos may well blame that on the arrival of the Nationals. Remember, his franchise value is guaranteed by MLB (a condition of relocating the Expos). His annual revenue is guaranteed by MLB (a condition of relocating the Expos). Peter Angelos has effectively no incentive to spend money on his team.

If Bannister's actually doing that, I love him forever.

You can't really blame the Mariners for failing to make a run. They've been playing over their heads all season and they finally have a front office who understands the concept for a pythagorean record, so they've regressed - as any reasonable observer should have expected. But hey, with a bunch of teams who have nothing to lose you end up with games like last night's brawl at New Yankee. That's always fun.

Good to see a projection system that actually gets Ichiro right. Perhaps integrating this into PECOTA in some way (finding historically similar BABIP, perhaps) would improve it as well.

Jay, is there somewhere on the site where readers can find adjusted standings for previous seasons? I can find them.

It's easy to look like your pitching is improving when you're facing the Mariners.

Yes, these sorts of rants tend to ignore contrary evidence. The A's were a top team for several years despite spending less. Tampa Bay and Toronto were both been competitive last season, despite being in the AL East. And, of course, St. Louis.

I wonder if they'll fudge his height if he makes it to the bigs. Teams always seem to lie about short players to make them closer to 6'.

That one might be too cheesey to be annoying. I mean, it takes two people to say it. That's comedy gold. I'd much rather hear than that "Chopper two hopper" everytime someone hits a groundball to 2B.

The A's allegedly used some off-label osteoporosis drugs to heal pitcher injuries some years ago. What about that? There's some standard of natural vs. unnatural which seems widely held but no one can define for me where the line is. It's just as "I know it when I see it" standard, and that shouldn't be acceptable to anyone.

"Quentin runs like he’s nursing a gunshot wound." Nice, Joe. That's a line brimming with imagery.

And that's a great idea. All contending NL teams should do that.

You'll never be anyone's #1 source for injury news that way. Anyone looking for information about an injury should want to come to you, but you're actively preventing that from being useful. Even without a write-up, a simple listing of guys when they go down would be really helpful.

Ichiro's missed over a week and you haven't mentioned him once.

I would suggest that you should have different prediction models for the AL and NL. The NL has generally made better choices from a sabermetric perspective, while the AL voters have been taking hallucinogens before they vote. If you designed two models - one for each league - I suspect you could be far more accurate with your predictions going forward.

Pick trading would immediately solve the problem of teams picking early skipping obvious top talent to avoid having to pay for it.

He was operating in an environment where all parties had agreed to keep the information secret. That it isn't secret is someone's fault, and that someone isn't A-Rod. It shouldn't have cost him anything.

Whoever leaked the information needs to go to jail. There's no maximum sentence for Contempt of Court.

Of course actual W-L now correlates better with actual W-L at the end of the season. Those wins and losses are already counted. If you want to measure the predictive value of actual W-L vs pythag or 3rd order winning percentage, count only future games. But regardless, both will break down as rosters change. The combined WAR of all the players on the team would probably be better.

Often when reading BP articles, if I think the article was subpar I find at the bottom it says "A version of this story originally appeared on ESPN Insider." In general, I think the ESPN articles are written for too broad an audience and simply fail to be interesting to the core BP audience (me). This article does not have that problem. If BP's articles were routintely of this quality, regardless of the ESPN content warning, I would have no complaints.

I wonder if you could do this by innings to include relievers, too. From what Jack Zduriencik is doing in Seattle (acquiring exclusively lefty pitching to complement the ballpark), I expect they'll lead MLB in this starting nest season.

15 years ago it was true. 5 years ago it wasn't. It was the events in between those dates that broke the system.

Not exactly where you want jagged shrapnel. In Beltre's case, "tearing" and "testicle" are two words you really never want to see together.

I don't see any credible scenario wherein Groffey doesn't retire at the end of this season.

I assert that every owner seeks to maximise the value of his asset.

A salary floor limits flexibility and forces teams to spend money at a rate within a predefined range. If some teams can complete better by spending in bursts, I think we should let them. Aside from the fact that salary caps reduce overal salaries, and that hurts the players and by extension the sport. Baseball competes with the other sports for athletes, and higher salaries are one of the ways they win that competition (a stronger union and longer careers help, too).

Presumably it was collectively bargained.

A salary cap is a terrible idea. First, look what it has done to the NHL. Second, the primary purpose of the salary cap is to transfer wealth from the players to the teams, and that doesn't help anyone except Bud Selig. The teams need incentives to build local revenue, while at the same time not being penalised for the size of their markets. The original Zumsteg Plan is still a good starting point.

Rather than capping spending at all (which will ultimately serve only to transfer wealth from labour to management), let's just let the teams trade draft picks. Then, if Kansas City doesn't want to spend $6 million on the top guy, but the Yankees do, KC can trade that pick for something tangible rather than just picking someone else they can sign for less and letting the top pick fall while getting nothing in return. Letting the teams trade draft picks solves all of these problems. Looking for other solutions only muddies the waters and might convince MLB there's another option. But there isn't. Trading picks is the only way to fix this in a way that will have predictable consequences and serve to solve the problem we actually have.

Give Ricciardi credit for assembling a competitive team in 2008. He built it, and it was very good.

Rios's contract wasn't that bad. He was one of the team's best assets going forward, and they gaev him away for nothing. I've been one of JP's biggest defenders for quite a while, but this was incredibly boneheaded. The only explanation that makes any sense was the ownership told him to cut salary, and the only way he could do that with Wells on the books was to let Rios go. Rios will be an asset for the White Sox.

I think Posada will get elected regardless. I think we'll see a lot of Yankees from the 1998-2001 teams in the HoF, regardless of whether they deserve it.

But there could be. There doesn't appear to be any restriction on what players you can use to replace injured players on the post-season roster.

Are you going to open every article with "Several weeks ago" even when it's not true (as it isn't today)? Will Christina let yo get away with that?

Point tenderness on the skull? They might want to CT him again.

Yuniesky Betancourt was. I hear this all the time, and then with Yuni's trade the misinformed suddenly fell silent. It was weird.

I really enjoyed the article, but what I enjoyed most was that link to Woolner's article from 2000. That's the sort of thing I'd like to see more of from BP. I want more statistical heavy-lifting.

Throwing up the while flag by trading Washburn? French is basically the same pitcher as Washburn, only younger, cheaper, and under team control. I would argue that the Washburn trade has no impact on the quality of the current squad at all. That wasn't a give-up trade.

What do you think of the assertion that French and Washburn are basically the same pitcher, only French is younger, chearper, and under team control?

"A pitcher who has slipped below that level will sometimes have a high BABIP because he’s allowing balls to be hit so hard and so far that he’s indefensible." See Weaver, Jeff and Silva, Carlos.

Isn't this the wrong way to look at it, though? Sure, some teams don't need Halladay to reach the post-season, but what does Halladay do to their Secret Sauce numbers? Acquiring Halladay might be done with an eye to winning in the postseason, not just getting there.

Given that injured players can return for the post-season, wouldn't it make more sense for the return date for season-ending injuries to be after the world series?

Average Hit List ranking by division: AL East: 9.20 AL West: 12.25 NL West: 15.20 NL East: 17.00 NL Cent: 18.67 AL Cent: 19.40

I would suggest that this could be improved by looking only at unintentional walks.

I think he got voted down because he's wrong. Look at what VegasWatch has done comparing PECOTA's accuracy to that of other projection systems and individual baseball analysts - PECOTA routinely performs better than the individuals. There may no longer be a meaningful difference in accuracy between PECOTA and other statistical projection models, but the stats beat the guesstimates time and time again.

The blackballing of Barry Bonds makes me angry.

As a Jays fan, I think the Phillies should buy. Ideally a Roy Halladay/Vernon Wells package.

Another factor Matt didn't consider, but teams like the Mariners should, is how goo they expect to be going forward. For a team that has a good chance to win it all this season, and maybe next season, but after that they need to rebuild anyway, trading for Halladay might make a lot of sense. But for a team like Seattle, that's already rebuilding, sacrificing the future to win now is inefficient. They'd be better off just winning in the future and not absorbing the extra expense of Halladay to win now.

The Mariners are a surprise? They're a .500 team, right about where statistical models projected they would be.

Last I checked, the Mariners drafted second and took Ackley - not the Braves.

Congratulations, Ken. I had you at the top of my scorecard the last three weeks running. Great job, and don't tone down the goofy style just because you're a professional now.

Explain this to me. You write "the Mariners have an even worse offense than I projected", and yet you nailed their runs scored EXACTLY: "(me: 641 RS, 671 RA; projected: 641 RS, 674 RA)". The Mariners have exactly the offense you projected, unless your projection somehow included a bunch of bad luck.

I struggled with that. I had a favourite, so I wanted to vote only for that article, but there was a second article that was too good to pass over. So I voted for 2. All three articles this week were excellent - I rank them as the three best articles of the competition - and I can't say I'd be disappointed with any one of them winning.

I would love this. The quality of analysis from broadcasters is incredibly uneven. I still cringe when I think about Ron Fairly's colour commentary. He had this old saw about how hitters performed better when leading off a half inning immediately following a half inning they'd ended with a spectacular defensive play.

Only if you're interested in spreading the word. I can see why BP is interested, but I am not.

I had thought there was a Mariners store in Japan. I might still think that.

Selig's disappointed in fan reaction to Ramirez? What? He's not supposed to be some moralistic paragon making normative claims about how fans ought to appreciate the game. He's supposed to be catering to the fans while growing MLB's business. If the fans reacted positively to the return of Manny, then maybe the fans just don't care that much about steroids. I certainly don't, and I'm still annoyed with the MLBPA for backing down so easily on the issue.

By making reference to other people's work (a great step forward for BP, in my opinion), you draw attention to any gaps in your own statistical library. I think this is also a good thing, but it seems to rile up people who feel some sort of loyalty to BP.

The Mariners would get at most one draft pick from keeping Bedard and Washburn to the end of the season. Bedard will only be a Type B free agent, and no GM with a brain would offer Washburn arbitration after this season. Trading Bedard and Washburn is the right move for the M's. For J.J. Hardy, perhaps.

I disagree that there should never be IBBs in the all-star game. These teams should be trying to win. I'd love to see one manager one year leave his starters in the game while the other intentionally degrades his team, and then we'll see how long the traditional lasts.

Often, yes, but Ichiro's surname is Suzuki.

While this wasn't my favourite article of the week (it was second), and I'm struggling with whether I should vote for it (knowing that I'd be diminishing the marginal value of my other vote by doing so), this article is easily the most important written in the competition. This is the sort of research that other analysts in the sabermetric community will pick up and run with. This is the sort of article that could start a revolution.

This is much more like a typical Unfiltered post than those submitted by your competitors. I would love to see more posts just like this one as trade deadlines approach. Team-specific blogs will often run similar articles, but without the international visibility and accountability of a place like BP (though they probably know their team's farm system better).

I just wrote on Tim's piece that it was immediately clear as I read it that it was one of the very best articles on the entire competition. This article, though, made me forget there was a competition. It drew me in immediately and made me care about the content. Very good, Ken. You've earned a final vote from me.

This was the first of the three final articles I read, it is easily better than anything else that was written by any contestant during any of the previous rounds. Of the dozens of articles we've seen, I knew as soon as I'd finished it that this was, at worst, the third best article of the competition. Great work, Tim.

Whereas, I don't find folks like Neyer that useful. Getting people interested in the analysis is far less important than doing the analysis.

I think the need to include a thesis has damaged many otherwise good works of analysis. The numbers speak for themselves; they don't need to be set-up for the readers like that. All that does in colour the readers' perception of the numbers (which I would argue is a bad thing).

Given that pitchers who would normally be starters who can gets wins would object to this, and further given that there's a measureable improvement in outcomes with this approach, wouldn't it make sense not to use starting pitchers for this sort of experiment, but to build the entire staff out of swingmen and long-relievers? These are guys who aren't used to getting a chance at a win, and now they will get that chance every sixth day (assuming they alternate which of them starts the game). The quality of pitching would be lower, but it would also be cheap. You'd be looking for Miguel Batista or Ryan Franklin rather than Felix Hernandez or Roy Halladay. Imagine the hitters and defense on the team if you didn't have to spend on pitching.

I'd go farther and assert that the Rios contract is a good one for Toronto, and they should try to keep him rather than trade him. Wells's contract is a disaster, though, and Ricciardi should try to bundle Halladay and Wells together (even getting nothing back it would be a great deal for the Jays).

PECOTA and the BP writers are correct more often than most baseball fans. Oakland was my pick to win the AL West as well (I had Anaheim fourth).

Rany's reaction to the trade makes me worry he's going to release Sarin gas at Kauffman Stadium. As a Mariner fan remarked the other day, one wonders if the other GMs sometimes feel guilty, as if they've just taken advantage of the special needs kid who sits in the corner and drools.

I've been open about that; I have no interest is listening to audio content.

Also, consider that signing Berroa for nothing is a considerably better move than trading actual prospects for Betancourt (let alone paying Yuni $7 million).

Except, it will be harder to teach the other way, because he explanation isn't as simple. Simple explanations sell, and people cling to those simple explanations.

I wonder when that last happened that the winning pitcher and scorer of the game winning run in the same game were never on the winning team at the same time.

Then they'll have to go Edmund Fitzgerald on him.

It has been a good series of articles, but I still don't see what good WXRL is. It doesn't tell me anything about the pitcher; it tells me about the combination of the pitcher and the pitcher's luck, and I already have dreck like ERA for that. A high or low strand rate isn't sustainable, for example, so I don't see why we bother measuring it. WXRL rewards pitchers for good defense behind them, and for lousy strategies executed by the opposing manager: those are luck; the pitcher didn't cause those.

If he's made the mistake, and any competent evaluator can tell that he has, isn't the wisest option admitting it and moving ahead? The mistakes are made. Those are now sunk costs, and it would be foolish of the Jays to reward Ricciardi for pretending they didn't happen. Joe's exactly right. Halladay is the only opportunity the Jays will ever have to get out from under the Wells contract, and they should work their hardest to do just that.

The Phillies look like an even more likely destination once you consider their established inability to evaluate aging outfielders. That Ibanez contract remains a bad decision, but it looks like a good decision (because Ibanez is performing well), so they'll probably be more willing to ignore the wiser voices once again with Wells.

I've wanted a Cartwright/Funck finale sice about week 2, and the only guy to repeatedly work his way to the top during the competition is Tim Kniker, so I'm very happy with the results so far. Matt was a bit of a conundrum for me. I really liked some of his work, but some of it was riddled with errors and oversights. Had Matt won, I think we would have routinely seen excellent work from him, but I do wonder if he might have made a lot of extra work for Christina.

Right, of course. Shows my general lack of interest in the NL.

But there is something to be said for watching Jake Peavy strike out four of the best hitters in baseball to start a game, and them promptly give up a monster home run to Vladimir Guerrero on a pitch that was off the plate away and above Vlad's shoulders.

He was such a friendly, accommodating guy. Just a lousy GM, though.

The Hit List seems to think so.

Given that the chart contains the third-order winning percentage, what's the point of comparing the PECOTA projection to the actual winning percentage? The actual winning percentage is less relevant, since you can't predict luck. It would be much more informative to compare the PECOTA projection to the teams' actual performance, which is the third-order winning percentage.

That's a limitation of the medium. If Matt wanted to make that distinction in an article, he could easily have done so. I always read collusion the way Matt meant it, because that's what the word means. This baseball-specific meaning is just a subset of actual collusion.

That was my plan this week right from the start - I don't care how these guys do on radio, so judging based on it is pointless. I'm not a big fan of Matt - I argued he shouldn't have been a finalist based on his original submission, and he wasn't an automatic vote for me this week - but he did earn my top score in weeks 2 and 3, so he has value.

I'm not thrilled with this from Brian. Brian's been my favourite througout the competition, largely because of the depth of his studies. A radio interview is the antithesis of depth. I came into this week expecting to hate everything and planning to vote for my two favourites regardless of what I saw. That's not exactly how it worked out, but the results aren't materially different.

Wow - Cartwright's read much shorter than the others. He must speak slowly.

Reading the transcripts (I only care about the written material BP produces, so listening to the audio here seemed counterproductive), I think Ken's interview is the one that works best. The answers were detailed and complete, and then the interview got light and entertaining with The Good Face and HACKING MASS stuff. Easily my favourite of the week.

I have children (well, a child), and I've long been arguing that we shouldn't hold anything against players who didn't get caught. Just as I don't think we should penalise Manny any more than the penalty laid out in the rules. He served his 50 days. He's done; let him play. Why people insist on adding some moral or ethical angle to this I have no idea. These guys are making reasonably informed decisions to improve their performance. They get hansomely rewarded for that performance. Do we not want them to excel? And if we want to place some restrictions on what's acceptable means to improve that performance, shouldn't those restrictions be non-arbitrary? The "think of the children" question, as I see it, is this: Can we adequately explain to our children why the rules are as they are? If they're arbitrary, then we can't.

They might have come into this looking for a jack of all trades, but they don't need to be wed to that. If there's one guy whose analysis blows everyone else away, but he's autistic and can't talk to people, I want him to win.

I love that you're giving us transcripts. Since I NEVER listen to your radio stuff or watch your videos - I vastly prefer written material - all I would ever care about is the transcripts, so it's the transcripts on which I'd be basing my voting. And I still wish BPR transcripts were available.

He's been above average by UZR, but he's having his weakest defensive season ever.

Regarding the Mariners, Runs are Runs. Scoring them is preventing them is equally valuable. Langerhans might not be the slugger one normally sees in left, but he's probably above average out there.

Yes, the Nats acquired Nyjer Morgan, but they traded away the virtually identical Ryan Langerhans the previous day, and they did so for scrap. That team makes no sense to me. This is also the third straight week with 4 AL East teams in the top 5 on the hit list.

I want someone to explain to me why the Nationals felt the need to acquire Morgan at all, the day after giving away the virtually identical Ryan Langerhans.

Remember that Gil Meche has the unusual history of always throwing 20 pitches per inning. He's never been efficient, so his pitch counts have always been on the high side. This is the fifth time in seven seasons since his shoulder surgery that he's been near the top of the PAP/game charts.

Why the hell did Washington just give up value to acquire Morgan when they traded away an identical player in Ryan Langerhans for nothing (Mike Morse) the previous day? I'm sorry the Nationals are your hometown team, Christina.

The BP Perspective is also being softened by mainstream baseball. One thing BP has started doing recently, that they hadn't been doing before, is citing the trememdous sabremetric work being done outside BP, like at Fangraphs or THT or by Tom Tango. That, combined with integrating into the mainstream, leads to good things. Let's wait and see where this all leads.

Scoring decisions generally - not just at home. In the Mariners-Yankees game on Tuesday, Ichiro hit a weak grouder to the pitcher, and Joba completely missed it (Cano then bobbled it as well, but by then it was too late). It was an obvious error by Joba, but the official scorer gave the hit to Ichiro, presumably because Ichiro gets a ton of hits.

The Business of Baseball. The world needs another Doug Pappas. Let's see which of them can fit the bill Incidentally, Doug was in the middle of a series about ballparks (one division per article) when he died. Perhaps they could try to finish it.

Re: Halladay. 6 innings and 88 pitches. Was there a plan to keep it a short outing for him?

You just made me go look up Mark Eichhorn's WXRL in 1986: 6.308 69 appearances (all relief) 157 innings pitches He was 5 innings away from winning the ERA title.

I notice that High Desert only drew one walk in that entire game. No wonder the M's are such free swingers.

Gods I love Ichiro's style. His interviews are alternately vague or dismissive, and sometimes both. It's beautiful. Having him and Eric Bedard on the same team must give reporters fits.

I'm disappointed we saw any game recaps, let alone mostly game recaps. The result of my voting was the Ken Funck has now moved up my rankings to be tied with Brian Cartwright at the top. Everyone else fell back.

It's like John's setting up a point, but never gets there.

Incidentally, Branyan's BABIP is high, but it's 26 points lower than Ichiro's (and Ichiro's .389 BABIP isn't unusual for him). Maybe he learned something.

That last point in the penultimate paragraph really tells the story. The Orioles clearly have no chance to do anything other than finish last in the AL East, but in the NL they'd compete for a wild card. I suppose this does mean that we're likely to see a fight to the finish for the AL wild card, unlike 2001 (for example) where Oakland won the wild card by 17 games over Minnesota.

"4 of the top 5 are AL east teams." This is the second week in a row in which that's been true. I'm interested to see if the Nats can stay at the bottom for the entire rest of the season. That would be impressive.

Erik Bedard is highly unlikely to qualify as a Type-A free agent at the end of the season, so the M's aren't going to get any value for him unless they trade him. Also, after Bavasi traded away every decent prospect the M's had, what do they have left that other teams might want in return? They're about to embark on a 16-game stretch against the best teams in baseball. If they don't stay above .500 (that would involve going at least 7-9), they need to cut and run.

Yuniesky was just starting to improve, too. He was visibly better in the field than he's been in years, and he was seeing more pitches per plate appearance. I would have been overjoyed if he'd been injured a month ago, but now it's kind of irritating. JP's never been great at managing people, but I wonder if he's trying to motivate McGowan into proving him wrong.

It's the Mariners. After years of using guys like Jose Vidro and Miguel Cairo at first base (and the thoroughly finished Richie Sexson), they now have their most productive hitter manning the station.

They're certainly more widely read, now, but they contribute less to the discussion, I think.

The Mariners have two quality hitters (Ichiro and Branyan), plus two more who contribute seemingly when they feel like it (Beltre and Gutierrez), and the rest of the team can't hit. That they're at .500 is astounding.

We need HitF/X - then we can quantitatively determine what's a fly ball and what's a line drive.

My only criticism of Donald Fehr as MLBPA commissioner was he didn't fight the owners on PED testing hard enough. They clearly wanted PED testing, and he should have demanded they give something up for it. Labour peace isn't a positive outcome if you have to make unnecessary concessions to get it.

I'm not suggesting this would ever happen, but if someone offered you $10 million to relinquish your citizenship, wouldn't you do it?

This leaves us with five authors I've quite liked throughout the competition. I really didn't like Matt Swartz's initial entry article, but since then they've all rested consistently above the median on my scorecard.

It was an interesting story, and one worth telling, but all he really did was hand us win expectancy charts. I love WE charts, and I routinely used them to follow games, but they're no longer sufficiently novel to carry an article.

I think BP is at its weakest when it tries to report news. This isn't ESPN. BP had a niche - it did analysis - and I think BP getting away from that has made BP less relevant.

Interestingly, Brian's Sandlot article is the only one he's written for which I did not vote. I think it was his weakest piece. Brian Cartwright is generally my favourite of the contestants, and is only ever surpassed by Ken Funck.

I disagree. I think Brian's writing style - which you've described accuratelly - serves baseball very well. This is why I miss Dan Fox so much. And Michael Wolverton. And I wish Clay would write more.

Why does that loophole need closing? The WBC isn't MLB - there's no reason for MLB's drug policy to apply to it at all.

Hear hear! I really wish I could vote up author comments, because this one deserves 100 votes.

So because the players excel at a highly valued profession, they're not entitled to the same rights and freedoms as everyone else? That's errant nonsense.

Especially since ticket prices are set based on demand, not the need to cover costs. Mountainhawk has failed to grasp the basic economic principles at work. Remember, if you sell out every game then your prices are too low.

None of those was his job. He was there to protect the players, and he did. I think he should have held a harder line than he did some of the time (the players shouldn't have agreed to any PED testing at all without concessions from the owners), but for the most part he did a great job, and he deserves our accolades.

I'm not suggesting that entertainment isn't allowed. I'm saying it isn't necessary when the article is already doing other useful things. Otherwise, we'll never learn of great new analysis if it happens to be discovered by someone who can't write well.

I think the math required to convert one to the other would be trivial.

And that's still largely true. The best source for detailed statistical analysis of one team is probably on a blog dedicated to that one team. Sure, they might not know anything about the Cub's minor-league system, or the optimal use of the Royals' bullpen, but their one team is the thing they know better than anyone else does. For leaguewide analysis and articles that compare between teams or do the high-level work on which the more focused analysis relies, we need BP and THT and Fangraphs. But if you want to read about some kid the Rays just drafted, go to DRaysBay. If you want to know how consistent Ichiro's batting average is month-to-month, you need USS Mariner.

It didn't really feel like a weak week while I was reading, but when all was said and done I only voted for two articles this week. My notation system is such that I'm effectively giving each article a score from 0-3 each week, and then voting for any article that scores 2 or higher. These are my average scores for each of the remaining authors: 2.40 - Brian Cartwright 2.20 - Jeff Funck 1.80 - Tim Kniker 1.40 - Brian Oakchunas 1.40 - Matt Swartz 0.00 - Matthew Knight The eliminated authors would place 1st, 4th, 8th, and 9th if I were to include them.

That's pretty much the problem with Win Shares.

"I want to see a live chart of this in this year's playoffs" Uhh, Will - doesn't Fangraphs do this for every game every single day? http://www.fangraphs.com/livescoreboard.aspx

I just claimed in the comments on Brian Cartwright's article that I come to BP to learn things, not to be entertained. And yet, a little entertainment counts for a lot. This was both entertaining and informative, and I loved it. It's also interesting to note that Matt Stairs was singled out by Bill James as someone who would have had a Hall of Fame career if only teams hadn't dismissed him (he came up as a 2nd baseman) based on his build. Oh, and that picture of Hack Wilson reminds me of my dad. It's uncanny (and he's also 5'6").

I don't read BP to be entertained. I read BP to learn things, and Brian makes me do that.

I just disagree with Will as to what I want out of a baseball column. This wasn't terse so much as concise. There was a ton of great information here, arranged logically, with a nice tie-in to the modern game. There was simply nothing wrong with this article. I loved it.

Matthew is the only author left in the competition for whom I have never voted. That's not going to change this week, though I do think this is the strongest of his articles so far.

Since I'm sure missing your chat doesn't warrant being penitent before God, I think attrite apologies will suffice.

If Ichiro heard himself reuse a quote like that, he'd punch himself in the face.

It is interesting that Richard is probably the guy who's accumulated the most fame from BP Idol.

"I hope that's okay with Geoff Baker." That's probably the funniest line ever to appear in a Will Carroll article.

4 AL East teams in the top 5 on the Hit List. Normalcy is restored.

My 11 month old daughter is learning the very same thing (hasn't quite figured it out yet).

It's not even just retro parks - there's just not as much concern for safety as you'd reasonably expect. When Rogers Centre added those fancy scoreboards to their outfield wall, they didn't even bother to ensure that the edges were smooth, and at the 2005 home opener Johnny Damon crashed into the wall and suffered a large cut on his arm.

Last week's results announcement didn't contain the next week's topic.

Interesting choice to take a guy suffering from an anxiety disorder and have him learn a new position in front of tens of thousands of screaming people.

"The Nationals do have some offensive weapons in outfielder Adam Dunn (.316), third baseman Ryan Zimmerman (.313), and first baseman Nick Johnson (.306)." I assume those are EqAs. It would be helpful to specify that.

The voting results are starting to make more sense. In the first two weeks, the elimiated writer had penned an article for which I voted (Byron's was my favourite article of week 1). The last two weeks, the eliminated author has been someone who has never garnered my vote. Though that can't last - there's only one author left for whom I've never voted.

It's still a systemic problem with voting comments up and down regardless. The minority opinion tends to get pushed to the side.

Only 32% of the respondents have given the issue any thought, then.

Moyer's not bad. He's drawn more walks this season than half of the Seattle Mariners.

I should mention this is also a bad omen. In both weeks 1 and 2, the author of my favourite article got eliminated. In week 3 I didn't vote.

I'm looking forward for the article on Billy Martin's post-season plan.

It was a solid reap of Vlad's career, but I think you missed a chance to look at Vlad's life in baseball, which is really very interesting. He loved playing in Montreal because he was anonymous there. Vlad lived in a bilingual city where he didn't speak either language, and he really seemed to like to that way. He lived with his mother all those years in Montreal. Amazing player. Freak of nature. Tremendous fun to watch. But also a really unusual guy, and I didn't get any of that from the piece.

Automatic bonus points for using HitF/X - those are going to revolutionise baseball.

About a third of the way through the article (right at the Damascus Steel link), I scrolled up and clicked my vote. Because this was, HANDS DOWN, the best article this week. So great is the gap between this article and the others I'm tempted to undo all my votes for the rest of the field just to illustrate how stark I think the differences are. Please don't tone down the humour. This was a wonderful piece.

I do think you should have linked to an explanation of Oliver for the benefit of those people who haven't heard of it or don't know how to use Google or haven't been paying attention througout the competition.

I agree. I've been keeping track of all of my votes througout the competition, giving every article a strong yes, strong no, borderline yes, or borderline no. And everything I've read this week so far had a borderline vote. Which is better than I expected, given that I don't really enjoy Player Profiles normally, either.

And as a fan, I think you can be forgiven for that. I'm more annoyed that Will hasn't made some effort to pay attention to the excellent baseball analysis that happens outside BP.

I found this quite interesting. It's unusual to read a profile as detailed as this about a guy who hasn't made the majors (and might not).

The 2009 evaluation was the only part of the artcile that contained anything new or interesting, I thought. It was quite good - I always enjoy a nice O-swing% breakdown - but the rest of the article was just this kid's life story.

This should be interesting. In general, I don't really like Player Profile articles. Statistics can't say much about a single individual with a lot of confidence, so they just turn into a human interest story. And I just don't care. We'll see if the idols can do better.

I liked it. But I work with dozens of economists.

I think the relevant difference here is that the NFL has a salary cap, so the teams think they're spending less on players, and these bonuses aren't limited by the cap. MLB holds the line on bonuses because they have other unlimited costs.

Ibanez's performance isn't at all out of the oridinary for him. He's always been really streaky.

There are three bones that make up the shoulder, Will. The humerus, the scapula, and the clavicle. I knew you meant scapula because I remembered Washburn's injury, but simply saying shoulder was grossly imprecise.

Efficiency might be a simple concept, but apparently it's really difficult to implement. The degree to which Halladay is better at it than every other active pitcher is laughable.

Washburn? Really? His pitching hasn't changed at all - just his results have changed. He's still a guy with a tRA over 5 (he's actually at 4.98 this season, but this season is the smallest available sample size). He's doing better because he's allowing fewer home runs and stranding more runners. He's the same average pitcher who hits on underage concession girls and throws his catcher under the bus when he loses games he's always been. If the Mariners get anything useful back for Washburn it will be a huge steal for them.

If he's wearing down or hiding an injury, then he shouldn't have the stuff for that one good outing. That he can demonstrates that the potential everyone saw before is still there - he's just not showcasing it well. Without that start, the possibility remains that whatever people saw before is gone.

I'm frankly surprised Detroit has the money available to demolish the stadium. Demolition is expensive, and as mentioned by the complainants objecting to the demolition, the last thing Detroit needs right now is more vacant land. Detroit ranks last among major-league cities in tourism - and it's not close; you'd think they might be interested in maintaining something resembling a tourist attraction.

Ichiro also holds the major league record for most 50-hit months, and is the only player in history to have more than one 50-hit month in a single season (he had two in 2004).

Independent leagues? They're conspicuously absent from your list of suggestions.

He didn't wrote, but his article was still valuable.

ESPN Insiders. Usually by one day.

Didn't Bill James say that Matt Stairs would be a Hall of Famer if he'd just been used differently?

Keep in mind that he probably won't sign until the deadline, so then the Nats would only have 6 weeks or so to get him on the field. And what would be the point? The Nats suck, and then winning more games at the end of the season only weakens their position in next year's draft. Even if Strasburg is ready right now, I think Washington would be better served by not starting his service clock until mid-2010.

Well, that was unexpected. I came into this week expecting two things. First, since I expect all BP readers to care about the baseball played in big league parks, but only a subset of BP readers to care about fantasy baseball, I suspected that fewer votes overall would be cast this week. If the readers, as a group, are less likely to care about the subject matter, they're probably less likely to find the articles really interesting and worth a vote. I also expected that this would be true for me, as I'm one of those readers who doesn't really care much about fantasy baseball. I saw myself as representative of that disinterest. And yet, I voted for more articles this week (5 of 9, follwing 4 of 10). I think the overall quality this week was considerably higher than last, and there was really only one article this week I saw as especially weak. Competition seems to be bringing out the best in these writers. I'm also noticing some consistency. Of the 3 no-doubt votes I cast in week 1, 2 of those got strong votes from me again (and the third was Byron). Of the 5 writers for whom I did not consider voting in week 1, I did not consider voting for 3 of them. One of them made significant improvement (but not quite enough to get a vote), and one of them wrote what I think was the best article of the week.

This was a surprise. I've already come to expect a certain level from performance from each of the BP Idol contestants, and I'll admit my expections for Matt so far have been pretty low. But this was great. This is probably the class of the round. If Matt can write articles like this consistently, he needs a regular job somewhere.

tRA is probably the best one-number pitching stat available today. It is to pitching the revolution that EqA was to hitting. It's incredible stuff.

Also, this is the second week running where Jeff gets a borderline vote from me.

I actually liked that this article had a lot of non-fantasy value in it. Most fantasy articles aren't that helpful to people who don't play fantasy, but if I'm off rosterbating on some team's blog, knowing what players are credibly available helps prevent me from looking like an idiot (which I already do enough on the interwebs).

I can't help but wonder why Brittany is in the competition. It makes sense from her side, but I don't see BP's angle. This piece was remarkably uneven.

I've actually wanted a detailed description of Strat for a long time, and here I got it from a fellow grognard. And even more applause from me for stretching the theme. I almost (but not quite) voted for Ken's article last week, but this one gets my vote. He's my first non-repeat winner.

I hate Excel. I do most of my data analysis in Access (I'm a professional database guy). And I thought this article was brilliant. Easiest vote this week.

There was one genuinely good piece of advice in this one, which is more than I usually see in Fantasy articles.

This is considerably higher-level analysis than I normally expect to see in a Fantasy article (I'm not a big fan of Fantasy content generally, but there are gems to be found here and there). I quite liked it, because it sought to do something other that just tell me what stats matter and what stats don't. Given the article's early use of wOBA (an excellent stat, but one readers might not see as meaningfully different from EqA in terms of measuring overall offense), it might have been useful to explain why it was being used.

I didn't really see this as a lot of analysis. It was just interpreting stats for me, and I can do that myself. The upside of this article was it served as a sort of stat clearing house because it used so many non-BP stats, and that's something I really like to see. I applauded that when someone did it last week, and I'm doing it again. Pretty good for a Fantasy article.

Hey, Dave. Who's thumb is that?

I'm doing that myself - I made up an Excel spreadsheet to track which articles and authors I like, and which I don't, and for whom I vote.

Sorry to hear that about Troy Glaus. One of my favourite memories of him was him playing shortstop for the Jays in 2006. It was hilarious.

Now we just need HitF/X and we can produce perfect defensive metrics.

Byron's piece was easily my favourite of the first round. As I said in the comments, I wish I could have voted for it twice. I'm very disappointed to see him voted out. I was very much hoping he would be the ultimate winner. BP has, I think, become quite insular in its use of stats (your continued use of Clay's old defensive numbers in recent years, when they'd clearly been surpassed), and Byron specifically citing perhaps the best analysts working today - who simply don't happen to work for BP - was a breath of fresh air.

Regarding headlines and Twitter... Society is doomed.

And (here's me being a big nerd) I'm keeping a spreadsheet of the articles week to week so I'll know for whom I voted before, and for whom I considered voting but didn't. If nothing else, it will be useful for breaking ties.

I still read for my own enjoyment. My idea of what's a suitable introduction might differ from the ideas of others, but that's why we all get to vote.

I fully planned to take the earlier articles into account, but I found that the authors with whose work I had issues before continued to offer the same sorts of problems in these new submissions, so considering the earlier work proved unnecessary. I voted for 4 articles. There are perhaps two others I think were good enough to warrant consideration.

I ultimately did not vote for this piece. I voted for 4 of the articles (to give you an idea of how permissive I was).

Kevin's conercerns about comparisons between eras are well-founded, but I think based on a misunderstanding of what it is we're comparing. Cust playing in 1920 would almost certainly be better than Babe Ruth playing in 1920. But Cust playing in 2008 is not more productive than Babe Ruth playing in 1920. Baseball's a zero-sum game, so performance is only meaningfully measured relative to the average. That Kevin's objection persists after reading the article suggests this point was insufficiently clear.

Solid, solid piece. I enjoyed both the tone and the content.

Despite really liking this piece, I'm left with a nagging question. Why shouldn't the park factor change if the park doesn't change? As long as the park changes relative to the average major-league park, that should be enough to change the park factor, shouldn't it?

"...the two pieces I've read so far by him seem to be more suited to an academia journal, textbook or research paper at a SABR convention." I'd count that as a positive feature.

I don't have any significant problems with the article (which puts it in the top half of the submissions I've read so far), but I found it uninteresting. I don't think she sold the numbers very well. I don't have any real reason to believe that this analysis matters.

Would a small-sample-size caveat be out of place in an article for beginners?

This was terrific. Using Tango and MGL's material was, I think, a wonderful decision. Tango is, I think, at the forefront of making advanced sabermetrics widely accessible. This is an introduction, and the best introduction not only inspires but encourages further reading on the subject, those outside links do that. I wish I could vote twice.

I aree entirely. I'd much rather this BP Idol thing produce the next Dan Fox rather than the next Steven Goldman (sorry Steven - you're great, but I don't think we need more of you).

This is almost a really great article. I have but two complaints. First, I think he unnecessarily assumed an excluded middle in his opening paragraph, which is a shame, because it was really just flavour-text. But more than that, he titled the article very badly. This article does an excellent job of showing that pitchers don't control BABIP, and does so by wonderfully illustrating (with great graphs) that year-to-year BABIP is effectively random. But that's not what the article said it was going to do. The title reads "Why Pitchers Don't Control Batting Average on Balls in Play", and that question not only wasn't answered, but it wasn't even approached. Demonstrating that something is true (which this article does very well) does not constitute an explanation as to why it is true. This is borderline for me.

Covered a relevant topic. Easy to read. Explained math using actual math. Provided raw data. There's literally nothing wrong with this article. Thumbs Up.

I don't object to the use of scatterplots in a beginners' article - perhaps someone should write such an article on how to read scatterplots, because they are so very useful when dealing with baseball data. However, in attempting to defend OBP (a laudable objective) he relies on ERA and WHIP to do it, suggesting to the beginning reader that either stat is worth a damn. And they're not.

I was really hoping they'd build that sail-roofed park. Because the last sail-roofed park (Olympic Stadium) worked out so well. I still hate Loria for killingn the Expos. If I were the Canadian government I'd try to put him in jail.

No, Jay. What do they say about the team in first place on Victoria Day?

Venom, Will? Seriously?

If Jeter is the first unanimous Hall of Fame selection, then the voters are completely ignoring defense.

That drop in franchinse value is due largely to the weakened US economy. Those will bounce back. "The payroll floor is now growing faster than many teams' revenues" This is the problem the NFL has created for themselves (and exactly the same mistake the NHL made with their salary cap). Caps and floors do not work unless you centralise ALL of the revenue. As the article points out, baseball actually pays less in salaries relative to revenue than the NFL does. So the cap clearly isn't working as intended.

I regret that you weren't writing about the 20-1 blowout, if only because it would have given you material and you would have had more freedom to wander off on tangents.

I love that he didn't know how many walks he had.

I bet Cito didn't expect his starter to give up 5 HR tonight, though.

It makes some sense, in that pitchers who give up walks tend to give up more walks, and generally throw more pitches. But that would just be selection bias in the sample. Those circumstances that tend to produce walks tend also to produce runs, and thus guys who reach base through walks score more often. You'd need to measure it to be sure, but it makes intuitive sense.

Indeed. Charts are mostly why I come here.

I have issues with the Prisoner's Dilemma generally (it's not a dilemma, first of all - betrayal dominates silence in the original construction), and that really ruins the whole article for me.

Look at it like a scientist testing a hypothesis. In this case, the data were consistent with the hypothesis, so we're left with the hypothesis still standing.

I can't help but agree. He explicitly ignores HR, but then assumes there aren't any in his BABIP calculations (or he's mistaking BABIP for BA on contact, which is a different thing entirely). I don't see how this ever got to be a finalist. That sort of rudimentary error should be unforgiveable in a contest like this. I doubt the quality of submissions overall was poor enough to warrant giving this a pass.

Jay, I think something wrong with your formula. The Nationals aren't in last.

This chart neatly highlights why I don't like WXRL as a stat. It's too context-dependent. I'd much rather know how the bullpens performed (ARP) without muddying the waters with how valuable those performances ultimately were.

Hacking weasels? I'm sure those Seattle sportsblogs have moved past that by now...

His 7.02 tRA tells us he's not just getting unlucky with batted ball results. He's giving up enough line drives that he's not throwing quality pitches.

"You're with me, leather" needs to stay the hell away from baseball. I just can't take anymore of those nicknames.

Thanks, Joe. You just inspired me to go vote for Manny 25 times.

It's not his place to enforce the rules of the league. Or of decency. I'd think less of Griffey if he turned in his teammates.

Yes. Manny will be back in time for the end of the season, and the rest of that division is laughable. The Dodgers are fine.

As long as Toronto continues to turn freely available pitchers into #3 starters seemingly overnight, they have a shot at this thing. I wonder if we can simulate that by moving replacement level up to a Jesse Litsch equivalent just for them.

I knew a guy who sneezed so hard he crashed his car. Does that count as a sneezing injury?

It might be the organisational philosophy, but that might actually be a strength of the organisational philosophy. For the last two years, Toronto has excelled with random pitchers they collected seemingly from nowhere, who then broke down (almost to a man). They could be doing this on purpose. If they're teaching these guys to throw in a way that is effective, but dangerous, that can be a winning strategy as long as those freely available pitchers continue to be freely available.

I can't believe someone gave Boomer a broadcasting job. I love that someone did - I'm just surprised.

You won't stay in the basement for long. No one can stay behind the Nationals for long.

4 AL East teams in the top 7. That division is sick.

Beat me to it. Yes, Vlad had a 31 game hitting streak in 1999. That's the club record.

Didn't stop Tony Fernandez. I want more third basemen to learn his looping lob throw to first.

I wonder if it will cost someone a job. If JP doesn't make any moves at the deadline, and then the team fades badly, people will blame him.

Concussions are brain injuries. Brain injuries are bad. People need to learn this. Now, that said, the Dickerson/Tejada collision is just one of those things that happens (like the Jackson/Damon collision in 2003, or the big Cameron/Beltran collision). But baserunners and catchers need to wear better helmets. I would like to see baseball have some rules about manadatory missed time on concussions like professional rugby leagues do. When the Red Sox left Damian Jackson in the game after he lay unconscious on the field for 2 minutes in 2003, they were gambling with his life.

Yes, but doing both is quite rare. Doing both makes you Roy Halladay.

The logical consequence is that reporters won't write about Milton Bradley. I think that's what he wants.

I would count from the strike. The Braves didn't win that year, and they weren't going to. It breaks the streak.

The relevance of the credit rating is that it impacts how easily the organisation can borrow money. If the teams were borrowing publicly and had lesser credit ratings, they might have real trouble.

It's interesting that you say Grienke is "smarter than the game". Royals fans have nicknamed one of their pitchers "The Brain", but it's not Grienke.

Phenomenal deep research pieces week in and week out? Didn't you just describe Dan Fox's time at BP?

The one thing I think performance so far has told us (there isn't a big enough sample yet to change our minds about how good the teams are, but these games have taken place and do count, so our expectations of overall records should change somewhat) is that the Angels are going to have serious trouble winning their division. They've lost significant ground to division rivals, and their injury situation isn't getting any better. The A's and possibly even the Mariners have at least as good a shot at the AL West as the Angels do.

I wonder sometimes if baseball does this on purpose. If they open the season with the good teams all playing each other, and the bad teams all playing each other, it will look like parity deep into the season, with a greater chance of big surprises and easier storylines.

If you'd like a good recent example of Pitch F/X largely failing to identify pitches, take a look at Jarrod Washburn's start on April 21. The pitch identification algorithm labels 8 different pitches, which he absolutely did not throw.

You might not be seeing a lot of procrastination, here. I think it's more that writers wre keeping their pieces to polish them until the last possible moment. That's what I would have done.

Don't forget to adjust for strength of schedule. Half of the Marlins first 12 games were against the Nationals. Wouldn't most teams be expected to win at least five of those?

I wonder if they'd help me get a green card? Who am I kidding? I could never put up with Texan weather.

Pitching is hard. You'd think players would know this, but both Ichiro and Swisher have managed to wear themselves out doing it this spring. Swisher didn't even look like he was throwing with maximum effort (unlike Ichiro, who was). Position players who pitch should just toss the ball in gently like Jamie Burke did last season.

Prognoses

That's an idiotic comment. He's had a terrible defense behind him for most of his career, so that's necessarily going to inflate his hit numbers. Use a stat that's defense and outcome dependent, like tRA, and you'll see that Felix is as good as Joe claims he is.

It's amazing Rany is still sane. Assuming he is.

I disagree entirely that the Jays missed their window. They hit their window exactly. They built to a single competitive season, and in 2008 had the fourth-best team in baseball. That's not missing their window. That's a peak on their success cycle, and they nailed it. Now they need to realise it has passed and work toward the next one, but I would count 2008 as a resounding success for the Toronto Blue Jays.

An apples to apples comparison of the performance of statistical models like PECOTA, CHONE, ZIPS, and Marcel would be interesting. But I think someone at Fangraphs already did that.

When I was growing up, my father and elder brother had no real interest in sports at all. But my Mom watched baseball, and for every game she kept score. Every time you write about keeping score I think of my Mom. Thanks.

They've clearly decided he can't catch, but he's as good a hitter already as AAA can make him. If they're not going to use him as a catcher, the only other smart option would be to trade him to someone who wants to try. Sending him to AAA now really diminishes his value (because it signals that he can't catch), so now he's just a first baseman. And unless you hit like Ryan Howard did, first basemen aren't prospects.

Incidentally, have you tried correcting the obviously erroneous height at weight values for players when you know your guess (though still not entirely accurate) would be closer than the official measurement? Ichiro, for example, has been listed as tall as 5-11 and as heavy as 190 during his career, when 5-7 and 155 is likely much closer to the truth.

I friend of mine says he's 6'9" (he's probably a bit taller than that), and he weight over the years has fluctuated between 260 and 385. At 385, he's a fat guy. At 260 he looks positively thin. Sabathia looks more like the 385 friend than he does like the 260 friend, and he's probably carrying a lot more lean muscle, too. I figure 320 is the lowest Sabathia could possibley weigh.

Would it be beneficial for catchers to do yoga to open their hips more? Greater hip flexibility should allow catchers to squat with a straight back, and thus cause them fewer back problems.

His lowest monthly batting average last year was in August (.207), but he got on base as a .387 clip while doing that. Batting average doesn't measure anything useful.

Ahh, the Bloomquist-Syphilis comparison. That was the best player comment ever.

Felix Hernandez came out as a 1 a couple of years ago.

Remember, some of us don't care about basketball (seriously, I don't see the appeal of that sport at all), so thanks for writing about college baseball, regardless of the marchness or the madness.

Bud's insistence on lying to the fans about a great many things (the popularity of interleague play, for example) makes him a very good commissioner for the owners. But he's damaged the game. The unbalanced schedule is appallingly unfair, and it affects not only the wild card but also the draft. And he's handled the steroid issue terribly, keeping it in the public eye to use as a tool against the union (I argued that the union should have done the same thing in 2003, but they backed down because they lacked Selig's congressional lobby).

Moyer's long been one of my favourite pitchers, and I was dissappointed when the Mariners let him go (a lefty flyball pitcher - that park is made for him). I hope he pitches through his age-48 season, and I hope he wins 20 games again.

Your sources were misinformed. That happens. As a reporter your job is to report what you learn, and you did. It's not your fault someone lied to you. This is just like the Pete Rose story Will Carroll and Derek Zumsteg broke some years ago. Because they broke it, it didn't happen, and they took a lot of flak for it. But that doesn't mean they weren't doing their jobs (and doing them well).

It was only available in Spanish.

The Netherlands was in a group with Panama, but never played them. They played the Dominican Republic (win), Puerto Rico (loss), and the Dominican Republic (win) to advance, never getting to face the weaker team. But that's seeding for you. In Joe's example, Mexico got to advance simply because they played the weaker team in the game that mattered, and they got to play that team then because of seeding. I'd like to see a level playing field with no seeding, but you need to play more games for that to work, and even MLB has abandoned any pretense of a level playing field by using an unbalanced schedule. So it'll never happen. Yet another reason not to care about the WBC.

The Jays' major-league shortstops right now are Marco Scutaro and John McDonald, not Marcus Scutaro and Jason McDonald.

Any rumours of teams looking at those Dutch pitchers?

Will did say 4-man rotation. The Jays have let him pitch on short rest on a regular basis for the past few years - they just spread out the other 4 starts around him. If Halladay can get 5 extra starts each year he could credibly average 23 wins per season, and that would shave a few seasons off that 300 win projections.

I think the WBC actually has it right using a double-elimination system over a round-robin system. In a round-robin tournament, you invariably get some games at the end of the round where one or even both participants don't have any incentive to win the game. The double-elimination tournament they're using now prevents that.

I think what's more relevant is that PECOTA is predicting such a low IP total for Halladay. Sure, his K/9 might not be as good as some others, but if he throws 20% more innings that matters a lot less.

That chart is unequivocally wrong. Even if the two lines weren\'t mirror images of each other, they\'re showing a negative number of players in the DL, and the Indians winning the division (which they didn\'t).

That\'s how I read it, too.

Sure, but by then the sample sizes are so small as to render the stats useless anyway.

You might want to put DEF in the stat glossary so people have some idea what it is. Some of us pay for subscriptions here so we won\'t need to buy the book. Making me require both for either to be useful is only going to make me buy neither product.

Seriously? People are still complaining about Beltre\'s contract, even though he\'s provided good value for his salary over the whole four years so far? Really? Beltre\'s performance (includnig defense) has been worth pretty much exactly what the Mariners have been paying him. That was a good contract when he signed it, and it\'s still a good contract. How does anyone still not know this?

Shame about Moyer\'s card. I always like to check out the guys with a similarity score of 1.

He doesn\'t use shades. All the greens are the same. Only the descriptors differ.

BP\'s days as the industry\'s best site ended some time ago. You can get better and more frequent analysis at FanGraphs, and superior and more transparent statistics at the Hardball Times, FanGraphs, and StatCorner. BP\'s only real lead now comes from them having better writers, and a well-organised and well-run website.

Alaska\'s flush with cash. No people, though.

7.4% is an unsustainably low HR/FB rate. I don\'t see how Danks is in Halladay\'s class at all.

\"Rodriguez already has all the money that he\'ll need for life\" I hate this argument. You don\'t know what he wants to do with that money. Maybe he wants to start a baseball league in Puerto Rico. Maybe he wants to buy the Florida Marlins. Maybe he wants to run for President.

As a platoon DH, Griffey\'s an improvement over what Seattle has, and he takes to roster spot of the third catcher (by pushing Clement out of the DH spot). The Griffey signing makes sense from Seattle\'s perspective.

Their 4 best teams came from the same division last year - only weakness of schedule gave a better record to the Angels. Remember last season\'s adjusted standings. The 5 best teams in baseball were the Red Sox, Rays, Cubs, Jays, and Yankees - in that order.

We know PECOTA hates Ichiro, but now it seems to be underrating the Mariner\'s run prevention. Ignoring last year\'s awful defense, perhaps? Ignoring platooning?

You think its unreasonable to judge decisions based on the information available at the time they were made? That\'s the only way to judge decisions. Waiting until we have the benefit of hindsight criticises people for being unlucky, and applauds people who made bad bets but won. This is the best time to evaluate those contracts.

The only reason this recession is going to be \"different this time\" is the already precarious position of the NHL leading into it. They may well lose teams, but they might have lost teams anyway.

I agree entirely, Joe. Plus, the players can quickly adapt to this. Next off-season, I suspect more players will accept arbitration as a result of this lower demand for free agents. As a result, the ntext off-season after that fewer teams will offer arbitration, and we\'ll back back where we were before, but without compensation. Let the system work, people.

Government spending never results in net job creation. Sure, it employs people, but the drag that spending and debt bring the economy always destroys at least as many. Government spending never results in net job creation.

Or Montreal. And make Loria live there. And publicize his address.

The Yankees won the pennant (and world series) in 2000.

We\'ll see how he does as a pitcher in the WBC.

Silva probably isn\'t the worst pitcher in their rotation. He just has the worst contract. I would argue that Washburn is the worst pitcher.

What I find really interesting is that Ichiro predicted that playing CF would be hard on his legs, and then he played CF and it was hard on his legs. This man knows his own body better than anyone else in baseball.

How do you figure? Ichiro has been well worth the money he\'s been paid since he came to America. Check out the win values over at Fangraphs. Also, the AL West is an appallingly weak division. I\'d give any team there at least a 10% chance to win it. Losing Ichiro would completely destroy Seattle\'s chances (as would losing Felix or Beltre - both also valuable parts of the team).

M\'s fans view Ichiro with a level of reverence usually reserved for religious icons. But, they also know better than everyone else how fit he is, and what tremendous good his stretching program does him. If any non-pitcher can pitch safely, it\'s Ichiro.

I don\'t see any reason to give you a negative rating here, but I don\'t share your position. I think the line between natural and artificial performance is entirely arbitrary, and I see no reason to draw one. I\'m inclined to stop drug testing.

That\'s not ironic. That\'s just apt.

I love that Roy Halladay can throw 250 innings and still be green. Seattle\'s pitching staff looks terrible, though. One yellow and the rest red. Ouch.

So, if the drugs are safe to use and have no side effects, why is anyone trying to stop their use?

Aaron Hill is healthy? That\'s news to me. 2008 did demonstrate, though, that the Jays are good at taking kids no one really thought much of, teaching them to mix their pitches (3 guys threw 5 different pitches at least 10% of the time - only two other pitchers in baseball did that), and turning them into legitimate #3 starters. The Jays excelled last year because of their defense, yes, but they also had a rotation of 2 #3 starters, a solid #2 starter, a top-of-rotation guy, and the best pitcher in baseball. Their rotation didn\'t have a back end, so they could basically guarantee a large pitching advantage in 60% of their games (any time they were facing someone else\'s 4-5 guys, or any time Halladay was pitching).

That\'s a really good point. Bonds needs to be on this team. I will note that he (correctly) didn\'t sign Griffey.

At the time, A-Rod was a very good shortstop. He was certainly better than Jeter. Jeter\'s tools should translate well to CF. He has a strong arm and good speed. He does not have a good first step, and he struggles mightily to move to his left. The things that have made Jeter the worst shortstop in baseball (Bill James makes a decent argument that he\'s the worst shortstop in baseball history) aren\'t that relevant to play in CF. This should have been done as soon as Bernie Williams was no longer able to field the position well.