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September 5, 2008, 01:32 PM ET
Quentin Out?
by Will Carroll
WSCR in Chicago is reporting that Carlos Quentin has a broken wrist and is done for the season. I have been unable to confirm the specifics, but there is more going on than I was led to believe yesterday. Just last evening, I spoke with a trusted source who told me that he expected Quentin to be back in the lineup today, as you’ll see in Friday’s UTK Wrap. Now, that is no longer the case. Quentin returned from scans on his injured arm with a cast or brace and an announcement is expected before game time with more details.
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September 5, 2008, 10:04 AM ET
The Other Sport(s)
by Will Carroll
The NFL season kicked off last night with a 16-7 victory by the defending champs, the NY Giants. That means we have real injuries and real games to talk about. As most of you know, I do both sports, so I want to let you know where you can read my football injury columns this season.
I’m thrilled to be back with our friends at SI.com for a second year. My “Injury Report” will be up each Thursday and can be found on SI.com’s Fantasy tab. On Sunday around noon, I’ll have the “Last Minute Med Check” to help you set your fantasy lineup to avoid injuries. I’ll be doing a chat this week at noon, here at BP, to answer questions. If we get enough turnout, we’ll try to make it a regular feature.
On Tuesdays, I’m going back to where it started. Four years ago, Aaron Schatz asked me to do a column at Football Outsiders and I did it as a favor, with no idea it would end up taking on a life of it’s own. I’ll be back there with the “Black and Blue Report” each Tuesday, looking back at the injuries of the weekend.
While I’m plugging, be sure to check out Basketball Prospectus and get your pre-order in for College Basketball Prospectus and follow the game of politics on Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.
September 2, 2008, 07:27 PM ET
Back At Bat
by Will Carroll
When the iPhone 2.0 debuted, one of the things it brought with it was MLB’s At Bat program. Used in the demos, At Bat brought a new level of attention to ‘watching’ baseball on the move. Having seen people using the WAP feed to ‘watch’ games on Blackberries, the At Bat experience was so good that I’ve seen people look at it and decide then and there that they wanted an iPhone.
Was it perfect? No, and many noted the shortcomings. It didn’t do a lot of things that people expected, like box scores, stats, or a real game-state environment. Bob Bowman of MLBAM said shortly after At Bat debuted that they got as much done as they could to make it work well in the amount of time they had. Given the sorry state of some iPhone programs, At Bat is one of the programs that’s never crashed me.
Now with the first major update to At Bat, they’ve answered almost all of the complaints. You want box scores? Here you go:
That would be pretty good, but the addition of “baseball cards” is a nice touch:
I’d expected all that, but what I didn’t expect was this:
Oh yes, it’s Gameday, almost exactly as you’ve come to know it on MLB.com. No, it doesn’t have the Pitch F/X paths or 3D graphics, but if you expected that, you really need a hobby. The updates come very quickly, about a minute behind real time, so it won’t be great at the ballpark but it would be great for keeping up with games you’re not actually at.
Add in game previews, the same great quality videos (good if you’re not on wifi), and you’ve got yourself a Home Run of an application. MLB At Bat is still just $4.99 and the update is free and available at the iTunes App Store.
September 2, 2008, 02:45 PM ET
Fundraiser for John Marzano’s Family
by Joe Sheehan
Earlier this year, our friend John Marzano passed away suddenly at the age of 44. I’d gotten to know John through working with him on MLB.com’s postseason coverage, and like all who knew him, enjoyed his humor, his love of baseball and his passion for his family. In fact, my first interaction with John involved him showing me a picture of his beautiful new grandchild on his phone.
One of John’s colleagues at MLB, Chris Carron, is participating in a half-marathon later this month to help raise money for John’s family. If you would like to contribute to the cause, you can can send checks made out to “The Jayden Brady and Ariana Marzano College Fund” to:
Andrea Scalici
MLB Advanced Media
75 Ninth Ave.
New York, NY 10011
Any amount will be appreciated, and all funds go directly to the family.
Whether you knew John as a longtime MLB catcher, a popular TV analyst in Philadelphia, an insightful and gregarious personality on MLB.com, or the guy in the room telling the best stories and getting the biggest laughs, you know he was taken from us too soon. Please help us support his family.
September 2, 2008, 02:21 PM ET
Ack!
by Clay Davenport
Yes, there has been a problem yesterday and today with a number of products on the site, principally the Post-season Odds, the EqA page, minor league translations, and the DT player cards.
All of these problems flow from the same source - my cable modem bought its farm Sunday night, the day before a federal holiday. I spent much of Monday trying - and failing - to get online in a way that I could run the product suite. Happy Labor Day, indeed; I think this aggravated me even more than the prior weekend, when I had to attend a (wife’s) family wedding three hours out of town AND had my car stereo stolen. I was able to do get everything but the minor league translations run today, albeit with some formatting issues - that’s the result of running them on a “new” machine, and discovering that at least one piece of software simply would not work the same way as it did on mine. I apologize for all of those issues.
Tomorrow things should be back to normal - that’s if the Large Fiber-Optic Phone/Cable Company and the Big Brown Shipping Company are able to keep their promises to me.
Clay
September 1, 2008, 12:52 AM ET
What’s in a Display Name?
by Dave Pease
We’re happy to announce that we’ve released the beta of our commenting functionality, and it is now available on Baseball Prospectus articles for all Premium and Fantasy subscribers. Look at the bottom of any new article for the link.
When you leave a comment on an article, you’ll be identified by your account’s Display Name. This new setting is available by clicking “Manage My Profile” in the blue login bar on any Baseball Prospectus page (or by clicking here). In our experience both with community features on web sites and old-school Usenet newsgroups, people who take their online identities seriously provide a high level of discussion quality, and many or even most of those people identify themselves by their actual names. While we don’t require that you do so, we do hope that you use your real name as your Display Name.
We’ve also noticed many sites where a user can change their identity from thread to thread or comment to comment, and when this happens here’s how such behavior can generally be described:
Fig A: description of user behaviour when posting identity is regularly changed
To this end, we’ve set up the system to allow you to change your Display Name once every 90 days, so please give your choice some thought before you lock it in.
As for the comments functionality in general, by now there are a ton of systems out there that are freely available for websites to use (and we checked a few of them out based on subscriber recommendations–thank you!), but none of them worked exactly the way we wanted, so we ended up rolling our own. We’ve still got cleaning up to do, we’ll be adding features as we go, and I’m sure some of what we’ve got in mind isn’t going to work the way we expect. Please do use the link in the green Beta bar at the top of any comment page to send us feedback, and if there’s a problem, we’ll get it resolved as soon as we can.
We don’t have a code of conduct worked out for the beta, so we’re borrowing fivethirtyeight.com’s comment policy for now.
August 29, 2008, 06:41 PM ET
Deadline Mess Update — Hosmer Pulled
by Kevin Goldstein
No. 3 overall pick Eric Hosmer has been pull out of today’s game with Idaho Falls of the Pioneer League. This happened at the commissioner’s request, and is obviously related to the grievance filed by the union related to the Pedro Alvarez deal, and the Pirates‘ official response, which noted that Hosmer’s deal with the Royals came into the commissioner’s office even later than Alvarez’ did.
An ugly situation just got a whole lot uglier, and I bet we’re not even close to done yet. Plenty of time between now and the hearing date of September 10.
Update: While the Royals have yet to comment, the commissioner’s office has, at least temporarily unapproved Hosmer’s contract, pending the September 10th hearing and the results within. While this certainly makes sense given the facts, it still seems like MLB extending their middle finger to Boras, when in the end, if Boras wins, it just gives him one more client he could end up getting extra money for. Just like the deadline extensions that were handed out, MLB fails to see the big picture at times, it seems.
Aside No. 1 – How mad you think the Royals are at the Pirates for dragging Hosmer’s name into this mess?
Selfish Aside No. 2 – I sure hope this gets figured out before I have to start team prospect lists.
August 28, 2008, 01:53 PM ET
Field Trip, and Other Stuff
by Joe Sheehan
Not to be all Will Carroll here, but Jay Jaffe, Derek Jacques and I, among others, will be at tonight’s Brooklyn Cyclones game. If you’re around and want to talk some baseball, or just ask Jay why Joe Maddon bites his style, swing by the first-base side and I’m sure you’ll find us. (And yes, I’m annoyed that we missed Brad Holt by a day.)
I don’t even have enough for a notes column, but I figured I’d throw a U together with some of the things floating in a Word file:
- Kevin’s review of the Pedro Alvarez situation today is as thorough and dispassionate presentation of the facts as you’ll find. As far as everyone else’s coverage…look, it’s nice that people are so concerned for Pedro Alvarez’s soul, so worried about what Alvarez’s association with Scott Boras and his refusal to sign a contract with the Pirates, will mean for his future. With that noted, why is it that these same people don’t have a problem with a system that costs Alvarez millions of dollars and freedom of choice at the only point of leverage he’ll have for a decade? The rules that prevent Alvarez from offering his services to multiple employers cost him a heck of a lot more than his current actions ever will.
Of course, the writing is not really about Alvarez. It’s about supporting the entrenched unfair system, serving the established relationship with management sources, and taking shots at an Approved Villain along the way. Keep all that in mind as the hack jobs on Boras and Alvarez continue.
- I almost wrote a piece burying the Yankees today, but I held off. If they lose today (down 2-0 in the fifth as a I post this), I’ll write it for tomorrow. We’ve seen too many teams close big gaps over the last few seasons to write off a team that could be six games back with 29 to play. Feel me, Mets fans? If they fall to eight back…OK, then I’ll get out my shovel. Props to Steven Goldman, who saw this coming long before I did.
- The Toronto Blue Jays have the fifth-best adjusted record in baseball. I had said at the start of the season that they might be the eighth-best team in baseball and we’d never know it because of their schedule. Well, they’ve outdone that, thanks to tremendous pitching and defense. One other thing: they’re 33-23 since recalling Adam Lind on June 22. Way to finally get there, guys. Shame the New Shannon Stewart Era didn’t work out; no one could have seen that coming.
- For the people who believe in momentum, I present last night’s Mets game. Not only were the Mets coming off of a devastating loss, but they trailed 3-2 and their ace was out of the game after six innings and as many walks. Four eighth-inning runs later, no one remembered Tuesday night’s disaster. The ability of professionals at the highest level to do their jobs under stressful circumstances should not be underestimated, and the dime-store psychology of the sports page is best used to wrap fish, line birdcages or pack boxes.
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August 28, 2008, 11:10 AM ET
About those Quad-A All-Stars
by Clay Davenport
In Kevin’s article he built an “All-Star” of minor leaguers over 30, and his off-the-cuff guess was 52 wins.
Let’s get serious about that number, speculative as the entire enterprise is.
For hitters, I’m going to use their regular translation for all of 2008 - combining across whatever multiple teams, including the majors, they may have had. For their defense I’ll use their averages over the last three years, pro-rated to 162 games. I made guesses as to how their time might be spent at each position, pretty much the way I’d do with a fantasy team in pre-season.
Name Pos EQA Def Time EQR
Phillips C .200 -26 .5 21
Johnson C .200 -30 .5 21
Phelps 1b .252 0 .8 62
Scales 2b .249 -3 .9 68
McClain 3b .255 -10 .9 72
Almonte SS .237 5 .8 53
Lane RF .235 0 .7 46
Torres CF .256 16 .9 73
Broussard LF .235 -3 .8 52
Cervenak 3OD .231 -10 .6 37
Dillon 13D .221 0 .6 33
Figueroa 2S .208 3 .2 10
Velandia 2S .195 15 .2 8
Perez OF .251 -8 .6 46
The team total for EqR comes to 602 over 4374 outs, a .238 EqA. That’s only slightly worse than Washington and Kansas City, the two lightest-hitting teams in the majors. Hold that number.
The pitchers - I’m using their actual innings to date, and the average of the four ERAs I spit out with a translation: an ERA based on their actual runs allowed, one that adjusts that figure for the quality of the team’s defense, one based completely on peripherals, and one that starts from the first ERA and adjusts for their “unluckiness” in hits and runs allowed. I’m going to pro-rate their innings through to the end of the season.
Name IP ERA R
Walrond 159 4.38 77
Gulin 162 4.88 88
Ohka 163 5.75 104
Mazone 196 4.95 108
Pettyjohn 191 6.20 132
Childers 71 2.58 20
King 52 4.23 24
Lehr 75 3.61 30
Randolph 68 3.49 27
Sanches 52 4.50 26
Strickland 75 4.84 40
Total 1264 4.81 676
One big problem is that we need 1458 innings to complete a season (162*9), so I.m going to assume that we could find 194 innings of 6.00 pitching to take us the rest of the way there; that pushes our run total up 805.
The defense came in at -31, so that pushes the runs allowed up to 836.
A team that scores 602 adjusted runs and allows 836 is going to have a record around .341, which is 55 wins.
Kevin, I think you’re a touch low. And I’m pretty sure he’ll tell me I haven’t taken enough off for defense.
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August 26, 2008, 03:27 PM ET
Instant replay to debut Thursday
by John Perrotto
Major League Baseball is holding a 5 p.m. conference call with Commissioner Bud Selig to announce that Major League Baseall will begin using instant replay on Thursday to determine boundary calls on home runs. More details to come.
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