Big Papi moves like Frankenstein.,stiff, clumsy and slow. As his bat slows down he becomes an expensive liability.
This from the guy who, when i make an offhand remark about Halladay’s good performance, feels the need to denigrate it by saying “Did you have a look at the opposing lineup?”
As usual, you ignore the substance of what i write, and cherry-pick the bits that fit your prejudices. Why are you so dishonest when you talk baseball?
As i very clearly noted, my comment about how great Halladay is might have been inspired by last night’s performance, but it was also based on his overall standard of pitching this year. If Carl Pavano or Jeremy Guthrie had thrown a complete-game shutout, i wouldn’t have made the same observation, but for Halladay it was just another in a long string of excellent performances. You do understand the difference there, right? Or would you like me to explain it in words of two syllables or fewer?
Here you go again. You tell other people to relax, and then you constantly suggest that anyone who doesn’t agree with you must not love, or even watch, the game.
You’re right that i didn’t watch this particular game. I guess i should apologize for my inability to watch every single one of the 2400+ MLB games played every year. I know it’s hard to believe, but when faced with a choice between a game involving my team, and one involving two teams that i don’t care about, i’ll choose the game involving my team. Pretty crazy, huh?
So, what i did last night was catch the last few innings of the Baltimore-Tampa Bay game on MLB.com, and then i parked my ass on the couch and, while grading student papers, watched the Padres beat the Dodgers. Is that sufficient to make me a bona fide baseball fan, or does such a label apply, by definition, only to people who follow contending teams?
What i did do with the TOR-BOS game was what i do with just about every game, just about every night of the season: i fired up my interweb machine, pointed it at the MLB.com Media Center page, and spent half an hour or so watching the highlights from every single game played yesterday. And in the TOR-BOS highlights was a clip called Halladay’s Shutout. You can view it here, if you’re interested.
I can’t believe i just spent three paragraphs justifying my baseball-watching habits to someone whose main baseball-related pastime seems to be telling other baseball fans that they really aren’t fans after all.
I was merely responding to your ludicrous suggestion that Manny has somehow been a detriment to the Dodgers, and that Boston did well to get rid of him.
As for Abner Doubleday, the folks who turned him into a baseball myth would be proud of your yeoman efforts in carrying on their work.
MLB.com’s headline story is that the Phillies clinched the division title.
But they haven’t (as of right now.) Philadelphia has 91 wins. If they lose out and Atlanta wins out, they’d both be 91-71. If Colorado wins more than 91 games they’ll win the wild card and Philly and Atlanta would have to play off for the division title.
I mean, it’s pretty damn LIKELY Philly will win that division, but they haven’t yet. MLB.com’s own standings page has it right, so how’d this headline get past the editors?
The Phillies have 92 wins.
Your baseball word is so strong with me I spent a few minutes wondering why the Phillies would be so stupid as to celebrate last night, when they might not even make the playoffs, before realizing what their win total is.
I just went on MLB.com, and the Standings pages has the Phillies at 92-66, and the Braves at 86-72. If this is right, the Phillies are out of reach of the Braves. The worst the Phillies could do is 92-70, and the best the Braves can do is 90-72. ESPN.com has the same figures.
Maybe they just corrected it since you noticed the error?
I think your data is out of date. Yesterday the Phillies won and the Braves lost.
Phillies: 92 - 66
Braves: 86 - 72
Edit: I guess I can’t claim a simul-post here when I posted six minutes later than the other two guys, can I? :smack:
Tigers lost so the race goes on. It was an ugly game with Leland and the pitching coaches tossed. Ump said a Tiger left before the right fielder caught the ball. The replay did not show that.
Then pitchers hit 3 batters. In the 9th Robertson drilled a Twin and got tossed. The Twins are not happy at watching it all end.
And the Rockies clinch the wildcard. If they sweep the Dodgers they would win the division.
Must have been. I guess my browser didn’t refresh the standings. My mistake.
Go Rockies! Sweep! This is far different than two years ago. This year, they’re a good team. If I’d only known that it took me leaving Denver for the Rockies to get in the playoffs two years out of three, well, given everything else, I’d have stayed. 
In other news, about two weeks ago I looked at the standings and thought, “At least the Orioles won’t lose 100 this year, and won’t even be the worst team in the league!” If they take two from the Jays, I’ll be right on the first one.
Making their pitch for the Cy | The Hardball Times Those dunces have a lot of statistical data. The idea that Grienke is a clear winner can be well debated. He did not face the best pitchers like the other contenders did and he has the lowest wins.
I’ve asked this question several times in this thread towards the people who keep arguing for Wins to be the major stat to use when evaluating a pitcher, but haven’t gotten a response yet:
Why do you think using a team statistic to evaluate individual performance translates to what you feel is the most important pitching stat?
And after looking at a list of pitchers that Greinke went up against, I can honestly say that clearly the opposing team managers were so terrified of their chances, that they essentially gave up any hope of winning, and trotted out their #6 starter nearly every time. And the Royals bullpen managed to still blow 4 leads for Greinke, and let their defense piss away countless other chances.
And yet, even after all of that, the author of that piece still concludes he would vote for Zach.
To me, the key indicator is the 213 ERA+. That just doesn’t happen, and hasn’t happened since Pedro’s ridiculous 2000 season.
The most important thing a pitcher can do is keep the other team from scoring. In fact, that is pretty much the only thing he can do. And Grienke was, by far, the best at that this season.
A few things.
First, if you look, right there in the post that i made, and that you quoted, you’ll see that i said the following:
Bolding mine.
See that? I made very clear that i didn’t think Greinke was the only contender. He did, and still does, seem to me like a pretty clear leader, but i’ve never once suggested that the issue could not be debated. And if Halladay or Hernandez, or even Verlander, got the award, i would disagree, but i would still think it had gone to a damn good candidate. So, the first thing you’ve done is make a rebuttal to an argument that i never made. Anti-stats people like you and ElvisL1ves are really good at that, at least.
Second, and perhaps even more telling, is that i agree with basically everything that Craig Brown say in that article you linked to. What’s more, i think it’s absolutely hilarious that the only things you apparently got from the article was that Greinke “did not face the best pitchers like the other contenders did and he has the lowest wins.” If you think that’s the most important thing to come out of that article, i think you could probably do with taking some basic reading comprehension lessons.
Here are some of the actually relevant points that Brown makes in the article:
So, the overall environment in which Greinke pitched, playing for Kansas City, weighed against him from the beginning. Let’s have a look how:
So, even when he pitched outstandingly, he didn’t get the sort of defensive backup that Hernandez did in Seattle.
Do you understand, or do i need to explain to you, the significance that a team’s hitting has in determining the number of Wins a pitcher gets? Do you understand that giving up 2 runs can still leave a pitcher with a Loss if his team can’t score more than 1? I could, if you would find it helpful, demonstrate the complicated mathematical formula necessary to understand such a bizarre scenario.
Not only did the KC bats suck, but:
That is, the already-crappy Royals hitters were, over the course of the season, even crappier on days when Greinke pitched. The article you cited has the numbers, if you actually want to read it.
Of the 5 pitchers under consideration in that article, Greinke had a lead blown by his bullpen more often than any of the others. Brown also notes that Greinke had the worst combination of poor run support and poor bullpen support.
Also, let’s look at Brown’s actual conclusion regarding the Cy Young, which you somehow managed to forget about:
Finally, do you see where Brown placed the point about Greinke not facing any of the other four starters? That’s right, in the section titled “Trivia.” And yet, for some completely mysterious reason, that was apparently the only important thing you managed to find in the whole article. And so what if he didn’t face the other four contending pitchers? Even if he had, it wouldn’t have changed his actual pitching, and nor would it have changed the ineptitude of the Royals’ offense and defense.
There’s a theoretical limit to the argument, though. I remember once having a discussing on Usenet that amounted to this; if a pitcher made 35 starts and pitched a complete game in every one, giving up 1 run per game, but lost every game 1-0, should he win the Cy Young?
At first I said absolutely, but in retrospect I think I was wrong; he shouldn’t, because he didn’t help his team win a single game. No, it wasn’t Mr. 1.00 ERA’s fault that he went 0-35, but the fact remains that his efforts resulted in no wins for his team.
Now, I’m not saying Grienke shouldn’t win the Cy; he should, because his efforts did in fact add more wins than any other pitcher. People are talking about him like he’s got a terrible W-L, but he’s 16-8; he has one fewer win than Halladay but two fewer losses, and has the same winning percentage as Justin Verlander. 16-8 for the Royals is mre impressive than 19-7 for the Yankees, simply because an average pitcher with the Royals would have gone something like 9-15 in those starts, while an average pitcher for the Yankees would have gone 14-12 or 15-11. (Indeed, Joba Chamberlain, a very average pitcher, had a .600 winning percentage with the Yankees.) Grienke probably caused the Royals to win at least six or seven games that they would not have won with an average pitcher. No other pitcher in the AL, not even Roy Halladay, can say that. Only Felix Hernandez really has an interesting argument, in that his team hits even worse than Grienke’s (but fields a hell of a lot better.)
But there is a point at which you do have to consider W-L. If Grienke was 10-16 I think there’s be some legitimate question as to whether he’d hlped his team win enough games to merit the award. It’s just not applicable here - his W-L is solid.
My ballot would be:
- Grienke
- Hernandez
- Halladay
- Sabathia
- Verlander, I guess
Actually, I want to put Jon Lester over Verlander. A Red Sox pitcher faces much tougher opposition; Lester put up his numbers against substntially superior offenses. Of the 4 division opponents Boston faces, three of four were three of the six best offensive teams in the American League. Verlander faced only oen (Minnesota, tied for fifth with the Rays.)
In cases like this, though, should you simply look at how many difficult opponents he faced, or also look at how he fared on the days when he did come up against a good batting lineup?
For example, of Greinke’s 32 starts this year, only 8 were against teams with above-average offenses. In those 8 games however, his figures read:
8 starts
4 wins
3 losses
2 complete games (one for a 1-0 loss)
57 IP
45 H
13 BB
57 K
1.58 ERA
1.02 WHIP
It’s hardly Greinke’s (or Verlander’s) fault that he doesn’t get to face the big hitters every week, and based on the figures above, he actually performed better against the good-hitting teams than he did against the weaker-hitting teams.
None of this has anything to do with what is or is not their “fault.” It’s not Felix Hernandez’s “fault” that he pitches in a pitcher’s park, but you still have to consider that in determining what his statistics mean, don’t you?
That doesn’t change the fact that a strong ERA against bad teams is not as impressive as one against good teams.
If a pitcher in a pitcher’s park had a better ERA on the road than at home, you would still have to adjust his ERA upwards to account for his home park, because his performance in that park is still in a lower-scoring context. Works the same with adjusting for the unbalanced schedule.
In any event, I downgraded Justin Verlander, and he totally dominated the three weak sisters of the AL Central; 8-1 with an ERA of about 1.
I am not anti stats. In case you did not notice I just gave you a whole bunch of them. I still have my copy of the Bill James Abstract. Baseball, because of its great record keeping is the best sport for number crunching. It is however a beginning science and the data that comes out are useful tools but not definitive. When someone cites a couple numbers and says thats all you need to know I object. Note the cite I gave is all about number crunching stat geeks.
No you didn’t. You gave me a link to an article, and a comment that drew on only one relatively insignificant aspect of that article.
Two things:
First, it’s not at all a “beginning science.” While the application of complex stats to baseball might be described as a relatively new phenomenon, the science of statistics is considerably older, and most of the principles being applied in baseball stats are well-tested and known for their ability to provide useful information.
Second, stats, can in fact tell us something definitive. They may not be able to make definitive predictions, but they can tell us some definitive things about what has happened in the past, and we can draw inferences from this to make general statements about past performance, as well as some reasonable predictions about certain aspects of future performance.
I guess you’ll have to point out where anyone did that, because i don’t recall it.