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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    I concur with all that Spy wrote above, but want to add that defensive stats suffer from an inherent small sample size compared to batting stats. Each plate appearance consists on average of around 4 pitches, these days. Even though only outcomes are recorded, there is a richness in the experience being measured that goes far beyond the basic numbers. How well does the batter lay off bad pitches, how often does he whiff on good pitches - all these micro-results wind up contributing to what we know of as a plate appearance. By comparison, defensive stats suffer the opposite problem. There is less to the data than meets the eye. An awful lot of Total Chances are on plays like cans of corn to the outfield and routine grounders to the infielders. Separating the wheat from the chaff is the first task of the data analysis, and there is an awful lot of chaff. That's IMO why it takes multiple seasons for defensive stats to take on the same meaningfulness of their offensive counterparts.
  2. ashbury
    In a thread specifically about "Twins Stuff From Around The Web," it seemed pertinent and deserves to be reviewed once in a while. It's all shades of gray. Some folks may recall that the site's Comment Policy has a short independent section about this topic of fair use - I'm not sure it says anything better than how this side-discussion has gone, but the site owners (and thus we as moderators) do take the question seriously, since no one would like to see their own words used in some way contrary to their own wishes and benefit - copyright applies even if the text is not behind a paywall, and a link-plus-summary is better than verbatim text, often. I hope I'm not contributing to any further thread-jack from the intended thread topic - PM to me or any others is indeed probably preferred at this point, for any followup.
  3. ashbury
    Traditional scouts don't usually net six-figures either. Are the teams just rolling the dice with them? Sure, in a sense, but they also treat the information with respect and as having value. Baseball doesn't pay much, compared to other industries, for pretty much any except the top-end jobs, for all the reasons you mention. You're setting an arbitrarily high bar there. If the goal is player evaluation, then data mining and analytics being considered on a par with traditional resources sounds pretty good to me.
  4. ashbury
    Impossible to overstate what a wonderful resource this is. Probably a day doesn't go by during regular season, where I don't read something about a game and want to validate with my own eyes - and this is how.
  5. ashbury
    "Fair use" excerpts, please.
  6. ashbury
    Do I get to, too?
  7. ashbury
    We used to have a member from Elizabethton, "Madre Dos", who gave us stories of many of the players who are now on the major league squad (and some others who have moved on). I was sorry to learn not long ago that she had passed away. She developed what she felt to be close relationships - she followed them in the seasons afterward just as though they were her own. Madre Dos indeed! It's kind of amusing to look back and re-read her comments about Miguel Sano's weight, and her descriptions of other players were generally spot-on to what we believe about them now. At spring training two or three years ago, I happened to sit near some people who turned out to be from Cedar Rapids, and listened to them work out some of the arrangements for their plans to host players at single-A the coming season. I was a little surprised at how casual the process was - the major league team didn't play a very direct role for a lot of it. This was later in the spring than now, and presumably the assignments of players to teams was just happening, or about to. I don't recall any of them posting here, I just mention it to say things seem similar in many ways. It's an understatement to say that neither of these towns is quite the tourist destination that Pensacola is. Much more challenging for you, I imagine.
  8. ashbury
    I was going to go with "they granted him a divorce", but your way works too.
  9. ashbury
    It's like George Carlin's observation about breaking a crumb in half. You don't have two half-crumbs, they're just two crumbs now, in seeming violation of the laws of physics. Similarly, putting together small sample sizes remain small sample sizes, no matter how long you keep doing it.
  10. ashbury
    And I don't know either, and if I had thoughts of Kubel being my #1 guy for the question posed here (I was just throwing him into the mix among other good candidates), I'm definitely backing off. At this point I'm just contemplating the what-ifs for 2006.
  11. ashbury
    It is a good thing to remind ourselves of. I was guilty of asking for a synopsis of something else the other day, labeling myself a cheapskate as the rationale, which is pretty weak. Fair use is hard to define, and the comment "worth the price" might please the author, but since I don't know what percentage of the total article was excerpted, it's hard to guess what's fair. Bottom line, let's do be careful with other people's property.
  12. ashbury
    I thought he was considered to have pretty good wheels, but I don't happen to have a pre-ACL Baseball Prospectus on my bookshelf to re-check that. The 2005 Prospectus certainly is, ahem, measured in its description of his defense - "adequate" is often a left-handed compliment. He DH'ed half his games in his September 2004 callup, pre-injury, but that's not unheard of when breaking in a young prospect in September. With his minor league progression, accounting for underperforming at Ft Myers and overperforming at New Britain, and the fact he didn't embarass himself when called up to the majors at age 22, and I don't think it's a stretch to imagine him as an offensive force two years later at age 24, and thereafter.
  13. ashbury
    Moderator's note: While meant in good fun I'm sure, this kind of tangent doesn't belong in the baseball threads.
  14. ashbury
    When we play the Rangers my runners have the green light rounding third every time on a ball hit to the outfield, Castro and Cron and Cruz included. / edit - OK, except for when it's hit to that Gallo guy
  15. ashbury
    And not just that. We're looking back at 2006? Imagine having Kubel in the batting order instead of Tyner/Nevin (our bizarro-world DHs). And his pre-injury wheels in the outfield instead of Rondell (slide him to DH where he belonged). I don't think Kubel is the one guy whose absence stopped a WS march, any more than Liriano. But oh my, that makes two coulda-woulda-shouldas.
  16. ashbury
    Let me toss Jason Kubel's name into the mix as well.
  17. ashbury
    Major League Baseball to rename disabled list as 'injured list' ICYMI.
  18. ashbury
    I don't recognize this song.
  19. ashbury
    I did not know that! Perhaps it's not correct. b-r.com shows in MLB that our batters were 4th youngest in the majors (behind SDP, PHI and CHW), while our pitchers were actually older (29.6) than league average (28.5). Their weighting is PA+G for batters, and 3GS+G+SV for pitchers. That latter one seems odd, while for the batters I can see giving some weight to defense-only subs, but I very much doubt the weighting with simply PA and IP would make our overall team that season anywhere close to youngest. I have no idea how to locate some point "early" in the season with a radically different makeup, but a fragment of a season can't be very important.
  20. ashbury
    I'm pretty sure when I said "inflection point" I was far from asserting this.
  21. ashbury
    Pure Adam Smith economics had a good run, but it's grounded in the concept of Scarcity, and is not equipped to guide the way in an era where Plenty is trending toward the norm. In an extreme case where Plenty is created by the push of a button by a single all-powerful finger, the shape of economics and justice would look nothing like today. I should add that pure Socialism is equally rooted in there being Scarcity. The challenge is to construct an economic theory that handles the present-day inflection point, and I recall that others here have provided links to such thinkers here and there, but I still haven't seen what I'm hoping for. The difference seems as vast as the break from Newtonian physics to relativistic.
  22. ashbury
    Later on, I hope you follow up and let us know whether you find someone this way. It would be cool to know if folks around Pensacola are following the big club.
  23. ashbury
    Do we ever find out the magnitude of the cash considerations in a trade like this one with the Rangers? Probably it's not as high as $750K, but if it is, and thus matches up with the bonus pool space the Orioles sent, it would be an awesome instance of something resembling arbitrage, or at least the brokering of two transaction partners who don't line up well themselves.
  24. ashbury
    I would like to see whatever a more deliberate delivery would accomplish, then. Too many of his pitches go nowhere close to the catcher's mitt.
  25. ashbury
    You probably want to change "Granite is" to "Granite was." From the article: "It incorporates age, offensive performance, defensive performance, and other characteristics from the past two seasons." I am going to stick my neck out and guess that incorporating 2018 stats into this methodology has dropped Zack's projection a little.
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