ashbury

I took a look at what Wikipedia said in summarizing this work, but it omitted Jensen's position on Chief Wahoo.

Check back again next week and we'll give you the same answer. We strive for consistency.

OK, up to here. But that doesn't follow. Historically, you could construct exactly the same thread of logic to explain not taking action against dangerous performance drugs, against gambling on games, against free-agent collusion, against... anything that threatens the long-term health of the game. You could make similar arguments against starting to play night games or to breaking the color line. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is a rule of thumb, not some kind of absolute wisdom that trumps everything. Successful businesses constantly look for problems on the horizon and then take steps to combat them before they become a crisis. Arguments like your a,b,c do not hold water in and of themselves.

We'll get to it, sometime this week.

Moderator's note: on an explosive topic like this one, I feel as though the discussion has been gratifyingly constructive for the most part. But, as a reminder, please don't cross the line into insults, directed personally or to some unspecified group. I've had to clean up a few posts in this regard, and there will be no tolerance for further swipes at one another's character.

With regard to correlating two line graphs...

We may look back and decide May 2017 was the high-water mark for the Dems, which would mean peaking too soon. I'm downright pessimistic on their chances this November; likely lose seats in the Senate and do slightly more than tread water in the House.

I just requested it at my neighborhood library. Thanks for the tip.

That may be a weakness in how WAR is defined, and in particular how to use it for deciding to offer a contract, or to look back at a contract. When a player starts with a positive WAR, and then he successively declines in ability for whatever reason, his WAR becomes a smaller positive number, then eventually zero, then a small negative number - but when his ability declines even further than that, it stops being negative and goes back up to zero, because he's not given opportunities anymore. In theory, most players get replaced once they are below zero, if "above replacement" means anything. A guaranteed contract can put the player out there to rack up worse results than, say, Andrew Albers, for a little bit longer time. But I'm not sure that's how to do the accounting when looking at a high-end free agent's body of work - though I'm not sure how else to do it, either. The opportunity cost of anything close to a zero WAR is pretty important, but whether that zero comes from shoddy work or from lack of use at all probably makes a difference. I guess I'm thinking about Zito more than Darvish on this; Zito's disappointing time in SF looks even worse in WAR-total terms because his final season was on a team that wasn't going to contend even if he had been stellar, and they ran him out there despite him having nothing, since it didn't matter anymore. With a better roster, they might simply have sat him.

If the narrative were true that in 1915 the name Indians was intended to honor a guy from 1897, the logo whose roots reside in 1932 and which was adopted in 1947 would look something more like this: It doesn't, because it isn't.

Is the scale of the y-axis simply off by a factor of 10X for every data point in the graph, or is there something more serious wrong? I know that teams in 2017 didn't draw 25 million, on average.

That's because blogging doesn't compel me to not get to bed until midnight, but attending a major league ballgame pretty much does. On a "school night" that is kind of a big deal.

Said another way (than Thrylos's post, above), of the 13 hitters with at least 50 PA against lefties in 2017, Mauer ranked 5th on the team in OPS. Of all the aspects of the season to fix, this one ranks pretty low.

It is hard to overstate the constraint that the 25-man roster represents, when trying to contend as a top team. Much less of a limiting factor when you're just putzing around as a bottom-feeder.

I may have dropped some earlier hints I might be going, but the chances are down around zero at the moment.

The players don't have much say, but as a spectator the next time I tell someone "I'm going to the game, Gary Cederstrom's behind the plate tonight" will be my first.

That isn't the story. Those were two different franchises in two different leagues. The Spiders of the National League were disbanded, after some monkey business with the owner also owning the St Louis Browns, and toward the end (1899) the best Spiders players were transferred to the latter team. Those Browns later took the name Cardinals (and a different team later took the name Browns in the AL), so whatever thread of continuity probably resides in St Louis, but mainly the Spiders just got squished as a franchise. What became the Indians started in Grand Rapids MI and transferred to Cleveland in 1900, shortly before the American League took on its present name. With that quibble out of the way... Joe Posnanski gave a nice look back at the whole issue we're discussing. My takeaway is that the moniker Indians derives more from a marketing ploy in 1897 than from a genuine desire to honor a player forever and ever, and became adopted by the later team mainly as a default in lieu of some better idea in 1915.

Oh. I thought Hagar was a documentary.

Maybe we should offer him a minor-league deal with an invite to Spring Training. A lot of guys seem to be going for that.

I went back to change the wording to be less likely to be taken personally, but not in time to help, it turned out. Sorry.

He's still facing enough batters with unimpressive bats.

I don't wanna launch a lengthy digression, but the insertion of this old chestnut always gets me. Ticket prices are high because other fans are waving fistfuls of dollars to acquire tickets ahead of you. If teams dropped their prices, scalpers would swoop in and pocket the difference. Salaries are more of an effect, than a cause, of high ticket prices.

You raise several tangents and I'll only try to address the three I bolded. I don't think we really know what forecasting the teams use, except to speculate that the kinds of sabrmetric forecasts developed 20 years ago (back when baseball front offices were mostly pooh poohing the business school quants) probably were a starting point, but they've gone in different directions by now and have left the amateurs in the dust - the heavy hitters in the world of business analytics have gotten pretty good at teasing out patterns from so-called Big Data. Occasionally team personnel take part in things like the SABR Analytics Conference (there's one coming up in March, not too late to buy a plane ticket to Phoenix!) but I've never attended one and I don't know what they choose to say there but I bet it's not very much they consider a competitive advantage. Second, I doubt they use one of the WAR variants literally, even if WAR is conceived in the desired spirit of "value added to the team". For one thing, I'm sure we all agree, in deciding on a contract offer it always comes down ultimately to dollars and cents. A team's winning record contributes fuzzily to revenue in ways they surely can model, and individual players in turn contribute fuzzily to winning in ways the teams also model. But in addition, big-ticket players can contribute to revenue a little more directly, such as concessions sales (might Darvish bring in $1M in sales of jerseys shipped to Japan during several years for example?) or simply name-recognition putting fannies in the seats. Just being seen as "going for it" may be quantifiable for revenue as well - which I think several posters here are suggesting as a reason to pull the trigger on a big contract now. The idea of dollars divided by WAR is just a proxy for the real computations the teams make, and I don't think anyone was pretending otherwise. Third, I am guessing that the free agent logjam is indeed an outcome of an adjustment, but not quite straightforwardly. It may be that the forecasts several years ago were inaccurate, but the inaccuracy was apparently skewed toward the overly optimistic side, and not merely random with bad outcomes generally balanced by surprises on the good side. It looks like teams were paying more for wins, in practice, than they believed going in - if that's a circular argument, so be it, because I can't know what goes on inside GMs minds. OTOH, they were easily affording these dollars. Empirically they WERE paying recent free agents $10M per win, or thereabouts; their perhaps not believing it beforehand doesn't make it untrue. So they CAN pay that price per win, if they choose to, and it's a matter of sharpening up their forecasts (which, in the years that have followed, they probably have) to get more wins for their dollar. That in turn perhaps leads them to spread the money around a little more evenly, which in turn disappoints the top-end free agents who keep waiting for the "real" offers to finally start rolling in this off-season. There's a lot to think about, when trying to reverse-engineer what's going on in baseball's front offices.

You'll follow baseball only if balls and strikes are called via guesses by different people each game?

Easily offended, by the legitimately offensive? Sometimes a person has gotta take a stand, man.