thebruce44

Here is more info on the best buy sale from Slickdeals.net: http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?t=1618017 Borderlands is noteworthy as it has something like over 1000 wepons if I am not mistaken. Take a look at some reviews and pictures before you buy it though as it may not be what you are suspecting graphically. I think it looks fantastic though. With the Best Buy sale, I will probably be getting Borderlands, FIFA 10, and something else.

Twobrewers isn't the first poster who's brought this up and I'm curious, has there been any good information in print either way about insurance on contracts? I can remember this coming up quite a bit throughout Sheets vestibular neuritis season. I thought Doug said they take out insurance on all players, but that they were unable to collect on Sheeter because he had pitched a certain number of games. I think a player has to basically miss a whole season. I wonder if they collected on Yo or not. That all being said, thats just from my memory so don't hold me to it. If you are looking for more information, I would look in the JS for articles around that time though.

A quick search and I couldn't find the old thread so I thought I would start a new one. The Flaming Lips new album, Embryonic, is taking me some time to get into. I am not very familiar with their older work, but love the last 3 albums. The new cd is not nearly as poppy as the last three, but is still very good. I think it will grow on me over time, but right now some of the tracks are tough listens. Wolfmother's new cd, Cosmic Egg is at the other end of the spectrum for me. Instantly accessible and just really frikin' good. I expected no less, but was still a little nervous since its basically an entirely new band. I would recommend both, but where Embryonic might not be for everyone, Cosmic Egg certainly is.

So, Kyles / Peterson will be responsible for teaching our pitchers proper mechanics. I am expecting a nice hitch from our entire starting 5 this year.

If one of my buddies hooked up with that girl, I would rip on him pretty good. Therefor I will rip on Steve Phillips and I am behind any news publication that helps me in that quest.

Every player playing SS for the Brewers will get similar positioning from the coaching staff. Why would it somehow help Hardy but not Escobar? Hardy plays deeper than Escobar though, no? They look at the same spray charts for players, but beyond that, their positioning is dependent on their lateral range and arm strength.

There is no way I would trade Braun for Greinke. Greinke is the only type of pitcher I would be willing to trade Gamel for. Greinke WAR 2009: 9.4 Braun WAR 2009: 4.7 Gamel WAR 2009: 0.5 Obviously a lot more to it than that, but I think its fairly clear which player is the most valuable of those three at this point. 9.4 WAR from a pitcher is just stupid good.

Looking at his contract, I think the original offer(Parra, Gamel, Solome, Hardy) looks like a sort of a low offer for 3 years of Greinke. Take out "sort of" and replace it with "ridiculously" and I agree.

That's a lot to give up for one guy and a few minor leaguers, depending on who they are. Is there anyone more valuable than Greinke and that contract right now? Maybe Longoria and a few others, but I would think he is in the top 5 for cost/production for the next 3 years.

JJ, while slower, has good instincts and anticipation that give him range to make up for his lack of foot speed. I always thought his arm allows him to play deeper than most SS, which makes up for his lack of range. Also, JJ actually has a lot of foot speed (I think he was just behind Hart and Weeks when they did the 60 yard dash a couple of years ago). I am not sure why he is considered to have poor range. Maybe its a lack of "first step" speed?

It is impossible to compare the two using ZR at this point. Agreed. Off the top of my head, I believe you need something like 3 years worth of data to actually conclude anything. You could possibly say Hardy is a top defensive SS based purely on ZR though (even though I think that is still incorrect). To say he is one of the best defensive SS overall though as Logan did is certainly a matter of opinion in my mind, regardless of what ZR tells us. With the amount of defensive positioning the Brewers do, I would never want to base my opinion on that. I would factor it in, as I did when I said I think Hardy is around 10. Being conservative, I still say Escobar will be around there next year, but in the back of my mind I expect him to be top 5 very quickly.

How is measuring outs within a zone subjective? He converts balls into outs at a rate higher than most SS. It isn't my opinion. It is measured. I never said calculating Zone Rating is subjective. I said defense is subjective, as in the way players would be ranked by various people. To say "Hardy is one of the best defensive SS in all of baseball" is your opinion. If you meant to say, "according to zone rating, JJ is one of the best defensive SS in all of baseball" that is a different discussion, but you didn't indicate that at all in your post.

Hardy is one of the best defensive SS in all of baseball. Escobar right now is probably about average with the talent to be as good as JJ in the future. He isn't as good defensively as JJ yet and probably will not be in 2010. Defense is pretty subjective to me since I don't trust many of the metrics. That is your opinion and it is fine, but I don't agree with it necessarily. I would say JJ is an above average defender, probably around 9 or 10. I think over a full year Escobar will also be above average, probably right around 10, but with a very good chance to eventually move up to top 5.

You sound like you're ready to go and stare at a wall of all of them for like 20 minutes and see what looks the best to you. I don't know if I would recomend this since the settings in showrooms are so jacked up you can't really tell anything about picture quality. I would look at reviews and in AVS forums. A good recomendation like the one laserbomb just gave is worth a lot more than the picture quality in a showroom in my opinion.

Its not necessarily a case of trading him while his value is down, but I think Salome's value will be much higher after next year. If someone really wants him and the offer is right, add him to a trade. If not though, I don't see the harm of keeping him another year at least and seeing where he is at.

Hernandez was never interviewed apparently. TH said his source was incorrect. Good news there! http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/sports/64213247.html

Plasma technology has come a long way to the point that burn in and power usage problems are practically gone. The bad news is, it appears they are being phased out due to this negative perception and the rise in LCD popularity. The good news it that prices are ridiculously low because of this. I will be picking a 50"+ one up before xmas solely for this reason.

anyone has suggestions for where I could find rock songs sans vocals, please let me know. Alman bros? For me, the highlight of the season was McGehee hitting that GS after the drop and his reaction in the dugout. I get chills thinking about how fired up he was. It is just great to see that kind of emotion.

Well I have heard enough convincing. I hope we get him if for nothing else than I want to see the entire organization on the same page for once in a progressive fashion towards pitching.

I thought the reason Verlander has always faded is because Leland abuses his pitchers so much. Verlander seems to always be at the top of the list in pitcher abuse points and Edwin Jackson was up there for most of this season too.

Logan, Can you fix that link? It isn't working for me and I am very interested in that article.

Thanks for the praise on the thread title. I know I could go for a little Edwin Starr right now. I don't pretend to know what Dave Cameron is talking about all the time, but if you follow the link there is a lot of good discussion going on in the comments on the blog post. I would start there. Basically, it sounds as though any metric that produces a correlation around .8 is pretty good. I think the reason it is not more accurate is that it doesn't take situational hitting and other aspects into account. Really I should stop talking here and wait for someone with more knowledge to chime in. The one thing I do really like WAR for is to compare players. For example, a Prince trade doesn't seem so bad on the offense if you think he will produce around 5 WAR next year and a stopgap 1b of 4 WAR can be signed to a short contract. Then if you can bring back 3 or 4 WAR through pitching it becomes a now brainer. I am just throwing these numbers out there as an example, but I hope it makes some sense.

I have seen a lot of people question some of the more advanced metrics on here, so I thought this was an interesting blog post on Fangraphs. Basically, Dave Cameron admits that WAR has its short comings (base running and catcher defense) but shows that it does a very good job of predicting wins and losses. It is not perfect by any means, but is probably the best metric we have right now to accurately predict how a trade or free agent addition will help or hurt the team this offseason. (Mods, please feel free to move this to the statistical analysis forum if need be but I thought it might pertain to some off season discussions such as Hoffman's signing or any Prince trade). WAR: It Works by Dave Cameron - October 7, 2009 We use Wins Above Replacement around here a lot, as one of the focuses of the site is to accurately quantify the value each player produces, and WAR is the best tool we have to do that. However, it faces a decent amount of skepticism from people who don't trust various components for a variety of reasons - they don't like the numbers that UZR spits out for defense, they don't believe in replacement level, or they believe that pitchers do have control over their BABIP rates. So, the question is, does WAR work? If it's designed well, there should be a pretty strong correlation between a team's total WAR and their actual record. Fans of WAR rejoice - there is. For 2009, the correlation between a team's projected record based on their WAR total and their actual record was .83. This is a robust number, especially considering that WAR is almost completely context independent and currently includes some notable omissions - base running (besides SB/CS, which are included in wOBA) and catcher defense are both ignored in the calculations. We also don't have an adjustment for differences in leagues, so we're not accounting for the fact that the AL is better than the NL. Despite these imperfections, WAR still performs extremely well. One standard deviation of the difference between WAR and actual record is 6.4 wins, and every single team is within two standard deviations. Only four teams were more than 10 wins away from their projected total by WAR, with Tampa Bay ending up the furthest away from our expectation (96.6 projected wins, 84 actual wins), and 18 of the 30 teams were within six wins of their projected WAR total. For comparison, the correlation between pythagorean expected record and actual record is .91, and pythag includes some aspects of context (performance with men on base, for instance) that impact runs scored and allowed, so we would expect it to predict actual record somewhat better than a context independent metric like WAR. The fact that WAR is even close to somewhat-context-included pythag is impressive in its own right. WAR isn't perfect. But given the known limitations and the variations in how contextual situations impact final record, it does an awfully impressive job of projecting wins and losses.

Forbes will have the figures for us in a few months, and it will show the Brewers as 1 of the most profitable teams in baseball yet again. Last year was the only year since Attanosio bought the team that they only were minorly profitable. I believe those figures from Forbs don't take debt payment into account. Doesn't the team still have considerable debt from Wendy? If that is the case, I suspect Mark has used the "profit" to pay down that debt.

Louis, how did you calculate his OPS-A for that time frame. I am looking at baseball reference and seeing that it was .723 against (Apr 7-Jun23) but admitedly could be making a mistake with the site. Either way, I don't put a lot of stock in 40 IP that he was decent for when he has been pretty bad the rest of his career. I mean, you can find 40 innings where Soup pitched well in the last two years...that doesn't make him a good pitcher. Also, I think what really doomed our staff this year (besides the obvious injuries) was inefficient pitching. Seth was exhibit A in this regard. In that time frame that he was "having success" he was still putting way too many men on base even if it was just singles or walks. As you can probably tell from my post, I don't want to see him back next year and am not too sympathetic to his tweets.