1992casey

Russ, the directions for that simulator say, "For player stats, assume players play [150] games per season," with the 150 being adjustable. Do we have to do something to equalize playing time for the guys we put in our lineups, e.g. making sure that they all have an equal number of ABs? Or does the simulator do that for us? Also, what would be the benefit of changing 150 to something else?

How about moving the discussion of Counsell's defense to either the Betancourt thread or a thread of its own, depending on how you want to frame the discussion. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif

I'm going to close this topic and refer general Roenicke discussion to the new thread: Impressions of Roenicke so far

It sounds like RobDeer45 was hitting the link in the navigation bar and that CheezWizHed was using the link in the right sidebar. The link in the navigation bar was updated to reflect our move from ezBoard to Yuku. The one in the sidebar was missed, but it used to work because Yuku was redirecting old ezBoard links to Yuku. They stopped doing that several months ago. Maybe Brian can fix that link.

KCBrewerfan34, the limitations of defensive stats are discussed earlier in this topic. One huge problem is the lack of objectivity in the raw data. You need a large sample to hopefully "equalize" the errors that occur in the data collection process. Typically, we're told that we need three seasons of data for defensive stats to show a dependable result. That means that even if you're working with one year, you need to give the number a fair amount of breathing room and tie it to a larger sample. When you're talking only 51 games, you have a scattered hodgepodge of numbers that could fall anywhere within the excellent to awful spectrum.

By the way, you made your point about the recent lineup cards. The "reasonable" lineups seem to be purely accidental. I'll revise my statement so it says simply, "My main complaint about RRR is that he doesn't seem to grasp the value of offense and defense."

DPR? http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif

I'd make a smartass comment about the cat, but I don't know whether to suggest that the cat should be euthanized for getting near the TV or rewarded for making it turn on again.

He sticks to many of the old baseball ways of doing things that I despise...bunting in the first inning, having a set 8th inning guy instead of maximizing the leverage situation to bring in a reliever and the love for gritty veterans who are way past their expiration date (see Kotsay, Mark). A set 8th inning guy is relatively new. It's an area where I think baseball strategy has changed for the worse (like the one-inning "closer"). However, when something is done by every manager in baseball, I can't fault one manager for being part of the crowd. The best you can hope for is that he flexes a bit. My main complaint about RRR is that he doesn't seem to grasp the value of offense and defense. However, as noted above, more recent linuep cards seem to be more reasonable. Recent comments about Hart concern me, though. Except for Loe, he's been cognizant of pitch counts and innings pitched. Given his lineups, if he weren't paying attention to pitch counts, we'd have another Dusty Baker on our hands. I'd single him out about reliance on small samples, but that appears to affect most managers. Yost and Macha certainly had issues in that area.

That's an interesting lineup. It appears that this gizmo is placing a lot of weight on the value of the leadoff hitter, which is likely why Braun and Fielder are #1 and #2. I'm kind of surprised to see the player who's probably the team's fourth best hitter put at cleanup. I'm not so surprised to see Lucroy at #3; my guess is that the optimizer is assuming he's the team's fifth best hitter. If I were to make one change in this lineup, it'd be to flip Hart and Weeks. That would put Rickie's OBP advantage in the cleanup spot.

I would think that there'd be no rule preventing Boggs from telling the Brewers that he'd accept the assignment if they give him more money.

Auto-completes and auto-corrects are fun. I don't mind that text message interfaces help to save me some typing, but I hate auto-correct on computers.

One reason IE is attacked so much is that it's such an easy target. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif There's a separation between other browsers and Windows that IE doesn't have. I guess IE 9's security is improved, though. I thought every browser had a spell checker, but it appears that IE is the only one that doesn't. Even IE 9 doesn't have one. Before that, Opera for Windows was the only other straggler; it added a spell checker last year. Opera for Mac has had spell checking capabilities for years as it took advantage of the spell checker built into the Mac operating system. While IE 9 has started to catch up, other browsers support much more modern code. That makes for a better user experience. Here on the Yuku board, you'll see alternating white and gray colors throughout our skin. White is supposed to be first, then gray. A Yuku bug flip-flops those colors for many members. We're able to fix that in modern browsers, but we can't fix it in any IEs other than version 9. IE 6, 7, & 8 get less effective fallback code. A subtle nicety on our board that IE users don't see are the cool text shadows that pretendastronaut has included in the headings in the in-game threads. Microsoft appears to be getting the message, but IE still lags behind Firefox, Safari/Chrome, and Opera. On some sites, the difference in user experience goes well beyond getting alternating colors right and being able to offer cool text shadows. Thankfully, IE 9 loses many of the bugs that caused older IEs to render pages just plain wrong.

I forgot to check this earlier, but I see that your domain redirect is working. http://WIradioforum.com/

This looks easy enough: How to Edit Firefox’s Dictionary & Remove Misspelled Words The instructions for removing words look like they're for Windows Vista/7, but they're easily adaptable to other operating systems. The bottom line is that if you want to remove a word from your personal dictionary, you'd use a text editor [e.g. Notepad (Windows), TextEdit (Mac)] to open .persdict.dat, which is inside your Firefox profile. Remove the misspelled word and save. It'd be even easier if a way to edit the file was built into Firefox's interface.

You can always add words to your spellchecker. My only fear is adding something by mistake and not knowing how to remove it. Although, now that I think of it, my Firefox profile is backed up every hour along with the rest of my system. If I make an error, I can simply revert to an earlier copy.

Is the spell checker built into your web browser an option? I don't think I've ever used Yuku's spell checker except to take a peek at it once. I use the built-in spell checker in Firefox, which is basically fine except that it took a bit of a dive back when version 3.0 was released.

This has nothing to do with being a WBA fan. Numerous studies have shown that when everything is totaled, the difference between strikeouts and other outs amounts to very little, so little that a cumulative stat doesn't need to consider it. In specific game situations, the difference between strikeouts and other outs varies. In some cases, a K is more harmful than a contact out; in other cases, the contact out is more harmful than the K; and yet in other cases, the harm done by each type of out is the same. If a manager is looking at whom to pinch hit and the prospect of a strikeout matters, he'd choose accordingly. This may be the case when a team is playing for one run late in the game. Most of the situations that end up being called "productive outs" aren't productive at all. ESPN offered a productive out stat a few years ago. They pulled it back when it was discovered that the teams who led in so-called "productive outs" scored the fewest runs and lost the most games. Out of the 24 base-out states1, I believe two of them actually leave the team better off when a runner is advanced on an out. A couple of others are more or less neutral. The rest leave the team less likely to score than before the "productive out" occurred. In short, the negative effect of the out significantly outweighs the positive effect of advancing the baserunner. ------------------------------------ 1. Examples of base-out states would be no runners on base, nobody out; runner on first, one out; runners on first and second, two out; etc.

Why would a team need to move from the NL Central to the NL West? If the Astros would move to the AL West, you then have 5 teams in the NL Central and already have 5 teams in the NL West. Slap me up. I don't know how I missed that. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif The only issue would be getting the Astros to agree to the move.

Besides the fact that the Astros would have to be on board with this, you'd have to get a team from the National League Central to agree to move to the NL West. As far as a CBA goes, I'd like to see: Increased sharing of local TV revenues, preferably equal sharing.Revised compensation to teams who lose players to free agency. As an example, when the Brewers lost Sabathia, they should have been able to receive the second available pick rather than being bumped down to receiving a second round pick.

Fwiw, he shared POTW with Arizona's Daniel Hudson Ideally, that should have been mentioned in the lead. Here's a link: Pair of hurlers share NL weekly award

That said, this could probably be merged into the Yuni thread? I think that the unusual nature of communicating this desire to return is the topic at hand. Invader3K, do you know of anything that might be going on besides the tweet?

OBP has never been a good stat for measuring total offensive value. It's missing extra bases, which make a major contribution. Similarly, SLG wouldn't be a good stat for measuring total offensive value because it fails to account for walks, which also make a significant contribution. Some stats are less significant. For instance, if a "total offensive value" stat skipped over strikeouts vs. other outs, we wouldn't be missing much.

My problem with some stat-based beliefs is the portrayal of them as fact by many. There are times that the statheads are a bit careless and portray statistical findings as facts. Other times, the gurus word things quite carefully and the reader mistakenly infers they're portraying the findings as fact. The reality is that stats don't really prove or disprove anything. They demonstrate, don't demonstrate, support, strongly support, don't support, correlate, correlate strongly, don't correlate, show significance, don't show significance, etc. If you played the same exact lineup for 120 games and magically started the season over and played them again for 120 games you would get significantly different stats each time. I remember Russ running a simulation that covered 10,000 games. He qualified his findings by saying that 1,000,000 games would have been better and that the reason for sticking to 10,000 was to save time. As far as lineups go, the way I understand it is that there isn't going to be a lot of difference between reasonably constructed lineups. Flip-flopping Braun and Fielder isn't going to mean much, for instance. A full season with poor hitter at the top of the order rather than the bottom could mean a couple of wins. A lineup with players in ascending order of OPS vs. a fully optimized lineup could mean a difference of several wins.

A little more on Firefox channels… As was mentioned earlier in this topic, Firefox has adopted a fast release cycle, with new versions of the browser being released every six weeks. Firefox 5 is scheduled to be released on June 21. Firefox 6 is scheduled for release in August. Firefox channels refer to different stages of the development cycle. You can choose the channel which suits you best. The four channels: Nightly: The first place changes are tried out; expect bugs; updates released every day; no quality assurance testing; currently Firefox 6; should change to Firefox 7 in a few days; named "Nightly" rather than "Firefox" and has a special icon. It's very possible that a nightly version could be a total dud and whack out your Firefox profile. Aurora: Cutting edge; could have bugs, updates released every day, cursory quality assurance testing; currently Firefox 5; should change to Firefox 6 in a few days; named "Aurora" rather than "Firefox" and has a special icon. It's not likely that an Aurora version will be a total dud, but it's possible that noticeable problems could arise. Beta: New features are available before official release, more stable than Aurora; updates released every week, good quality assurance testing; currently Firefox 5; should change to Firefox 6 soon after the release of Firefox 5; named "Firefox" and has the traditional icon.Release: Stable; excellent quality assurance testing; updates every six weeks. Firefox 5 will be released on June 21; Firefox 6 will be released in August.Emergency updates will be released as needed and will be applied simultaneously to all channels. The channel switcher is currently available in the Aurora and Beta versions of Firefox. It allows you to switch between the Aurora, Beta, and Release versions. I'm sure that Nightly is left out of the switcher because it's too fragile to be offered so conveniently. Note that when you change channels, you do a full download of the version you're switching to. That threw me the first time I tried it. The channel switch will take effect after a restart. I assume that the channel switcher will be available in the Firefox 5 release. In the meantime, if you want to try Aurora or Beta, they can be downloaded from the Firefox Channels page.