Brawndo the Thirst Mutilat

Like fun it was, or I don't have the foggiest clue what a strawman argument is. Your point, if I'm not mistaken, was that one particular player, out of the hundreds of players in MLB, has had wildly fluctuating UZRs from one year to the next. All I did was point out that if that is your standard for the validity of a metric, you'd better throw batting average out the window right quick. Anyway, I'm done trying to defend Fangraphs' WAR or UZR on this site. For half a decade, it's been somewhat of a tragedy that cutting edge valuation measurements weren't freely available on the net. Dave Cameron & co. have done a wonderful thing by making the best of them freely available, and by making their derivation more transparent and peer reviewable than BP or anybody else ever dreamed of doing, and yet citing these numbers still illicits heaps of indignation and scorn even on a site with as relatively intelligent a level of discourse as this one. If you want to talk about a strawman argument, howsabout the idea that anybody stated that WAR was the "end all be all" of anything? I don't think anybody other than its detractors described it in any such fashion anywhere in this thread.

I guess I needed to make the point of my post much more obvious. What I'm trying to say is that volatility is not, in and of itself, a reason to dismiss a statistic as though it isn't measuring anything. Once you account for the fact that in a given season, a position player gets countless more ABs than he gets non-routine fielding opps (the kind that differentiate between good and bad fielders), you see that batting average is at least as volatile as UZR, but you don't hear anybody arguing it's a useless stat as a consequence of that volatility.

If you account the discrepancy in the number of opportunities, this reasoning would also forbid you from ever looking at batting average.

Per McCalvy: Tidbits The Brewers do not intend to recall shortstop J.J. Hardy from Triple-A Nashville before Sept. 1, and as a result, Hardy will not have the Major League service time he needs to qualify for free agency following next season. Instead, he'll have an extra arbitration year before reaching the open market in the winter of 2011.

Kazmir cleared waivers. Anybody could've traded for him.

Just don't see how Bradley and Vick are even remotely analogous. Check the "controversies" section at the bottom of his wikipedia page. There's the thing with the umpire when he was with San Diego (which led to MLB disciplinary action against the umpire) and an attempted confrontation with a Kansas City TV announcer. My reaction was "That's it? What fiendishly heinous and vile acts am I missing that make this guy the devil?" Nothing he's said this year about Cub fans in the bleachers or the Chicago sports media struck me as out of line, at least in the sense that it seems plausible enough that all of it is true. He might be professionally unwise for saying it, but I doubt he's making any of that stuff up. He's got a temper and a chip on his shoulder. So does Prince. Only differences between the two of them are that Bradley makes the media aware of his disdain for them (to his credit, I have no idea how Prince feels about the media) and the chip on Bradley's shoulder is large enough that it might actually qualify as a full-blown persecution complex. If I'm honest, the former difference just makes me a Bradley fan, the latter just makes him a sorta interesting and sad character study. Besides, I think I'm willing to live with the aforementioned quirks for a guy who has a RoS ZiPS projected line of .276 / .394 / .471 and defense at least in the neighborhood of average in RF.

Juan Cruz wound up having to settle for $3 mil per year for 2 years...from the Royals. There may have been others as well. I don't think this year's free agent class is going to be nearly as confident that the free market will treat them more kindly than arbitration would, though, so I agree with you that it would be very unfortunate if Lopez sneaks in as a type A, for both the Brewers and for Lopez. It's pretty sad that the system is sufficiently broken to give Lopez an incentive to hit like crap the rest of the year so that he doesn't become unsignable.

Linear weights values have been derived a number of different ways. You can read about them here. The values I used came from Palmer, the inventor of the concept, and I believe he was using what is described in that link as the "empirical approach". Basically, this method involves calculating the average change in run expectancy that results from every play over the course of, say, an entire season of data. As to whether the coefficients I used undervalue successful steals and unduly punish CS, most versions you see lately are even more unkind. Check out the "run SB" and "run CS" columns in this table. Those are the run values that serve as the basis for all of the advanced offensive stats at fangraphs (they are the "w" in wRC, wRAA, and wOBA). In recent seasons, it looks like I should have used something more like .20 and -.43 for SB and CS, and .30 for the difference between a single and a double. That gives a net value of 4.1 runs for Escobar's SB/CS vs. 9.6 runs for 32 extra doubles. The ratio is about the same, though the run values are lower across the board. For individual players, linear weights are generally considered to be the gold standard of run estimation in the analytical community.

Between Melvin playing dumb at the press conference and Ash saying this today, I think it's fairly clear that they are at least kicking around the idea of delaying Hardy's FA. They have a few weeks to decide. He could help them out by getting injured or by continuing to fail to hit worth a windy spit in AAA. Also, Dave Cameron at fangraphs has a post about this situation. He basically calls shenanigans, and is not pleased.

This is quite simply not how it works, at least if your intent is to preserve any modicum of the sorta-useful-in-a-back-of-the-envelope-kinda-way utility of OPS as a run estimator. Those stolen bases aren't like turning singles into doubles, which is what you are doing here. They only advance Escobar an extra base, whereas turning a single into a double advances Escobar and all other baserunners at least one extra base. Using linear weights values, Escobar's 42 SB have been worth 42 x .22 = 9.24 extra runs. His CS have cost 10 x .38 = 3.8 runs. Net gain from attempted steals is 5.44 runs. If you turned 32 singles into doubles (which is what your OPS calculation is doing), that would be worth the .38 x 32 = 12.16 runs. That's more than twice as many extra runs.

Melvin just claimed in his press conference that he doesn't know the answer to this question. He said "Gord might know, but I don't." That has to be a lie, right? It took us stupid fans less than a couple hours to figure out that this might be a possible consequence of, or even the primary motivation behind, this move.

Why would anyone bother? ERA+ is already ballpark adjusted, so I don't really get what you're driving at here. Granted, he's managed to post solid ERAs the bulk of his career, and the last few years as well, but always as a consequence of a fair amount of BABIP luck or LOB% luck. Maybe I'm being SABR dogmatic here, but w/o decent K/9 or BB/9 rates, count me as a sceptic on the question of whether Weathers is still a decent pitcher.

It's his version of a curveball. Here's an interview where he talks about his pitches, as well as his awareness that scouts, GMs, etc. have a hard time taking him seriously.

Some pitching statistics actually do stabilize over very small samples. Swindle faced enough batters in AA and AAA last year for his strikeout rate (which was well over 10 per 9 IP and translated into an MLE just north of 9 K/9) to be considered reliable. His GB/FB distribution should also have been considered reliable based on last year's numbers, though there isn't anything unusually good or bad about it. Add in this year's Nashville line and you've almost got enough TBF to say his walk rate is reliable. That has also been excellent in the high minors, translating to an MLE of 2.34 BB/9. It's basically impossible to be a below average RP striking out that many and walking that few. Swindle was released because of a .455 BABIP and a 39.1% strand rate in the majors. It is also basically impossible to have worse luck than that in these, the most luck-driven of all pitching statistics. The same thing could have just as easily happened to Stetter or DiFelice (in fact, it almost did happen to DiFelice) in their first few big league IP and we would never have seen those guys again either, unless some other smarter team decided to give them a shot, all because of unquestioning worship at the unholy altar of the radar gun. Tampa is as smart an organization as there is in MLB at the moment, and it's likely that they'll wind up with him in their system as bullpen depth, and off the 40 man and out of the way. Good for them. I really hope he gets another shot to pitch in the big leagues someday.

Dave Cameron over at fangraphs weighs in with his take on the Weathers trade. I am inclined to agree with his conclusion: "The Reds were right to get rid of Weathers - he's old, not good, and makes more money than he should." The PTBNL probably isn't anybody of consequence, and I still don't like this deal. If the PTBNL is actually someone vaguely resembling a prospect, I loathe this deal.