Brawndo the Thirst Mutilat

C'mon, you know that gritty battler catcher game-calling pitch-blocking instincts can't be trained. They're either sewn into your genetic code or they aren't. The Branyan / Hart clone will bein RF, having been moved there after an embarrassing one season trial as the regular at 3B. Its offense will suffer (rather coincidentally), but Schroeder will spend the whole season telling us how much of the clone's focus has been on learning a new defensive position.

Are we satirizing the satire now? I'll go with a two-headed accelerated-growth test-tube clone built from DNA taken from Bill Schroeder and Ned Yost, both of whom will still be in their current positions, much to my chagrin. The clone, however, will be a thing to behold on a baseball field.

Long term deals ensure financial stability. If you go year to year, you take the risk of a career ending injuries. Absolutely - why does this matter in Hart's case but not in Fielder's? Especially given that we have reason to believe that Fielder may actually have some present day financial worries? (I'm assuming you think Hart will be extended and Fielder will not here, if you don't, disregard.)

Big ditto on that interpretation from these quarters. A much-needed poke in the eye, at that. For everyone that is so sure he'll sign an extension, why do you think that? Is it just because Boras isn't his agent? I doubt very much that the Brewers will be able to extend Corey Hart and buy out any FA years. They waited too long. He knows he'll get a big fat pay raise this offseason no matter what, and the arbitration system will be very friendly to him, as he is a high AVG, high counting stats kind of player. Why wouldn't he just go year to year and then go for a big payday as a free agent? Moreover, if he does do that, or if he states he intends to, why do Brewer fans insist on regarding that decision as a personal slap in the face? Why should it make you any less able to enjoy watching him play baseball at a high level? Prince and Corey are equally goners in 3 1/2 years, in my view, until an extension is actually signed. Everything that has a beginning has an ending. Everything that is born one day will die. We've got quite a nice opportunity to make the playoffs a few times and possibly win a championship if we get a little lucky. Why not just try to enjoy that?

Amen, TLB. I'm sick to my nipples of the treatment Fielder gets on this board, i.e. the notion that he is a fat, fat-headed, fattypants unclutch malcontent who has already seen his best days and should be traded now, while he still has some value, before the rest of MLB catches on to how useless he is at everything.

Yeah, and what's up with the lack of steals? He was supposed to be a 30/30 guy, and while the power is pretty much there, he's only on pace for like 20 steals. Personally, I can't help but notice how much fatter he looks this year.

Bucky...you opened fire. I realize there's some lingering discontent about stuff that has gone down in other threads, but I'd appreciate it if in the future you avoid making my posts your vehicle for dredging up any hostility you have toward FTJ, particularly when you have to take several shots at me in order to do so. Beyond that, I'm just going to let sleeping dogs lie here. You can have the last say. I'm done, and I hope never to have to talk about what is and isn't a straw-man argument on this board again.

Hey FTJ -- can I get an acknowledgment of "straw-man" arguments and absolutism with this one? How 'bout at least some recognition of a flat out bias against Yost? As many times as FTJ has provided a link to a definition, it is quite evident you still do not have any idea what a straw-man argument is. I am not exaggerating anybody's position here. Several posters opined that DiFelice is terrible against lefties in this thread. I took issue with that position in an earlier post. Here, Yost specifically says that DiFelice "needs to work on" his ability to get lefties out. Again, that's the position I'm taking issue with. Now, I go beyond the specific statement to guess at the method of performance analysis being used to arrive at that conclusion. Again, not a straw-man argument, because I am not changing anyone's position in order to disagree with the dumber position I made up. The guessing I'm doing here about what Yost is thinking, about why he would say that, isn't a straw-man either, because it is overt. I didn't say "Yost says that 19 crappy PA against righties is enough to assume DiFelice can't get them out." I showed what Yost said directly, and made some educated guesses about why he would say that based on the kinds of statistical evidence I've seen him use in the past. Again, all of this was overt in my post, so there is no straw-man to be found here. As far as absolutism, I'm not sure what you mean. If insisting on understanding when statistics are meaningful and when they aren't is absolutism, then guilty as charged, I guess. Anti-Yost bias? Maybe it's true that I have one, but that doesn't necessarily undermine the logical validity or accuracy of my argument. In fact, by charging me with "bias", you are committing another fallacy, an ad hominim attack on me as a poster rather than against the substance of my post. What Ned has to say on the subject is immaterial. If you want to look for relevant quotes, find out what Doug said. I never said that Yost made the decision to demote DiFelice, nor do I believe that he did. Yet here, you argue against that claim as though I had made it. What is called again when someone does that, sir? I'll grant you this, and only this: maybe this thread wasn't the most appropriate place to get in a jab at Yost. But that line of discussion arose because, as I said earlier, the ubiquitous "DiFelice can't get lefties out" meme reared it's ugly head, and my desire to refute that position is totally appropriate in this thread. It so happened that Yost took that exact position, so I didn't feel like it was that much of a stretch to comment on Yost's thinking, given that issue was already being discussed here. I'm not going to start a "DiFelice probably doesn't actually suck against lefties, and Ned Yost is a dipwad for thinking he does" thread. The post that you took issue with was my way of saying "See everybody, Yost made the same mistake many here did as a consequence of a poor understanding of the vagaries of statistical variance, and he's in charge of stuff like deciding when to pinch hit for a batter, or pull a pitcher because of a platoon advantage for a major league team!!!"

Sorry to make consecutive posts, but I just noticed this comment from Yost on DiFelice in the mlb.com article on Gagne's activation: "He needs to continue to work on his ability to get left-handers out," Yost said. This means one of two things: 1) The Brewers have access to more information than we do on the net, including minor league split info from previous seasons, and this data reveals that a too-high platoon differential really is a problem for DiFelice. Ned Yost has looked at this data, or has consulted with someone statistically savvy that has in his stead. - OR - 2) Like every other time Yost has quoted statistics on anything in his entire career, he's just looking at this year's MLB stats for his splits, and making the exact same mistake everybody in this thread made when they assumed that weirdly bad results in 19 PA tell you anything about anything. There is probably someone in the organization that knows better, but that person either lacks the influence or access to dissuade Yost from drawing foolish conclusions like this one, and making on-field decisions on the basis of such thinking. Gee, I wonder which it is?

No doubt, that is flukish. So is the .429 BABIP against RH hitters in AAA. As extreme a reverse platoon differential as he was sporting in Nashville, it shouldn't be surprising to find that weird BABIP luck is a major factor. But I wasn't trying to argue that DiFelice is actually better against lefties, only that there's no reason to think that his even more extreme major league platoon splits (in an even smaller too-small sample) are indicative of anything. So let's apply the same analysis there -- A .208 BABIP against RH hitters in MLB is flukish. A .364 BABIP against LH hitters is flukish too. Giving up 4 homers on something like a dozen fly balls hit by lefties (guessing here, it's not more than 19, which is how many ABs lefties have had against him) might be the most flukish thing of all.

Past experience suggests that there is likely nothing I can do to stop the runaway freight train that is the "DiFelice can't get out lefties" meme, but for what it's worth, here (again) are his splits from Nashville this season: vs. LH: 170 / 188 / 404, k/9 = 12.08 vs. RH: 308 / 300 / 436, k/9 = 9.90 That sample is only a little bit larger than the major league sample, but it certainly seems to suggest that DiFelice's lack of success against lefties in the majors so far is probably a fluke. I don't know of anywhere you can get splits from previous seasons of minor league data, so I think the best we can do is look at the drastic difference between his major league splits and minor league splits and assume that he probably has a normal platoon differential, like just about every RHP does. The only consistent thing between the major and minor league split data is that he has only given up homers against lefties this season, so it might be fair to assume that he's more homer-prone against lefties than righties. But lefties aren't hitting .429 and OPSing 1.474 off of DiFelice in the majors because "he can't get lefties out." He couldn't have been so effective as a starting pitcher in AAA the last year plus with such a glaring weakness. Nor is he as invincible against righties as his major league splits suggest. It's just dumb luck.

I also live in Madison, also have DirecTV, and I do not pay for Extra Innings. I've gotten both games in HD this weekend, on the same channel they've always been on. You may want to give them a call and complain.

Is that true? I thought that a team couldn't make a player stay on the DL if they felt healthy. And if Gagne isn't on the DL, they can't keep him in AAA. I'm dumb -- you're right (mostly). Both ESPN and the transactions FAQ here agree that rehab stints in the minors can last a maximum of 30 days (20 if you're not a pitcher). So it was certainly dumb of me to suggest "letting him rot down there all season". Of course, Gagne's rehab stint lasted 3 days (unless the clock was already running before his first AAA appearance). By my count, that leaves 27 more days they could have let him rot down there if he continued to stink. And really, if he hasn't gotten it together by the end of that month, why not just release him at that point? (Aside -- I'm not anywhere near as objective on Gagne as I usually am. I don't guess that I really even feel like trying to be. I hate him. I always have.)

The broadcast team said that Gagne will be activated tomorrow. Unlike when Riske returned, they refrained from speculation about who will be sent down (Melvin burned them last time by DFAing Tavarez after they'd run a brief segment on the pre-game show stating that DiFelice would be sent down and "Boy, isn't it a feel-good story Mark DiFelice got to have a cup of coffee in the bigs?"). I think Gagne's activation is a shame. I can't think of anyone one in the pen I would prefer Gagne to. Maybe Mota? There's no reason they shouldn't have simply let him rot in AAA until he proved he could at least get AAA hitters out, even if that meant he stayed down there the rest of the season.

Speaking only for myself here, I never stopped not liking him.

For a batter, it's more a sign of how lucky or unlucky he's been, since 'hittin' them where they ain't' can only be controlled so much. .300 is regarded as being the approximated median. It's important to check out players' BABIP over their careers, though -- some guys do tend to keep it higher than others. Luck is a decent-sized chunk of a hitter's BABIP, but it is important to remember that a hitter has a great deal more control over his BABIP than a pitcher has on his BABIP allowed. That's because the ability to hit line drives consistently is a fairly stable skill, and over 70% of line drives drop in somewhere for a hit. As a result, the best way to tell whether a hitter has been lucky or unlucky isn't to compare his BABIP to the league average BABIP (Like TLB said, usually around .300), but instead to compare his BABIP to his expected BABIP, given his line drive % (Dave Studeman over at The Hardball Times site calculated a while back that all you have to do to get a surprisingly solid estimate of expected BABIP is add 12% to line drive %). A couple of links from BrewCrewBall: 1. Jeff Sackmann's excellent overview 2. A recent look at which Brewers' hitters have been BABIP lucky and unlucky so far in 2008.

The rest of the year, I'd bet real kaysh money that a team of guys who hit like Ryan does would be better suited to keep up the hitting pace, and win a lot more games, than Damon, who is off to a great start, and less likely to sustain this pace of his. That's not what TWR asked, or at least that's not the question Endaround heard and was answering. I think you'd be hard pressed to find many (if any) stat geeks that wouldn't agree that Braun is a better bet to hit this well the rest of the season than Damon is. Most of the projection systems had Braun pegged for exactly this kind of season (around 900 OPS), whereas Damon was supposed to be a 760-ish guy. So Damon is overperforming. If that's part of the question, the obvious answer is Braun. If the question is whose performance so far this year has been worth more runs, given our current best understanding of how runs are produced, the answer is Damon, by a little bit. Maybe a more interesting question for Brewers fans, given that both guys play for Milwaukee, both are the same age, and projections systems liked them both about as much, is this one (assuming that what we've seen so far in 2008 is perfectly reflective of their true talent hitting, which it isn't): Would a team of Ryan Brauns score more runs than a team of Prince Fielders?

If you have direcTV, game is on 669. I don't have Extra Innings, so I think you should get the game no matter what.

My vent is that FtJ stole my "hive mind" line, and if he looks in the Braun OBP thread he'll see all I stole back from him is the word "dipwad". I don't think I got a fair deal.

I do think that some in the stat community have banged the OBP drum so heavily that the message has become distorted. You have a point there. The other reason the Blue Jays haven't scored any runs is how terrible they've been with RISP, but the stat geek party line on that is "eh, sorry about the rotten luck." Unfortunately, that's not even a thinkable premise in a mainstream world where SC dipwads keep saying "so and so is clutch, and clutch is everything."

I'm FoP in the where Szymborsk has that remark, but it's not clear to me what that quote means. I'm far from an expert in stats, but when I hear that slugging correlates higher to runs, I understand that having a really high slugging is more important than a really high OBP (not by much, granted, but that's what the stats seem to say). Now, I don't understand why you felt the need to capitalize the NOT, there, nobody was claiming that one point of slug is better than OBP. What I don't understand is why slug isn't more important than OBP if it correlates higher on a team level to runs. I wondered whether that might be you. We're in much the same boat in terms of statistical expertise - it's a lot like another language, and I'll confess I'm better at understanding it when it's spoken than I am at speaking it myself. I tend to take people who are obviously better at this stuff than me (like Tango and MGL and Szym) at their word. So I'm certainly not sure I'm the right guy to try to help you out here, but I'll try. I think the short answer is that correlation coefficients don't mean quite what you think they mean. A few examples -- in these studies, doubles always correlate with runs scored more strongly than triples. I've even seen some where team strikeouts had a slight positive correlation with team runs and team stolen bases had a slight negative correlation. Would it make sense to argue as a consequence of these findings that a double is better than a triple or that striking out is better than stealing a base? As near as I can figure, what Szym was trying to say is that the reason that SLG tends to have a higher r value than OBP at the team level has to do with how the data is distributed. Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients use a working assumption of normal distribution. If you look a little downthread at the Baseball Fever link in my last post, you'll see this (unfortunately clumsily-worded) response from Tango agreeing with Szym's point about team OBP being clustered together (I think) : Also note that there is a lack of understanding of correlation. If all the teams build their teams so that the team OBP is all around the .320 to .340 mark, the regression won't be able to approach 1.00 as well as a teams that are built where HR are clustered. I wish the last phrase didn't have syntax problems that make it impossible to tell exactly what he's saying. So here's my interpretive guesswork: either team OBP violates the normal distribution assumption because there aren't enough outlying datapoints (too clustered in the middle) or (more likely) team SLG violates the normal distribution assumption because there are clusters at various points, not just in the middle. This might be because of park effects -- ballpark dimensions probably tend to have a much more drastic effect on SLG than OBP. This might also feed into strategic roster construction considerations, since there seems to be a tendency to try to build a team to fit the ballpark. Then you end up with too many high-SLG teams built to hit the 3 run HR and too many low SLG teams built to play small ball. If the data isn't normally distributed, you can't trust the correlation coefficients to tell you how much of the variation is explained. In any event, please take this post as a well-intended attempt to collaberatively build a better understanding. I'm sorry if my tone seemed harsh in my previous post. If we have to face down virulent anti-intellectualism to even talk about stuff like this, we might as well think of each other as fellow travelers.

Here's Tango, using linear weights run values (which the guy from the Reds blog correctly identified as the "gold standard" in run estimation), to demonstrate mathematically that 1.7 x OBP + SLG is correct: http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/why_does_17obpslg_make_sense/ This is a quote from Dan Szymborski, inventor of ZiPs, regarding the noted higher Pearson r value for team SLG relative to team OBP in the previously linked study: On the team level, that wouldn't be surprising - team OBP tends to be clustered together a little more than team SLG. Karl Pearson wasn't a demi-god - r isn't the sole determinant of utility. I'd link to the BTF discussion thread where this was said, but the link is so long it breaks the page width (good thing I previewed). Go to BTF and read the comments for the "don't press the red button" article from yesterday.http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/files/newsstand/discussion/bugs_cranks_kyte_whatever_you_do_dont_press_the_big_red_button/ Because there is always a smaller spread between team OBP, team SLG tends to have higher r-values relative to runs scored. This is true not just for recent years, but for vast chunks of baseball history. Post 2 here looked at 40 years of data: http://www.baseball-fever.com/showthread.php?t=48531 r values: OBP = .904, SLG = .926. This does NOT mean that 1 marginal point of SLG > 1 marginal point of OBP, nor that SLG is more important than OBP. In fact, 1.8 x OBP + SLG had a higher r value than simple OPS in this study. There's no real consensus about whether 1.7 or 1.8 is the correct number to use, but that's really the only thing up for debate anymore (i.e. not whether OBP or SLG is more important, just the factor by which OBP is more important).

Just went through the same thing last month. Try the website later like you said -- I did it through the website rather than over the phone. The process was very painless (and totally free apart from the gas and time to drive to a UPS dropoff location). It only took about two weeks for me -- and all of that was shipping. Once they received the system, they turned it around in a day. I'm pretty sure I got a refurb instead of the same system back, though, so maybe they took one look at mine and concluded it was unfixable. Good on Microsoft for being a stand-up company about this issue. Pretty ludicrous that this is such a widespread issue though. It wouldn't surprise me if it ultimately causes Microsoft to get out of the console business next go-round, even though 360s will almost certainly have sold more units than PS3s when all is said and done.

I'm happy to have Stetter back. I think he's a better bet to be successful in MLB this season. Dillard needs to find a strikeout pitch to complement the mid-90's heater he's found he can rev up when working in short max-effort stints. His k-rate in AAA was too low for me to expect any big league success at all when they called him up -- they should be glad they got some useful innings out of him. On the other hand, I am quite alarmed that the bullpen is being handled in the fashion it is. Ned Yost's reluctance to use "unproven" relievers who struggled in their most recent performance in any situation other than the lowest of low leverage ones (i.e. total blowouts) might be hamstringing Melvin a bit on this issue, but his bullpen-related roster moves this season really do seem like they are being made based on knee-jerk, attention-span-of-a-gerbil style thinking. To me, this is a disturbing trend.

The "doesn't care about baseball" stuff is Dunn's reputation, and part of why I have always been a colossal Adam Dunn mark. If it's false, he's a guy being unjustly persecuted by the strikeouts-obsessed MSM. If it's true, hey, who doesn't hate his job?