Thurston Fluff

That is why it's so hard to judge managers TLB. It's easy to see the game situations and make a judgement on them. It is less easy to see why moves may be made, or not made in the Ramirez case, as a way of relating to a player to get the most out of him over a long period of time. I think that is why so many people get hung up on game strategy, lineups and such as being so important to a manager's capabilities. In some ways it was like defense a decade ago. It's importance is hard to judge objectively or analytically so it was usually not deemed that important. Until we an quantify people skills managers will always be judged on what I believe to be minor aspects of their job. Maybe I'm wrong and people skills isn't that important but the Macha experience seems to point the other way.

monty, with regards to the Braun infield fly ball situation I was under the impression that they threw out data for plays with extreme shifts, at least for UZR. I could be wrong though. I imagine that would be like a +1,000,000 UZR for a pop-up at the mound for a LF. Seems to me that eliminates a lot of information for a team who routinely does that. How can you make an apples to apples comparison when you eliminate so much information from some teams and not others?

I don't feel like we've seen as many boneheaded plays on the bases this season as last. I remember Ron saying something to the effect that, after two years of station to station baseball, it probably would take some time for the players to get the feel of when to run or take the extra base again. He understood there would be some growing pains and there was. But in the end the choice was to continue going station to station or to let the players loose a little and (re)learn how and when to be aggressive on the bases. There are so many things that have to be looked at in the long view that sometimes it's hard to know if it ever will pay off. When it does it's still hard to remember back and determine if it was worth it. I think overall having a consistent philosophy is more important that the particular philosophy. If he wants to be aggressive then be so. If he wants to sit back and wait for the 3 run homerun fine. Just don't bounce back and forth and expect the players to respond well. He seems to get that.

That might be the worst bit of analysis I have ever read. How can you be wrong on every aspect of something and still pull a check from SI? He was after all, the best SS in MLB amongst those unable to bend at the waist for a grounder. Clever.

Our outfield defense when Gomez is out is below average but those bats are essential I'm not sure how they can be below average when the only guy who may be below average at his spot is Hart. While we may not have three guys who could play center field above average Braun is one of the better left fielders in the NL. That he is such may show how bad left fielders are overall but that still makes him above average. Gomez and Morgan are both above average with Gomez one of the elite ones in the game today. Hart I think is below average but not so far below to negate the above average defense of the others.

Lets see how high we can set the bar to be considered good until there is no possibility that we can have a good manager. If you expect perfection you are never going to like anyone. I think it fair to say taking Greinke out after 7 and letting Veras finish were both great moves but nobody ever seems to remember the thousand good moves made. I guess when there are so many it's easier to remember the 10 bad ones.

In other words once there was an overabundance of good relief pitchers and anybody could have managed it, he did well. Good managers don't make bad players good. I know the argument is they can put them in the right place to succeed. There is only so much putting in the right situation one can do when those situations are few and far in between. There is also that little issue of what to do when there is no perfect person for the situation. How do put a player in the right situation when there are no right players for a situation? All in all expecting managers to wave a magic wand and find the perfect guy for each situation is like asking a player to get a homerun every at bat. The most you can hope for with any manager is to mitigate the damage caused by bad players. To me Loe was a good example of that. He was overused when his options were limited then not used as much when the options got better.

Does it really matter this early who is on the bench? The bottom couple guys are interchangeable as the season goes on anyway so why sweat it?

If he has gone through the trouble to look up and memorize some obscure stat you think thats all just a smoke screen? I think that's giving him way too much credit, but okay. I think any good manager probably works to know every bit of information he can get no matter how obscure. It's his job to know as much as he can about his players and their opponents. Even to the point of knowing irrelevant stuff as a way of leaving no stone unturned. That does not mean he did so simply to use as a smoke screen later even if it gets used that way. Ultimately if he uses something like the guy was 3-4 against him 5 years ago as a real reason I take it to mean either there is something he doesn't want us to know or there were a hundred factors that went into the decision and he just doesn't feel like going through every detail of it afterward. When the time comes to explain it he just says he as 3-4 against him and moves on. Seems lot easier to do then sit down after the game and give some sort of long winded explanation of every little factor that went into it including some that he may not want out in pubic. I just don't believe anything a manager says when he knows it's for public fodder. All that said, hypothetically speaking, if all other factors equal each other out and it's a coin flip decision why not use it instead of flipping the coin?

I can't disagree with any of that, even though I personally do feel as though RR made or makes more bad calls than other managers. My main point was the complete lack of logic in his explanations. I have no way of knowing he's good at it either so we are pretty much on equal ground there. It really is just a gut feel. As far as his explanations I take them with a grain of salt. I don't even know how much we can believe when it comes to explanations. He may have thought what he said was true or there may be a reason for it that he doesn't want to divulge in public for whatever reason. I've come to believe post game interviews with managers are completely useless. I can never tell if they are telling the truth or not anyway. Same goes with newspaper quotes the next day. He's telling us what he wants us to hear not what he's actually thinking. That goes for every manager with the possible exception of Ozzie Guillen. Frankly if that is what we get with frankness I'm not sure I want any part of it.

Coat it however you guys want, RR made some really puzzling calls and when asked to explain them showed a complete lack of logical decision making ability. I agree but my point was those stupid, illogical decisions are made by every manager. It's not just some who do it. If you believe is Ron does it more than others I'm not sure how we measure that. Nobody has figured out how to quantify decision making to know who actually is good at it. We have to rely on anecdotal evidence. Which is where we get stuck going in circles. While all we have is anecdotal evidence to go on that has some value. Just keep in mind anecdotally speaking if you can still remember all the mistakes that happened last season there can't be that many. All in all the team last year was not projected to be a 96 win team. At bare minimum it wasn't expected to be any better than a 96 win team if everything went right. If the team won as many or more games than they should have on paper there was one of three things going on that I can think of. The players must have played amazingly over their heads to compensate for poor decision making, the decision making wasn't that bad or it just doesn't matter in overall wins and losses. If it's the players playing over their heads shouldn't the manager get some credit for that? If the decision making wasn't that bad then he can't be judged a bad manager because of it QED. If it really doesn't matter then what sense does it make to judge the competence of the manager based on it?

He had a few errors in strategy but it was his first year and that will happen. The Cards will see a bunch of that as well this season. The Cards saw errors in strategy last year as well and they had a hall of fame in waiting making the decisions. When there are literally thousands of decisions made over the course of a year there will be some errors. There will also be some decisions that look bad in the short term but have positive long term implications. Playing bench players often early is one that comes to mind. Keeping bench players sharp requires them to play and keeping regulars from wearing down requires them to sit some.

Nobody has had a chance to see if his in game management, player management or playing time has changed so there cannot be a discussion of how he's changed in that regard. All we can even discuss at this point is has his spring training approach changed for the better or worse. Which ironically is the one thing I haven't seen discussed here. Until there is a way to quantify managerial skills I have no idea how anyone can actually know what skills really matter or now good he is at them so why even bother? At least that is the approach I'm taking when it comes to him from now on. I know he's good enough to not prevent a good team from winning 96 games. That is enough for me to be getting on with.

http://sphotos.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/p480x480/375009_10150659355883512_155696228511_9322997_602223381_n.jpg This is my backyard. As of 03/30/12. I have to go through this every sticking year. I usually have to re-sod at least twice a year. I decided we need to do something more permant than re-sodding once again so I looked into K9-grass. $6000 later I'll have no mud issues. All that because I like throwing a firsbee to my dog. I was planning on replacing the fence but I guess that can wait until next year.

Just once I'd like Chipper Jones to retire without calling a press conference in spring training to announce it's his last season.

Trying to replicate a soup I made by accident a while back. I mixed leftover green chili chicken soup and leftover cauliflower in Mughlai gravy together then added some heavy cream. It was a happy accident. If it works again I think I'll have my signature soup.

Sounds a lot like every manager in every spring about every player to me.

The only issue I have at all with the deal is that the arbitration system still undervalues defense so it might have been cheaper to go year to year just because defense doesn't pay the player at that age. That all depends on what the proper value of defense is.

A planted tree placed strategically between 2nd and 3rd would be better than Yuni http://i684.photobucket.com/albums/vv208/ThurstonFluff/425792_10150646957013512_155696228511_9281112_1855421550_n-1.jpg Last year's infield would have been so much better defensively with these three.

I wasn't really using defensive UZR here but even assuming that you do it would be talking 3 years of data which is not worthless. If I mistook your comment about him having a +1 WAR on defense alone wrongly I apologize. I just assumed you meant his WAR was +1 using UZR (or some version of it) since that is what is used in when calculating WAR. I may also be mistaken but I seem to remember reading WAR uses one year of UZR it's calculation not three for each. so regardless of how many years of WAR you take you are still using an insufficient number in each one to represent defense. Three wrong numbers don't suddenly make a right one. You can't just stick your fingers in your ears and pretend defense doesn't exist so you have to find some way to assign a value to it. I tend to use a combination of stats, reputation and the eye test and they all point to him being a good defensive SS so I don't see any reason to doubt it. There is a difference between knowing it exists and accepting the system used to describe it's value has any use in assessing said value. To say we have to find a way to represent it means we have to accept a faulty way of representing it is kind of iffy at best. It just leads to a false sense of certainty. In the thread about WAR a couple months ago one of the things even WAR defenders commented on was WAR was misused. Since that time I have seen it continuously be misused. Your comment included. Wasn't that comment the very definition of using mixing up predictive and counting stats? I am all for using his defense to say it isn't a bad signing. In fact I agree with you. I am less for saying his +1 WAR created mainly on defensive metrics represents an accurate version of that defense. And way less sold that it can be used to asses weather he will meet the value of his new contract.

If defensive WAR was at all indicative of anything I guess I'd get excited about +1 WAR for defense alone. As it is based on a calculation using well under the necessary numbers to be anywhere near accurate it's less than worthless. It's misleading.

Let's face it shortstop is going to be a sore spot until we find something other than a stop gap type player. I just don't see the point if arguing over whether this version of sub-par is so much better or worse than another version of it. WE know what he is going in same as Yuni. If he gives us what we expect what's to complain about? Last season Yuni was a known quantity. If the team was much worse than we expected then I can see complaining about him. That wasn't the case last season. They knew what he was and accounted for it in other areas. For myself if Gonzalez holds his own on defense he'll be what we expected so who really cares if he was slightly better or worse offensively than what we had last season? In both instances Melvin knew what we were getting and had it accounted for. Last year the team didn't suffer from having Yuni on the team. IF the same holds true this season I'll be happy with what Gonzo has to give us.

I don't know what the point would be to complain about his offense. Everyone knew going in that isn't why we got him. Knowing that it seems pointless to complain about it. It may hurt but I think not having two total black holes will alleviate the frustration somewhat.

I'm having trouble signing in at LambeauLeap. I tried refreshing the page, going from here to there, opening it from a different browser and used both backupcatchers and Thurston Fluff but no luck. Am I missing something or is it just a switchover issue?

When you are an obsolete entity desperately holding on to past glory you say or do anything just to stay relevant. They are to sports coverage what Polaroid is to photography. An old school titan made obsolete by new technology. I don't even have them programed in my channel guide as an option. If I want scores I go to my phone or computer. If I want in depth analysis I go to reliable sites like this one. If I want opinion pieces or fluff about my team I listen to sports talk radio or local papers on-line. If I'm bored and want to watch something about baseball or football I go to the networks dedicated to 100% coverage of the sport. I just don't have any interest in ESPN any more.