Pointer1VB

Well, since the initial post was about pitchers... I figured I'd throw in my two cents. Using the average of the Bill James, PECOTA, CHONE, and ESPN projections (compiled painstakingly on excel) and applying an unscientific forumla (tried to give every stat a 1-12 value because I'm in a 12 league rotisserie format) and weighing ERA and WHIP for IP (so closers and relievers don't dominate that much), here are SP rankings. (and Yo didn't fare well because his WHIP projection is around 1.30) Lincecum--------------43.13Halladay---------------40.97Haren------------------37.18Greinke----------------35.65Sabathia---------------35.65Hernandez-------------34.30Vazquez---------------32.51Verlander--------------32.39Beckett----------------32.06Hamels----------------31.35Santana----------------31.07Carpenter--------------30.66Wainwright-------------30.21Lee---------------------30.16Lester------------------29.90Cain--------------------28.68Hanson-----------------28.67 Shields-----------------27.10 Peavy------------------26.69Nolasco----------------26.16Gallardo----------------25.95Lackey-----------------25.88Jimenez-----------------25.59Kershaw----------------25.47Johnson-----------------25.34Baker-------------------25.31Oswalt------------------24.56Garza-------------------24.56 Rodriguez---------------24.56 Billingsley---------------24.48 Weaver-----------------24.11Jurrjens-----------------24.05 Anderson---------------23.07 Scherzer----------------23.03 Burnett------------------22.33 Blanton------------------22.05 Dempster----------------21.41 Harang------------------21.12 Danks-------------------21.05

Article about fantasy baseball and Hart, but still relevant... http://insider.espn.go.co...3dkarabell_eric_baseball

http://www.baseball-refer...s/ANA/ANA200406080.shtml Box Score

Ah, you got a bit of that wrong... http://articles.latimes.c...n/10/sports/sp-angfolo10 Vlad just broke up the no hitter in the 7th by hitting a ball that was in the dirt into shallow left. Sheets maintained a shutout through nine, and the Brewers won in the 17th.

Although the yahoo front page had a video of a cat jumping out of a cardboard box yesterday.

Couldn't disagree more, and this from an avowed ESPN hater. Sounded to me like what he was saying is that the Brewers would be much more easily overcome the loss of Weeks, than the Mets would be able to overcome the loss of Delgado. I still think the Brewers need to address the lead off spot, but I would say Delgado creates a much bigger hole in the line up than Weeks does.Eh, I guess I could be mistaken.

Peter Gammons did say some great things about Weeks though.

I'd say Dave Winfield is correct. Probably the equivalent of the Brewers losing Fielder.Well, with Wright, Beltran, and Reyes on that team I don't think Delgado is as important to them as Fielder. Also, Weeks has outplayed Delgado so far this year and most Brewer fans are under the consensus that the Weeks this year is the real deal. I'm not discounting the loss of Delgado, it still is big, but it just seems like ESPN to say that what happens in the New York market is always more important than the midwest. The way Winfield said it also seemed like a dismissal of the Brewers. He basically said, "yeah, it sucks the Brewers lost Weeks, but the Mets lost Delgado and that is by far more important."

I also heard Winfield's comment and was dumbfounded.

Also Mike Sweeney is valuable on the bench because he is essentially a player/coach.

...and Randy Johnson also had horrible run support in 2004. Is it Ben's and Randy's fault? I'm thinking it's probably the fact that they both had pretty poor offenses supporting them that year. Steve Phillips made this same argument on Baseball Tonight last week and was visibly mocked by the rest of the talking heads. John Kruk kept bringing it back up throughout the show and each time he did Phillips had a sheepish look and would say something like, "Well, I don't have anything to back it up but I just believe the pitcher sets the pace for his offense with the amount of time he takes." If that were true, Doug Davis would never win over 5 games.

I'd just like to say that the Mets also have a horrible bullpen that has had knack for blowing big games this year. We're still in this one.

Do you think we have a 3.30 ERA reliever just hiding in the bullpen or something?

Lots of thin skins on the board tonight. Someone complained that Shouse can't pitch to righties. There was a collective moan when Riske was brought in. Someone said they would rather see Gagne and I don't know where to begin on that one because the board would have really flamed Yost if that was the case. Torres is the 9th inning guy and the board would have bashed Yost for bringing in a new callup because we can't hand the ball over to inexperience on such a pivitol situation in a playoff chase. Honestly, I don't know how you guys can yell at Yost like this when he really has no 7th and 8th inning options when a pitcher goes out in the 5th or 6th. It happens basically every night that CC doesn't pitch.

CLASSIC BILL HALL

If the Brewers had put up, let's say, 5 runs up to this point, I think Supon would be pitching in the 8th. Only at 94 pitches.

Suppon was at 70 pitches and could make it to 7 innings. Leave him in.

Yeah, because nothing says automatic loss like a 5-6 pitcher.

Lohse was hitting the outside corners earlier, but that last inning he seemed to be alternating between the low outside and inside corner with some great accuracy.

Yeah, Lohse has pretty much hit every spot. The only few balls that I've seen in the zone that we could get to are Weeks two deep fly balls and Cameron's long out there.

I'm guessing gameday is off because the strikezone seems to be a little large. Lohse keeps getting the low and outside pitch for a strike, which concerns me because he has been hitting that spot consistantly.

Weeks making some good plays in the first. Although Soup was a little late to the bag on that last one.

This comment sparked my interest, so I did some additional number crunching starting with rluzinski's data. I listed every start on the season by the pitchers he classified as bad (Delarosa, Fogg, Rusch, Olsen, Redman, M. Hendrickson, Livian Hernandez, R. Liz, G. Reynolds, Piniero, Moehler, Badenhop, O. Perez (WSN), C. Morton, Nelson Figueroa! and Chacon). I don't put as much stock in projected data, especially since they tend to be a little generous in terms of horrible pitchers (ie they don't project people over 5.5, but many of these guys have ERAs above that in actuality). Here's what I came up with... Weighted Projected ERA: 5.12 Actual ERA Against Brewer Batters: 5.42 2008 ERA Versus All Teams: 5.43 This shows us that the Brewers are in line with all of the other teams against crappy pitchers. But how about the spread of these games and do we have a larger feast or famine tendency as geddymd hinted at? These pitchers have a combined 198 starts on the season. The median is 4.50 on the button. Note that the median is BELOW the actual ERA. This says that poor pitchers have more above average ERA games then below average ERA games. Geddymd is correct by saying the median ERA is 3.38 for these pitchers against the brewers, which may show the Brewers have a tendency to give poor pitcher more above average games then most teams. However, this sample size is only 19 games, and the next ERA after 3.38 is 5.07, which is obviously above 4.50. Therefore, if we have above a 5 ERA against the next poor pitcher start, our median will jump over a point in ERA. Therefore, there is too small of a sample size to do anything with the median, but the data suggests there is no reason to believe our median would be dissimilar to the 4.50 mark with a larger sample size. Also, the mode for the Brewers against these poor pitchers may be 3.00, but surprisingly the mode for these pitchers against everyone is 0.00 (15 of 198 games had 0 ER, 13 had a 4.50 ERA). However, the tendency for certain ERAs for a game to show up more often for nice round numbers (such as 0, 3, 4.5, 6) shows me that mode is not a good analysis tool in this situation. My conclusion is that the Brewers are perfectly average in their performance against poor pitchers, however even poor pitchers perform better then their season averages in the majority of their starts. Therefore the perception is that the Brewers do worse then they should against poor pitchers when they are performing at a perfectly reasonable standard. I would post my data, however I do not have a website to upload to, and it's rather ugly because I only have Microsoft Works Spreadsheet and didn't spend the time to format and pretty it up. Also, please ignore any grammatical errors because I typed this out quickly after crunching the numbers.

FIRE YOST! FIRE WYNEGER! FIRE MADDUX! DFA EVERYONE!

Sheesh, step away from the hate button already. Same to you towards Villy and Yost.