sbrylski

Supply and demand. There will be a lot of teams that have money who will be bidding on Pujols if he isn't extended, Gonzalez, and Fielder. If Pujols is extended it leaves about 5 or 6 teams with openings at 1B/DH to bid on both Prince and Gonzalez. These are big market teams don't let the Orioles and Nationals fool you in thinking that they are small market teams they are not. Both the Nationals and the Orioles offered deals to Teixeira similar to what the Yankees offered a little bit less money but rather similar. Don't forget the Cubs will have a lot of money coming off the books next year and they would definitely be in on Prince or Gonzalez. It really is the perfect timing for Prince and Gonzalez with 5 big market teams with a lot of money available to spend. You will have the Dodgers, Red Sox, Nationals, Orioles, and the Cubs all bidding on possibly three players maybe only two. So if Pujols and Gonzalez were not free agents, how exactly would Prince be hindered? Then there would be five big market teams after just one guy. The theory of supply and demand dictates that when supply increases, price goes down.

For me, he instantly reminded me of Brady Clark. Just enough power to not be a slap hitter, and if he can maintain an average batting average, his OBP will be above average. Good depth signing, and I like how he can be optioned if need be. I think that give us six OF candidates for the Opening Day roster? Braun, Hart, Cain, Gomez, Dickerson, Boggs.

Grooveshark.com is the greatest website of all-time. All-time!

"It's a really cool video. Like the song too." "

The "addressed" a need, yet it's still a glaring hole. Barmes has a sub .300 wOBA over the past two seasons. Go Astros!

Endaround...you have to at least admit those "values" have no real world correlation to actual contracts, though. Maybe if teams paid guys in Monopoly money they might mean one thing, but since they have to pay actual dollars, no team is going to sign Pujols to a $40 million/yr contract. You're mis-interpreting the number. The value stat tells what a team with an average payroll could have paid him last season to have broken even in value. It says nothing of the future. For example, it doesn't consider risk. It doesn't consider aging. What you can do with that number, however, is plug it into risk and aging formulas to figure out what an acceptable contract would be. This is a really simple illustration with semi-made up formula's, but here's an example. Pujols was worth around $30 million last season and $40 million in the two seasons before then, so let's say he's about a $35 million player. Let's plug that into an aging formula that I essential made up on the spot here, but passes the eyeball test for the most part. Age 31 - $34 million in production value Age 32 - $31 Age 33 - $28 Age 34 - $24 Age 35 - $20 For comparison, Adrian Gonzalez was about a $20 million player last year. He hit .298 / .393 / .511 and rated very similarly in defense to Pujols last season (1.1 runs above average verse 1.5). So I think it's fair to say Pujols will fall off to around Adrian Gonzalez 2010 level over the next five seasons. After aging, we can add some risk to the equation. Again I'm going to just go with a super simplified method. Pujols has been fairly durable (shoulder?), let's say there's only a 5% chance he get's injured for the season and the team only gets $5 million in production out of him. Here are the new expected values for the next five seasons, adjusted downward for risk: $33 $30 $27 $23 $19 (I'm rounding all these numbers, btw) The next thing you could do is adjust for inflation. That is, let's say the cost of a win goes up 2% each of the next five seasons: $33 $31 $28 $25 $21 Alright, enough touching the numbers. But the point is, when starting with Pujols' fangraphs value, we CAN produce an expected contract value. From the numbers above, on a five year deal Pujols is expected to be worth $138 million, for an average annual value of $27.6. Seems to match the conventional thinking. A six year deal should be worth around $154 million with a $25.7 average annual value, and a seven year deal would be worth around $167 with a $23.9 average annual value. One more point to make - remember those values are for a team with an average payroll. That means teams who can afford to pay higher than average per win, can afford to sign him to a bigger contract. Hopefully this post makes sense.

My absolute favorite off all is the late 1980s to early 1990s away jersey. Best Brewer jersey of all time. I wish they would go back to these. 1993 Yount Away Jersey Those jerseys in the new colors, plus a redesigned "M" for the hat would be perfect.

Box score says he had two. Did they come early?

I don't think the team should switch back to the old logo permanently, but I do think our current uniforms need to trend away from what I would call "elegant" (shiny gold trim, thin and pointy script) towards a more classic/simple and "square" look, exemplified in the early uniforms of the franchise. That would accomplish two things: (1) Make the uniforms better, IMO. (2) Make the integration of the old logo easier. I just don't think it fits in with our current font and overall look. I could go either way with pinstripes. But the shiny gold trim has to go, and I would like to see a script change and a "M" logo redesign. Something designed with the ball and glove logo in mind, but with the intention of keeping it an alternate logo and a merchandise cash cow. EDIT: Google search of "think script font" yielded this quick result... http://blog.youdesignit.com/images/stitch_2_opt.gif I'd like to see our script look a little more like that. Sort of these two fonts put together: http://www.sportslogos.net/images/logos/53/1477/thumbs/rn3gjcl13iqes66hoo2qsf5en.gif http://www.sportslogos.net/images/logos/53/1477/thumbs/igsm9vaqn7odfecf5foahzjce.gif I'm not quite sure what the perfect "M" hat logo would look like, but something based on a thicker script.

Gasser only scored 7 tonight? He sucks. What I like about him is that he's leading the team in rebounds with 15. Led the team in the opener and tied to the lead tonight. Wasn't able to make it to tonight's game, but he sure looked like a starter and then some against PVAMU.

http://www.google.com/trends/viz?q=fire+joe+morgan&date=all&geo=all&graph=weekly_img&sa=N Cool to see the clearly visible run of FJM.com. I wonder what those random spikes correlate to... probably egregious errors by Joe on the air. And yup, you can see the current spike. EDIT: Actually, the site's been run since 2005, so I'm not sure why the search hits were so high in the middle section of the graph. May not have complete data in the picture above.

I like it, I've had pool play in my thoughts when it comes to MLB playoff changes. Of course, I'd like to see a meaningful slate of games, something like 6 teams and 30 games (6 games against each of the other five teams, a home series and an away series.) But then you would need to shrink the regular season to fit it in. Or, what about bringing back Sunday doubleheaders? If you can get the regular season to end mid-September (19th at the latest), you could fit in 30-game pool play and still have Game 7 of the World Series scheduled by November 3rd (2010 calender).

Just catching up here... looks like a pretty awesome claim by Melvin. If we were on the other end and had let James go, there'd be healthy grumbling here. Hope he gets a fair shake, and doesn't go the way of R.J. Swindle. I definitely would have liked him to get an extended chance.

Passing judgement? We are trying to make predictions about how he's going to run the team, and then stating what we like/dislike about that potential style of managing. Nobody has actually said he's a crap hire, doesn't know what he's doing, or it won't work out. Just expressing some apprehension about some of his tendencies. We shall see how he handles this team and how it plays out. But what you're saying above is that it's never okay to predict what an individual will bring to a team until he plays/coaches. If we traded for Albert Pujols, could we express excitement over him likely bringing 35-45 homers to the team, even though he hasn't yet? If the Packers signed Randy Moss, could we express doubts about his locker room presence? Nobody has written Roenicke off yet.

Again, I'm not able to catch the presser, but from this thread, he's sounding even more small-ball than I hoped (in a bad way). I was really hoping he come with something a little more centrist, like "We'll play to the strengths of this team, one of which is their speed, which appeared untapped last season. We can make things happen on the basepaths when we need to, but I also understand this is one of the most powerful offenses in the league, and we don't want to stifle that with over-aggression." I'm cool with stealing being a part of the offense. Sounds like RR thinks its the only part.

Despite all the steals talk, I'm actually more worried about him sacrifice bunting too much. At least with a steal you have a chance of a positive WPA. I missed the presser, did he mention anything about bunting?

Yeah, I don't think we can make any definitive conclusions from the data, necessarily, but it's something to look at. Like, despite the fact that they didn't quite have the best basestealing personnel, they continued to run a lot and it eventually hurt the team more than it helped. And I think the tiny steal totals in the 9th and Xtra innings is significant as well.

To clarify LI... it stands for Leverage Index. It represents the importance of each play in terms of it's impact on win expectancy. 1.00 is the average play. For example, if a home run was hit in a 2.00 LI situation, it would add twice as much win probability than if the same home run was hit in a 1.00 LI situation. So the Angels stole more often when the stakes were higher, because the average LI of their running plays was 1.112. That's going to amplify both the positive and negative potential impacts of the stealing attempt.

I ran the WPA number on Angels stealing plays last season. Note: I used Fangraph's play logs, and came up with the Angels having 154 plays last season where they ran (had the word steal or stole in the play description). Five of those were double steals. That means there should be 159 SB+CS for the team, but Fangraphs lists it only as 156. Not quite sure why there's a discrepancy, but these numbers should be decently close. Best Steal: June 25th, B11, 3-4: Bobby Abreu advanced on a stolen base to 2B for .07 WPA. Worst Steal: July 5th, T10, 4-4: Alberto Callaspo was caught stealing for -.136 WPA. Average WPA on successful steals: .0145 Average WPA on unsuccessful steals: -.0451 Average LI on running plays: 1.112 Total WPA on all running plays: -.92 That means the Angels lost nearly a full game off their record last year on running plays. 1st Inning: 26 attempts, .000 WPA 2nd Inning: 15 attempts, -.009 WPA 3rd Inning: 19 attempts, .007 WPA 4th Inning: 16 attempts, -.016 WPA 5th Inning: 14 attempts, -.009 WPA 6th Inning: 17 attempts, -.020 WPA 7th Inning: 20 attempts, -.005 WPA 8th Inning: 21 attempts, .002 WPA 9th Inning: 3 attempts, -.028 WPA Xtra Innings: 3 attempts, -.007 WPA That's kind of troubling. When the value of scoring one (and only one) run is at it's peak, the Angels stopped being aggressive. 2 outs: 79 attempts, .001 WPA 1 out: 46 attempts, -.007 WPA 0 outs: 29 attempts, -.025 WPA When there's more outs, the team runs more. Good or bad?

Last night, the light switches in our kitchen and living room kept turning on. My roommate and I went to bed around 1 AM (and turned off all the lights). I was having trouble sleeping, and arose around 3 AM to use the bathroom. The lights in the kitchen and living room were both on, so I turned them off again. Then, around 4 AM I was awoken by a door opening and closing twice. I just rolled back over, thinking it was my roommate. Then, the lights in the kitchen turned on for about 30 seconds, then turned off. Thirty seconds later, they turned on again, and then off a little later. Once more it happened. I thought he just forgot something in the kitchen and came back or something. Then, they started turning on and off about once a second. I could hear the clicking of the switch. By that time I didn't know what to think. I sat there about two minutes, then finally got up to check it out. But before I stood up, it stopped with the lights off. So this morning, I ask my roommate what the heck he was doing last night. He asks the same thing - it wasn't him. Very strange. Now, I live on the second floor of a three-unit apartment, but the doors are always open for everyone in the building because we all know each other. But I've spoken to everyone likely to use our kitchen, and none of them say they were up at that hour. Both the front and back door's to building were locked all night. I'm thinking someone's a sleepwalker. Any other suggestions?

I hate it. But I also hate interleague play and the wildcard.

Nothing wrong the a year too late. Next year, I'm going as a Chilean Miner.

Gobias wins.

I'm kind of a minimalist when it comes to costumes. Crossed with obscere is perfect for me... I'm going as Steve French from Trailer Park Boys tomorrow night. Just wearing ears. I went as Mose Schrute two years ago: http://remote.lohudblogs.com/files/2008/02/mose1.JPG I had the fear tape on my shirt and had grown a neckbeard. Last year I went as Harry Potter, because I get teased about looking like Daniel Radcliffe often (when my hair is medium length.) I just drew a lightning bolt scar on my forehead.

Actually, that's a pretty good book to read - "Good to Great". Tells you the qualities of great leaders, which is what managers are - leaders, not strategists. I'll bet Napoleon wouldn't be looked at as a great leader if he sucked as a military strategist. There's cheerleaders, and there's calculators... I think a great baseball manager needs to be a little of both.