rluzinski

"I really don't care about the so call odds ,they mean nothing almost every year and just watch the way they are playing and the way we are Playing " I don't really care about the so called "the way they are playing" nonesense. How many times has the Brewers proven that theory complete bollocks this season alone? Momentum. Yipee.

What Gagne did before he was hurt is pretty irrelevent at this point. He doesn't appear to be even a mediocre reliever anymore. I'm not sure I would DFA him but he has no business being the 8th inning guy.

Time to go to dinner with the wife but I want to post this quick. If it results in bad grammer and spelling, so be it! I just wanted to show the strength of schedule differences between a few teams and show that even a big difference in SOS doesn't amount to as big difference in the standings as some seem to think, at least over 22 games. When I say SOS, I'm also referring to how many home and away games each team has left. First, using a team's current win percentage as an estimator of their true collective talent right now: http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a345/rluzinski/SOS_WP_905.gif The .492 under the Brewers is the collective strength of the Brewers opponents, adjusted for home field advantage. If the Brewers were a .500 team, you'd expect them to lose 49.2% of their remaining games. You can see that the Cub's remaining SOS is much harder than eitther the Brewers or Cardinals. Over 22 games, the Brewers are expected to get 1.3 extra wins from that SOS advantage. The .577 under the Brewers is the win percentage I'd expect from the Brewers, based on their current win percentage. So, even though the Cubs are the better team according to win percentage, their SOS wipes out that advantage. We expect the the Brewers to win about .6 games more than the Cubs over the last 22 games. But even after 140 games, win percentage can still be a less than perfect gauge of a team's true talent. Four good or bad bounces can result in a 8 game swing afterall. Baseball Prospectus tries to estimate a team's true talent with something called WP3, which you can find on their playoff odds reports. I'm using the PECOTA version. It's far from perfect (it doesn't adjust for personel channges very well at all, among other problems) but it's better than simply win percentage, IMO. Let's take a look: http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a345/rluzinski/SOS_WP3_905.gif The SOS values are different but the relative differences between the teams are pretty similar. The Brewers and Cardinals have about a game and a half win advantage over the Cubs over the last 22 games from their relatively easier SOS. That's pretty huge actually but it's going to take a lot more than that for either team to catch the Cubs.

The AOL speak is confusing me but are you trying to say that they really are a viable playoff candidate now? Do you think giving them 100:1 odds of making the playoffs grossly understates their chances?

"I have no proof at all to back this opinion but I agree that SLG seems like it would be more streaky than OBP. More 2B/HR means more crooked numbers and more OBP means a higher likelyhood of a 1 run inning. That at least makes some sort of sense to me even though I'd have to go into research mode to put it to the test. " I won't pretend to have done an exhaustive study but I've looked at run distributions (how often a team scores 0, 1, 2, 3 runs) and can't find anything obvious. It's not like the Brewers run distribution curve is an inverse bell curve or anything dramatic. I just think things get smoothed out enough by having 8 streaky hitters that it's hard to even notice it.

Did he use the phrase, "playoff teams don't lose series to teams like the Padres"? I hope he did! Really, I'll never understand those kind of "predictions". Even if you think the Padres only have around a 30% chance of winning any one of these games, they are still expected to win 1 game in the series. They also have about a 1 in 3 chance of winning the series. They even have a 3% chance of sweeping! Anyone who's watched baseball should know that's how it works. Of course, if the unexpected does happen, we'll just hear that they weren't mentally tough or didn't want it enough or any combination of the other cliches people repeat ad nauseam, while trying to pretend they are having an original thought.

"It's also no secret slugging will be more streaky than OBP." Individual batting lines are going to be a bit more streaky, sure. Take a player that generates the majority of his offensive value in less AB and he'll be more prone to longer streaks from randomness alone. Have 8 guys like that and it would tend to smooth that out pretty well though. I'm not sure you'd even be able tot notice it at the team level, in terms of run production.

You mean, we don't have 5 aces in our rotation?

They should be able to win 11 out of the 13 games against those 3 teams! You think we should expect a .846 win% against them? It could happen but it's certainly not the expected result. "They should be able to win 7 out of the 11 games against these 3 teams." 7-4 against the best teams in the NL? "I am more worried about Houton making a run as they're schedule is extremely weak and they are on fire right now having won 7 in a row and showing no signs of slowing down!!!" If you are worried about Houston's .7% chance of making the playoffs, you might as well hide in your basement until the season ends. And if you think those odds are grossly off, I'll be happy to give you 10:1 odds. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif

I love how it was only 5 months ago that I was trying to explain that expecting 50 HRs from Prince this year was unrealistic. Now, Prince is obviously a mediocre batter that should bat 6th or lower. It's all so simple.

I just think the team is bad defnsively overall. You guys just forget about the errors of little consequence.

I think we all just have unrealistic expectations when Prince is up in big situations. It's hard not to. Also, he has to contend with not having the platoon advantage in many of those situations and not getting anything to hit. I'm glad to see he's still remained patient and is usually willing to take the walk. I think the numbers show that he's been at least middle of the road in clutch situations.

Two blowout games proves little, much less two very close ones.

The problem with this team is that they don't win every game.

Using BP's WP3 for the strength of the Brewers and each of their remaining opponents, I get 14.8 - 11.2. Already half a win behind that pace!

Ahhhh yes. To have a nice lead in September. The Brewers can lose and still have their playoff odds increase.

but the probabilities were MUCH more spread out than the people saying "he is worth 1 to 2 wins"). Every estimate has an expected spread. If you want to estimate the win total for a team over 162 games, 1 standard deviation is around 6 wins. But if you are going to argue about the merits of a trade, you are going to use the average expected value, as you see it. You aren't going to say, "Yeh, but he might pitch much better than his expected performance for 100 innings and get crazy run support to boot".

I understand that but the point is why make a comment about improves us by two wins? Because Melvin had to estimate how many wins CC was worth over what the Brewers had when he traded for him? If a fan wants to argue about the value of a trade, he has to do something similar. Had you simply let me know he was going to have a 1.43 ERA with the Brewers, I would have adjusted my estimates accordingly. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif The rest of us had only his previous performance to go on. I projected his ERA to be around 3.25 in the NL: http://rluzinski.blogspot...hia-be-worth-in-wins.html Maybe I should have used 3.0 but this 'changing leagues" bump is pretty much a myth, from what I can tell. Of course, I also assumed 4.6 runs/9 of run support (what the Brewer offense was averaging per game at the time). The offense has actually averaged 5.73 runs/9 in his starts, which certainly hasn't hurt. That's why they call it an estimate.

Not pinch hitting for Kendall late in a game is asinine.

Nobody in this thread has said that his weight has cost him 75 points in slugging. There was this: "He has lost bat speed due to his ever increasing girth. Harder to "fire your hips" when you have a big lunch bucket restricting this movement. There you have it!" I agree, though, that most opinions have been pretty reasonable.

Horrible at bats by 4-5-6 way to swing at crap Fielder and Hart and way to watch a fastball right down the middle with two strikes go by Cameron. I've never figured out why batters just don't swing at strikes and lay off the balls.

Do you think we have a 3.30 ERA reliever just hiding in the bullpen or something? Really. This is a bad bullpen. Switching to a new bad reliever isn't some great plan. A better plan might have been to let our only decent reliever (Torres) go against the meat of the lineup, but that's not allowed.

He was laughing in the pen, so I doubt there's an obvious injury, ATM. Of course, "dead arm" can turn out to be a lot of things.

Here, let me get them all over with in one post: This the kind of game that playoff teams wins. If Sheets is truly an ace pitcher, he will realize that this is a must win and step it up for a big game. If Santana throws a 9 inning shutout, Sheets will have to throw AT LEAST a 10 inning shutout. That's what elite pitchers do. They know when they are up against a great pitcher and pitch even BETTER! Blaming your offense for a loss just because they didn't score runs is just an excuse that pitchers that aren't real aces use. MUST WIN GAME! Did I miss anything?

I didn't mean to imply that Prince's weight has no negative effect on his performance. What I'm looking at is his SLG being 75 points lower than his projection this year, vs. whatever weight he gained since the end of last year. Isn't that what supposed to be the topic of this thread? I don't see the theory that the X amount of pounds he gained cost him 75 SLG points as plausible. Maybe it's one small factor but there are countless other factors to consider.