rluzinski

Average eyesight in one eye = "practically blind"? Not saying he didn't have bad eyesight but the hread title is just a tad misleading. I figured the guy was making his way on the mound with a cane... or was Daredevil.

I think people's offensive expectation for Braun in 2008 may be unreasonable. I suspect his numbers are going to sag a bit from 2007.

I'll take a look at this today. Thanks for the reminder. EDIT: Only 8 people took a stab at guessing average relative values. Not going to be able to draw any conclusions from that. Only takes 5 minutes!

I still have my almost launch 360 and have never had any problem either. At this point, it's pretty clear that the failure rate is significantly higher than what MS expected (IIRC, less than 5% is industry standard for electronic equipment) but I still don't think it's nearly as high as some suggest.I've heard numbers north of 50%. I just can't believe that. As for Halo 3, I was referring to the campaign coop. I played many hours of matchmaking and it was fun but became fairly repetitive for me. I like FPS's that require a higher degree of teamwork and strategy, like Counterstrike or Return to Castle Wolfenstein (no, I'm not talking about raw skill).

This is what happens when a poster is more concerned about proping up his own ego than having an honest debate.

By the way: can you really do a relative offensive value for a successful stolen base without somehow taking into account the risk of getting caught stealing? I just wanted the value of a successful steal. You are correct that what's generally of more importance is the value of a stolen base attempt, which has to factor in CS. Come on people, I need more guesses on actual relative run values.

I have a theory that fans have a tendency to value offensive events closer to their relative entertainment value, rather than their actual run value. Its certainly not unreasonable to want batters to do the things that are more fun to watch, so I don't blame any fan for doing it. I thought it would be interesting to test that theory and see how people would weight steals, walks, singles, doubles, triples and HRs, relative to each other in two ways: * Entertainment * What they think their relative run value actually is Keep in mind, we are talking about the average, relative run value. If a batter always came up to bat with no one on, a walk and single would be worth exactly the same. Common sense tells us that a single is worth more, however, since their will often be base runners on that will be advanced more efficiently with a single than with a walk. So, try to think of the average situation and how the various events would effect how many runs a team will score and how fun it would be to see the batter performance the event. Now, anyone who wants to cheat and find their relative run values could simply google it (it's pretty straight forward to calculate) to find the answer but I ask to resist the urge. And for anyone who already knows, just post your excitement weights if you'd like. Finally, If I didn't already know the answer , I don't think my guess would be anywhere close to right, so I don't think the correct answers are easy to estimate. Perhaps the average guess might do a pretty good job, though and my theory will be proven wrong. It will be interesting to see. Here's my entertainment estimate, to illustrate what I'm looking for. I'll use a 1 through 10 scale, using whole numbers: 10 home run 8 triple 5 double 3 single 2 steal 1 walk

It took my 7 years to pay my $20k. I guess I didn't have many good years http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif

How is Halo 3's online coop working? It's the only way to play it, IMO.

However, I will always think that a statement like this is an overstatement. There might be some luck involved in ERAs, but I don't think it's extremely luck based. That's like saying it's not a valid stat at all, or that Jake Peavy consistantly posts lower ERAs every year than Bret Tomko because of extreme luck. As the sample increases, a stat like FIP doesn't tell you anything more than a stat like ERA. In fact, the opposite it true. Where FIP is very is small sample situations, like a year's worth of stats from a reliever. It assumes a league average rate for the most volatile stats (BABIP, LOB%, etc...). While that's not completely corret, it's better than assuming a pitchers's BABIP over 50 IP perfectly represents his talents.

Looks like pitchers who relly on ground balls would always have a high FIP. When you say, "Rely on groundballs", you mean, "strikes no one out", he's going to be in trouble, sure. A strikeout is an out virtually 100% of the time. Even a weak groundball is converted into an out less often. In actuality, there are many good groundball pitchers out there who have excellant FIPs. Maybe, they have a mediocre K rates but they supress HRs and have good command and low walk rates.

Certainly one year is not enough to know for certain if his range is limited, but given the circumstances it's possible. Absolutely. It's not like Hardy has a huge MLB track record to begin with. I just can't begin to understand how anyone could predict that moving Hardy from SS is a forgone conclusion. We have no idea of knowing. I personally don't see it happening for a long time.

The defense certainly hurt Cappy and Suppan, two guys who need decent defense to do well. Also, I'm not sure how relevant a year's worth of FIP is for a reliever (although, it's certainly better than ERA).

Hardy's range factor was fine the year before (not that I would advocate using range factor). Had he qualified, he would have been among the leaders. Am I to believe that he went from great to bad in one year? In actuality, range factor is a junk stat and one year's worth of any defensive metric isn't the best at measuring a player's true talent. Hardy's defense was good in 2006 and he had a reputation as a good defender prior to 2007. His defensive talents may have been overstated as a minor leaguer but to suggest he'll have to be moved is premature, to say the least.

Statistically, all the defensive metrics agree that Braun was atrocious in every way last year. For an example, here's the defensive metrics the Hardballtimes.com uses (Revised Zone Rating, RZR): Braun Year Tm Pos Inn PO A TE FE FPct DPS DPT BIZ Plays RZR OOZ 2007 MIL 3B 945 61 161 16 9 .895 12 0 225 127 .564 21 He was credited with 16 throwing errors, which only starts to account for that .564 RZR. Even if you take away 6 of his 16 throwing errors, he still has the lowest RZR among qualified 3B last year. As for his range, he only made 21 outs on balls that were considered "out of his zone" (which is defined as a play that an average 3B would make a play on less than 50% of the time). Even if you adjust for the fact that Braun had less innings than an everyday starter, 21 plays is very low: MLB 3B OOZ Anecdotally, I felt that he allowed far too many liners down the line to become doubles and I don't feel like he did very well ranging into the hole, either. Too many memories of Braun getting in a position to make a play in the hole, only to deflect the ball or miss it altogether. His arm might be his biggest defensive weakness but it's not his only one, IMO.

Why would Hardy have to be moved to 3B?

Neither Weeks nor Braun gets to very many balls, so I don't think it's just their arms that is the problem.

Career Line: .283/.336/.391/.727 And he's an outfielder and 38. I'd be surprised if he's even in the league next year.

Sheets did spend some time with Beloit -- not on the roster, but the player that mentioned this was his roommate and played with him in 1999 in Stockton. But you said: "Again, he isn't doing anything to stay in shape...and that's from players who have played with him. " You make it sound like you have inside information from multiple sources, confirming that Sheets doesn't stay in shape. In actuality, it was really just one guy from almost a decade ago. Talk about overstating your "insider information." You think Sheets has a bad work ethic and many others agree with you. I'm not as comfortable assuming such a thing but it's certainly possible. Let's just not state it as fact, please.

Anyway, I heard that I would be able to view high-definition DVDs using the XBox 360. Is that true? You can download high def movies for a reasonable price.

As end said, the hard drive is worth it if only to download the demos. Heck, I've put 5+ hours into just messing around with demos of games I know I'll never buy. If you are a single player kind of guy, when it comes to non-sports games, you have to check out Mass Effect and Bioshock.

Can you really say anyone "look very foolish" based on a conjecture about what will happen over the next three years? If Suppan has a 5.0+ ERA in 2009 and 2010, he'll simply explain that the Brewers paid was market value. Never mind if he was actually worth market value. Just follow the leader, apparently.

Finally found the 2007 correlations: <span class="statdef">[url=http://www.baseballprospectus.com/glossary/index.php?search=PECOTA]PECOTA[/url]</span> .627 ZiPS .622 CHONE .599 Marcel .591 RotoWire .582 ESPN .581 THT .579 RotoTimes .574 [url=http://www.baseballprospectus.com/unfiltered/?p=564]LINK[/url] Trivial difference between PECOTA and ZiPS with regard to correlation and ZiPS did just as well overall, as Silver acknowledges: <span style="font-style: italic;">"So, another good year from </span><span style="font-style: italic;" class="statdef">[url=http://www.baseballprospectus.com/glossary/index.php?search=PECOTA]PECOTA[/url]</span><span style="font-style: italic;">,</span><br style="font-style: italic;"> <span style="font-style: italic;">certainly a good year from ZiPS - Dan does excellent work. I think we</span><br style="font-style: italic;"> <span style="font-style: italic;">can call those two co-champs, but several of the other systems weren't</span><br style="font-style: italic;"> <span style="font-style: italic;">far behind. We'll repeat this exercise for pitchers at some point</span><br style="font-style: italic;"> <span style="font-style: italic;">within the next week or two." </span>

I'd like to see a link showing PECOTA having the best correlations by a "pretty strong margin" for 3 years running. Am I to assume it came from BP? That runs contrary to the couple of studies I've ran across, recently. Depending on the exact test used, the "winner" changed. With respect to straight linear correlation, several were pretty darn close to each other. Can't find a link ATM, though.

I would agree on both counts, though they almost always miss the breakouts, which to me, is why projections are made. Most projection systems aren't built to find breakouts. The foundation of most of them is simply a weighted average of the last three or four years, regressed and adjusted for age. Tangotiger's Marcel projection system only does that (he even ignores minor league numbers) and can hang with any projection system, including PECOTA. Maybe PECOTA is better at finding the break outs, but they don't consistently beat the other systems overall, from what I've seen at least. I don't think any projection system has proved itself far superior to the rest. Projections are the good, safe bet but they can never be too accurate. A 600 AB sample of a player's true ability has a lot of error associated with it to begin with.