February 10, 2012
Now Available for 2012 THT Essentials: Now Available The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2012, an annual "must buy" for all baseball fans, is now shipping. Read this article to learn more about it.
THT's latest e-book Most Recent Comments
A baseball card mystery: Ken Holtzman’s 1974 Topps card (16)
20,000 days since Herb Score’s injury (1) A baseball card mystery: Bill Sudakis and the strange light (5) Super at the right time (2) Would the Nationals consider holding back Strasburg? (3)  
Lucas Apostoleris
Rich Barbieri John Barten Brian Borawski Vince Caramela Chris Jaffe Brad Johnson Mat Kovach Kevin Lai Myron Logan Chris Lund Bruce Markusen Jeff Moore Troy Patterson Harry Pavlidis Dave Studeman Steve Treder David Wade And here's the full roster. Dish TV Packages options for all televised baseball games.
Or you can search by:
Gear up for baseball season with Chicago White Sox tickets and New York Yankees tickets. LA Angels tickets, Houston Astros tickets, and Atlanta Braves tickets are hot sellers! You can get Boston Red Sox tickets, San Diego Padres tickets or Chicago Cubs tickets for your favorite baseball fan. Coast to Coast Tickets has the best MLB tickets like Minnesota Twins tickets, LA Dodgers tickets, Milwaukee Brewers tickets, New York Met tickets and St. Louis Cardinals tickets.  All content on this site (including text, graphs, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Part of the USA Today Sports Media Group |
Tuesday, March 25, 2008Escobar injury instant analysisIn SG's latest Diamond Mind projections blowout, a composite projection built from six different projection systems projects the Angels to about 88 wins on average, about eight more than the A's and a few more than that over the Mariners. Assuming, say, that Escobar is projected to be about three wins above replacement, missing a third of the season could cost the Angels a win or so. Probably not even that much, given that THT's projections have Joe Saunders, his likely replacement with a 4.60 ERA, which is a significant downgrade but still better than replacement. So ultimately, this shouldn't be a big deal in the grand scheme of things other than narrowing their margin, both in terms of performance and ability to absorb injuries. This is a pretty different situation than the Red Sox with Josh Beckett, as they have a much smaller margin over the Yankees to begin with. Escobar Resets Throwing ProgramKelvim Escobar experienced shoulder discomfort and has stopped his throwing program for now. Escobar never even made it back to throwing off a mound before this surfaced. A return in May is now quite optimistic. 2008 Over UndersPatrick Sullivan tackles over unders for wins over at Baseball Analysts, introducing his piece with the following introduction: Many would argue that the crux of Sabermetrics is that you can predict a team's win total by analyzing a team's ability to score and prevent runs. Virtually all other research aimed at determining what contributes to a baseball club's winning efforts, on both an individual and team-wide level, is derived from this finding. Sabermetric projection mechanisms with these principles at their core offer a neat opportunity for the enterprising individual to take advantage of Vegas over/under win totals. I'm actually going to disagree with him on this one. It's unclear to me whether he's using something like a PECOTA or ZIPS (or THT Projections!) driven Diamond Mind simulation, but at this point it's well known to the point of being cliche that in general it's hard to beat the market in this sort of thing, even if you're an expert. While prediction markets are certainly not infallible, I do think that sports betting markets are pretty close to ideal prediction markets, as they aggregate the opinions of a large crowd of people with diverse opinions, are generally too large to manipulate and everyone contributes different knowledge to the pot. Do players turn “clutch” when chasing a personal goal?Phil Birnbaum looks into a Bill James piece that claims that players perform better when approaching round number goals, such as 20 wins. Birnbaum argues that the difference could be attributed more to opportunity, and presents some compelling evidence for his claim in the piece. Personally, I think Birnbaum is probably right, and there's not enough evidence for me to reject the null hypothesis, that players perform the same on average in all situations, in this case. Adrian Beltre Needs SurgeryOne of my readers over at The Disabled List Informer had posed a question pertaining to Adrian Beltre and his lingering left thumb pain. The article can be found at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||