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.
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Tuesday, October 06, 2009Greatest game in Metrodome history?Earlier this year, I wrote a column for THT titled: "The 10 greatest games in Metrodome history." Looks like I spoke too soon. Clearly, today's game belongs high on the list. Where? Well, it's a judgement call of course. You have to weigh the quality of the game alongside its importance. Still, I don't see how you rank it any lower than third, and frankly, it may very well belong up top. Game Seven of 1991 still has a special place in baseball history just because it was a Game 7 of a World Series, but today's contest was also a winner take all. Was it the greatest game. . . . maybe I'll think otherwise later, but as of right now .. . Yeah, it was the greatest game in Metrodome history. It had comebacks, numerous late-inning dramatics, an 10th inning comeback, plays at the plate - - it was just unreal. With my personal interest in managers, I couldn't help but think while watching it in the final inning that this game dramatizes how it's tough to be a manager. If the Twins lose, Gardenhire gets roasted for blowing through all his relievers. Instead, the Tigers lost so Leyland can get nailed for sticking with his guy for too long. Will RotoInfo steal this post?I'm not going to bother with linking to them, because I don't want to reward the sort of behavior they engage in, but the website RotoInfo steals posts. It seems like this is all they do with their MLB "blog." This is something I've noticed before with other websites, and I've notified those writers of it. But today, it happened to a post I wrote, and it really bothers me greatly. So if you operate a baseball-related website, please:
They are nothing but a bunch of parasites, and they deserve every bit of scorn they get. UPDATE: They will:  Your vote for the AL Cy YoungAt the end of my article on Friday discussing the five contenders for the AL Cy Young Award, we ran a poll asking for your vote. With a good response - we had 775 votes - we can safely call this one a landslide:  The huge margin for Zack Greinke meant I had to combine third through fifth place finishers to make the pie chart legible. So for simplicity sake, here is a list of the final percentages of all the candidates: Greinke - 85% Hernandez - 6% Halladay - 4% Verlander - 3% Sabathia - 1% Other - < 1% Something tells me if we did another poll where we asked who should finish second in the Cy Young balloting, those results would be much closer. Thanks to everyone who cast their vote. Is McLouth a fourth outfielder?From a recent BPro chat by Joe Sheehan: Nate McLouth is still a fourth OF masquerading as a starting CF. Is this really so? JC Bradbury doesn't think so, and marshalls the evidence that says otherwise. He does a decent job and seems much more invested in the particular outcome than I do so I'll leave that to him. But in that very same BPro chat, McLouth's name links to his DT card. Do the DTs support what Sheehan is saying? In short, no. WARP1, by year: 2007: 2.1 2008: 5.1 2009: 4.0 As far as I can discern, a league-average position player gets about 3 WARP in 650 PAs (putting the replacement level baseline for WARP1 a bit lower than for, say, Fangraphs/Baseball Projection WAR, assuming that a league average pitcher with full playing time also gets about 3 WARP - this isn't a full "what's wrong with WARP1" study so I'm not going into detail on this.) McLouth played a partial season in 2007 and proceeded to put up above-average seasons in '08 and '09 - by BPro's own metric! If Sheehan thinks that WARP1 is wrong or somehow flawed he should probably speak up about it. But looking at the WAR figures on Fangraphs (where an average player is worth about 2 WAR a season in 650 PA) it seems that WARP1 is basically right about McLouth from where I sit; the only point the two measures seem to disagree upon is where to put the replacement level. (Which, again, really needs its own "what's wrong with WARP1" post to deal with all those issues. It's just that its evaluation of McLouth relative to his peers really isn't one of WARP1's problems.) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||