CubinNY

That's crazy talk. The Dodgers are 5 games and 4 teams back. The next closest has a worse record than the Pittsburgh Pirates, yeah those guys.

Not for you, for whatshisface who always bitches about us bitching about Lou: -Every super hero has one weakness, Lou's is the proper use of a bullpen.

That show must be great to listen to. Max Kellerman is tough to take seriously.

i'm not so sure. he tends to get painted this way because he grew up in the burbs and went to Northwestern I am pretty sure he grew up in NY; he was certainly born there. Stuyvesant is a prominent private school located in Manhattan. My stepfather attended in the 60's. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Greenberg Thus he is a Jets fan. He covered the Bulls and to a lesser extent the Cubs while working here back in the early and mid 90's following his graduation from Northwestern. I doubt he grew up loving Chicago baseball, but he doesn't seem to mention it on-air. Stuyvesant is not a private school, but it might as well be. It's one of the best public high schools in the country. It is supposedly a "math" and "science" high school but almost every kid that goes to that school has some serious brain power. You might be thinking of Horace Mann, which is a very expensive and very private high school in Westchester County.

That doesn't really make much sense. Whomever finishes in second has the highest odds of winning the WC. The Yankees clearly don't have the highest odds of finishing second, Boston or TB do.

Meph, I think you give far, far too much value to chance. Competitive sports like baseball is not the same thing as rolling a six sided dice and looking at variance and probability. There are far too many variables in play to chalk victory up to luck. It's my one big gripe with the saber community. They have a weird fetish to want to chalk up any unexplained variance to luck. It's really a piss poor way to do behavioral analysis. A manger making a poor decision that cost his team 1 game in April can have a big effect in September if his team loses the WC by one game. That's not bad luck. We could go round and round on this one but I think luck is a default position, one only used when all other possibilities have been exhausted.

Clearly, right now there are no deserving non-in-first teams to make the playoffs than the Brewers, Cardinals, Mets, and Marlins (I have those guys). If I were a betting man I'd take the Phillies/Marlins first, then the Brewers. The inevitable hand of sample size is catching up to the Cardinals and the Brewers are managed by Ned Yost. The Phillies have the offense to overcome their middling pitching and the Marlins are getting back Johnson and Sanchez.

Brenly's sniffing something alright.

The Cubs shouldn't be afraid of facing anyone. The Division should be the goal. It's the only sure way to get in. The "Wild Card" is just that.

Fight, fight, fight. Para vs. Prince after Para gives up 6 in 6.

But to be fair, the Red Sox are thinking "Nomar part 2" with this deal. They got rid of a franchise icon, Nomar, and replace him with serviceable players like Mientkiewicz (at the time) and Orlando Cabrera, and in a separate deals Dave Roberts and Mike Myers and they went with the "team" concept the rest of the way. Now I understand that Manny was on that team, but I remember Nomar becoming a distraction that yr, because A: He turned down a contract extension and B: He pulled himself out of an Red Sox/Yankee game in which we saw that DJ "overrated catch" into the stands. They got rid of a distraction and it proved dividends. They're hoping history repeats itself with Jason Bay. But I do think this trade will definately hurt the Sox chances of getting into the playoffs. You don't get rid of a talent like Manny and only settle for Jason Bay. I like Bay, and I am glad he is no longer in Pittsburgh, but I could see him struggle under the burden of replacing Manny in LF. Can you really replicate those kinds of counterintuitive trades though? Isn't that sort of like pulling off a Carlos Lee for Scott Podsednik like swap and saying it'll work out with a World Series victory like it did in 2005? I don't know. Bay strikes out a little more than Manny (I think, I'm eyeballing the numbers) but hits a much lower line drive percentage for a lower BABIP. He seems like a .280-.285 ish hitter which will keep the OBP and SLG lower. They're going to miss Manny's production when he wasn't pouting, but I think Bay can make up about 2/3 or 3/4 of the non-pouting Manny. That's more than they were getting out of the pouting Manny.

Good topic and good post. This is exactly the cushion the Cubs need.

Who are the particulars?

That's hilarious.

Changing the likelihood that you win the games doesn't really change the standard deviation. A team with a 105 win talent level will still have a standard deviation of 6 games. The problem isn't the math, it is the assumption that math is based on. The odds of winning or losing a game are not 50/50 unless "talent" is equally distributed across the two teams. That almost never is the case. It's kind of like in vegas. The roulette wheel is set up so that no matter what happens, in the long run the house wins. Yes, that's what I was just saying. Every team still has that same standard deviation regardless of their talent level. I don't see how that invalidates his conclusion. A binomial distribution assumes that the there is an equal likelihood of a yes/no outcome. In most cases in sports there is not. Therefore, the SD is correct only in theory. It's a nice thought experiment though and shows how much chance there when two teams are equal.

Changing the likelihood that you win the games doesn't really change the standard deviation. A team with a 105 win talent level will still have a standard deviation of 6 games. The problem isn't the math, it is the assumption that math is based on. The odds of winning or losing a game are not 50/50 unless "talent" is equally distributed across the two teams. That almost never is the case. It's kind of like in vegas. The roulette wheel is set up so that no matter what happens, in the long run the house wins.

No offense to Meph, but it's one of the more ridiculous things he's written. There is no normal distribution in baseball. Talent is not equally dispersed across the league. He's still has never defined what "true talent" means. In 162 game season the best team finishes first.

What's the over on the number of games he gets tossed?

Uh, no. They went from one of the best in the game (Hunsicker) to a guy so far in over his head that anyone with an ounce of compassion had to feel sorry for him (Purpura) to a Lynch-level GM (Wade). Yes Hunsicker is the guy I was thinking of.

Yost manages kind of like Dusty but without all of the 10ç philosophy and deflection. I think he actually does more stupid stuff too.

I want to start a "Could Anybody Use Marquis" Thread.

I wonder if they'll bring up Pie and let him play a lot if they get a big lead the final month of the season.

It's crazy. They went from a good GM (Tim Purpora) to a terrible one.

Neither is baseball. Hopefully he's ready to go if need be tomorrow.

The Cubs have come to show who's what. Lou is going to kill big Z.