Diffusion

That's not what Moneyball is about at all. Moneyball is about coming to a fuller understanding of the game, primarily through an emphasis on relatively objective evidence, and using that knowledge to exploit market inefficiencies and so punch above one's weight. The fact that some of the players that the A's target as they go about doing that tend to be unwanted is entirely secondary. Is it not the case that baseball statistics (with a few relatively minor exceptions: hit/error rulings, for instance) are entirely objective? And are they not evidence? If so, then you might as well be saying that sabermetrics is the analysis of baseball statistics through baseball statistics, or that sabermetrics is the study of objective evidence through objective evidence. Which you obviously should avoid saying. You'd be far better off using a quoted definition of sabermetrics. Bill James' "the search for objective knowledge about baseball" perhaps. Either "only a few" or just "few". Are you entirely sure that the turning point in all of this was the publication of Moneyball? I'm not saying that it isn't, but that's a pretty bold statement, that a book changed the game, and you must be aware that that's exactly what your sentence there implies. Ditch the word profitable. Profitable references the bottom line, income relative to expenditure. That's economics. Your essay is about sabermetrics. You don't want to go into a diatribe about whether baseball teams are making more money these days, which you have to do to justify making a statement like this. You don't then want to have to prove that sabermetrics is responsible for them making more money these days, largely because that'd be just about impossible. Stick to the baseball and get rid of the word profitable. And if you're getting onto dodgy ground underfoot if you're going to argue that there's been an increase in the ability of teams to compete since they adopted a more sabermetric approach because they read Moneyball. At the very least you're going to have to justify this statement. You certainly can't just leave it out there, merely referencing the success of the A's (who were successful before Moneyball, hence Moneyball being written), the Braves (who have very little to do with sabermetrics, so I've no idea why you've included them, and they were running a winning organisation long, long before Moneyball anyway) and the Red Sox (who also had the "ability to compete" well before Moneyball - the Red Sox have finished second in the division since 1998, Moneyball was published in May 2003) Batting average is a counting stat? Oh, and please, statistics aren't faulty. A statistic can't be faulty. What's faulty, if anything, is either the design of it or someone's application of it. Batting average is hits divided by at-bats. If you must express at-bats as a function of plate appearances, the denominator is (PA - BB - HBP - S - SF). So what? On-base percentage doesn't measure power. Slugging percentage doesn't measure the ability of a player to steal bases. Does that mean that those statistics are flawed? Of course not. You judge a statistic against what it's designed to measure. And batting average is designed to measure how often a player gets on with a hit, and it does a great job of that. Your line of argument here should be a) that how often you get on with a hit isn't all there is to being a good offensive player and b) the traditional application of batting average as a measure of how good offensively a player is thus is greviously flawed. Again, so what? On-base percentage is designed to tell you how often a player avoids making an out. It does that just fine. You seem under the impression that you need to make a decision as to a player's offensive value on the basis of just one statistic. That is not the case. So you should stop deriding statistics that aren't designed as catch-all measures for not being catch-all measures. Look at what a statistic does, not what it doesn't do. If the metric is commonly applied in such a way that doesn't fit with what it can and can't tell you, then complain about the application of it. You've got this entire bit about statistics (which sadly makes up most of your piece) backwards. The denominator is again wrong. See batting average for the correction. A lousy example, though it makes the very point that I've been making all along: you don't judge a player just on his slugging percentage, or just on his average, or just on his on-base percentage. None are designed as a catch all measure. On the first day of the season, Player A hits four singles (1.000/1.000/1.000). Player B hits a home run and makes three outs (.250/.250/.1000). Anyone here want to argue that Player A and B both done equal good? Well, you're wrong, because on average Player A contributed 1.44 more runs to the cause in that game. But, yes, you're right in your basic point that each total base is not created exactly equal. As such two players can have identical slugging percentages (and averages and on-bases) but have contributed different amounts to their teams by virtue of the way they amassed those total bases. Suppose Player A and Player B put up absolutely identical numbers over a season with the exception that Player A hits 30 more doubles, but Player B hits 20 more singles and 10 more home runs. Player B actually on average contributes 0.3 runs because of the difference in the way the total bases were put up. As such, slugging percentage isn't a perfect measure. But it's good enough: 0.3 runs over a season really isn't that much, and if you want a more extreme example you have to involve guys that hit 30 triples or something similarly unplausible. Meh. I know what you're trying to say, but that's completely the wrong way of saying it. I see plenty of them. From 1959-2004, there were 171 instances of a player with 300 or more at-bats in the season having a .290-.310 average and a .390-.410 slugging. The most recent examples include Darin Erstad and Edgardo Alfonzo in 2004, BJ Surhoff and Sean Casey in 2003, Dan Wilson and Jose Vizcaino in 2002. Again, so what? It's not designed to. It's design is pretty sound. No-one even wrongly uses it that way. There's not much wrong with its application. In other words, there's not much wrong with slugging percentage. Actually, I'm pretty sure the only person that's refined Runs Created is Bill James. How closely? Closely compared to what? And does a rubbish job of it. It's poorly designed, because a total base isn't worth a walk isn't worth a stolen bases isn't worth a caught stealing. Using at-bats as the denominator is contentious at best. And the statistic is completely redundant, because it doesn't tell you anything you can't tell from an AVG/OBP/SLG line. That's why you never see it used in modern day sabermetrics. That's a pretty horrid way of making that point. Actually, since 1998, the NL has comfortably outscored the AL every year. Obviously that's down to it having two extra teams, but it still invalidates what you've written. I know what you're trying to write, obviously, but you need to re-word. OPS+ is a horrible statistic by the way. Cool, it adjusts for park and league average, but it's still OPS. And it's still adding two things that use different scales. Always? Please. Next you'll be telling me Billy Beane has never made a mistake in his life because of sabermetrics. Are you implying causation or not? I can't tell. Esteban Loaiza? You're writing this whole thing as though the reader knows nothing about baseball. So you have to tell them that Giambi used to play for Oakland. And you should mention that the A's got their draft picks for him, and that this is a policy they pursued with Ray Durham, Miguel Tejada etc as well. Then go and look up who they drafted with those picks, and what they're doing for the team now. You should probably mention that by best season of his career, you're talking about .280/.374/.433, which is extremely unremarkable for a first baseman. And you should probably also mention that Hatteberg was rubbish in two of those three extra seasons, and that he earned $6.5m for them. The Braves have just about nothing to do with sabermetrics. Maybe look at the BlueJays, who pretend to under Riccardi. Or the Dodgers under DePodesta. Or would that not be one sided enough for you? You should include a source for these kind of assertions. What? On? Earth? Are? You? On? About? Otherwise, besides spelling, punctuation and grammar etc., it's just about acceptable. If you want to improve it you need to look at your writing style, you need to back up the points that you make in much greater depth, you need to take a much much more objective viewpoint (because, ironically, your essay on the great and the good of objective evidence is currently riddled with your subjective high opinion of everything sabermetrics touches), and you should probably stop looking at sabermetrics just in terms of the statistics that it argues are more valuable when it comes to player evaluation. There's more to sabermetrics than RC27 etc.. It'd probably make for a much more interesting read that way as well. Drearily explaining one statistic after another really isn't doing much for me. I don't know how old you are or what the significance of this paper is, so bear that in mind.

What are OBP's flaws? I'll read the paper in a minute.

For someone one year from free agency that's by no means an ace, Barry Zito is criminally overvalued.

I liked it too. And I hated the Gerut/Lawton and Lawton/Berg deals.

By my reckoning that's now $589.725m that's been handed out in free agent contracts since the end of the 2004 season to the following nineteen pitchers... Kevin Millwood, AJ Burnett, Pedro Martinez, Roger Clemens, Matt Clement, Jarrod Washburn, Brad Radke, Jon Lieber, Derek Lowe, Paul Byrd, Esteban Loaiza, Kris Benson, Carl Pavano, Odalis Perez, Matt Morris, Kenny Rogers, Jaret Wright, Eric Milton and Russ Ortiz Jeff Weaver is licking his lips. And Clemens is probably tempted to try and get himself a five year deal.

Six regulars with a .397+ OBP!

By the way, I should point out that by Spring Training, I'm only including time with the major league team, because I can't find the numbers for the minor league spring training games. If you know where I can find them, again, let me know and I'll take them into account.

Thought this might be interesting and yet useless at the same time, but if you include all of Cedeno's hitting over the last two years, from the beginning of 2004, Spring Training, Double-A, Arizona Fall League, Spring Training, Triple-A, Majors and now Winter Ball (I don't think Ronny played Winter Ball last year, let me know if he did and I'll take it into account)... .310/.361/.437 in 1053 PA

I'm well aware, he was on my fantasy team at the time. For the record, before he was shutdown last year... 60.2 IP, 49 H, 3 HR, 14 BB, 52 K, 2.08 ERA Superficially very good. But, CPat, you know as well as I do that 49 hits allowed in 60.2 innings with just 52 strikeouts means luck on balls in play. His FIPS ERA is a whole run higher at 3.02. Make an adjustment for a flukishly low number of flyballs going out for home runs (in the long term, there's evidence to suggest that there's a universal trend amongst pitchers of 1 in 10 flyballs going for home runs), and his sustainable ERA is probably nearer around about 3.45. Still very good for the AL. But we're talking about the best spell Bedard's ever had. Isn't Camden Yards a hitters park? Well, for 2003-05... Baltimore, 0.94 R, 0.98 H, 0.92 2B, 1.00 HR, 1.06 BB, 0.96 K http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/files/oracle/discussion/weighted_park_factors_2003_2005/ 1.00 is neutral, below is pitcher friendly, higher is hitter friendly. So, not really.

Interesting. So there were no 20 game winners with a >3.80 ERA from 1986-1990 and 1992-1996? Hm. I don't have much to add to this post, but just found the results interesting. Yep. The shortened 1994/95 seasons probably help explain the second period a little.

I'm well aware, he was on my fantasy team at the time. For the record, before he was shutdown last year... 60.2 IP, 49 H, 3 HR, 14 BB, 52 K, 2.08 ERA Superficially very good. But, CPat, you know as well as I do that 49 hits allowed in 60.2 innings with just 52 strikeouts means luck on balls in play. His FIPS ERA is a whole run higher at 3.02. Make an adjustment for a flukishly low number of flyballs going out for home runs (in the long term, there's evidence to suggest that there's a universal trend amongst pitchers of 1 in 10 flyballs going for home runs), and his sustainable ERA is probably nearer around about 3.45. Still very good for the AL. But we're talking about the best spell Bedard's ever had.

Show me the last pitcher who had a mediocre season and won 20 games. Pitching very well is a pre-req for winning 20 games. Russ Ortiz in 2003. Damnit, ok show me the last one before him. Pitchers with >20 wins, ERA > 3.80, 1986-2005 Russ Ortiz, 2003, 21 wins, 3.81 ERA for Braves Andy Pettitte, 2003, 21 wins, 4.02 ERA for Yankees Jon Lieber, 2001, 20 wins, 3.80 ERA for Cubs Tim Hudson, 2000, 20 wins, 4.14 ERA for A's Darryl Kile, 2000, 20 wins, 3.91 ERA for Cardinals David Wells, 2000, 20 wins, 4.11 ERA for BlueJays Rick Helling, 1998, 20 wins, 4.41 ERA for Rangers Brad Radke, 1997, 20 wins, 3.87 ERA for Twins Bill Gullickson, 1991, 20 wins, 3.90 ERA for Tigers

He can't, and I'm one of his biggest fans. Well, okay, maybe he can be a marginal 2. He's got no shot at being a 1.

Best sounding post in this entire thread.

A grammar, factual, and predictive error. The holy trinity of crappy writing. Grammatical. :lol: My resume to the Trib is in the mail. Commiserations on not getting the job. You're not going to be up to their requirements in terms of the factual and predictive.

A grammar, factual, and predictive error. The holy trinity of crappy writing. Grammatical. :lol:

Then move on and look elsewhere for help. Current Cubs + Tejada - Prior does not = champion. So there's no point in making the deal. Exactly. No deal is better than a terrible deal. I agree. But I also think it's fair to say that all deals are better than this terrible deal!

They're either diabolically brilliant in trying to exploit Hendry's desperation, or incredibly stupid for looking a gift horse in the mouth and not taking the already lopsided deal and running. Or, and this is what I'm clinging to, the reporting of what's going on is completely unrelated to the reality.

I went to check if there were any other Prior's in our organisation that maybe we could hoodwink the O's into taking in the deal, you know, instead of the Mark Prior, but no luck with that. No other Prior's. He's the one and only. I did find these though... Mark McGuire, Executive Vice President, Business Operations David Knickerbocker, Account Executive (in Marketing Department) Mike Hill, Manager, Event Operations/Security (Stadium Operations Department) Leo Sosa, Ticket Sales Representative (Ticket Operations Department) So, I say we trade the O's Sosa, again, send them Hill if they really want him and like his curveball, and throw in Mark McGuire to see if Angelos can spell correctly (I somewhat doubt it). But don't send them Mark Prior! That'd just be silly.

That'd be the first 88 player trade! Phil Rogers didn't make that one up. You can tell because it doesn't include Kerry Wood.

I think they would want a more impact bat then Murton now that they have so many holes to fill. It's possible that a Patterson, Pie, Cedeno and Murton could work depending on how high on Cedeno they would be. Given that I think Patterson, Pie and Murton would be a huge price to pay, I'm not exactly amenable to throwing in Cedeno too and having to suffer Neifi. A hole now is a hole for a long time unless the farm system comes up big if we have Manny's salary hampering the team's financial flexibility.

Believe otherwise. After 2008.

Ironically, Johnny Damon looks like he's from a bygone era without the caveman look. Gross, gross overpayment by the Yankees, but when you scarcely have a budget you need to stick to, does it actually matter? Coco Crisp would be a fantastic move for the Red Sox if they could get him. He's better than Damon at this very moment. He's sure as anything going to be better than him in four years time. And cheaper. The Red Sox were looking for Mike Cameron and Lastings Milledge from the Mets in mid-season when they were looking to trade Manny. They were asking for Mike Cameron on the basis of him being a very good defensive centre fielder with a decent bat. They were asking for Lastings Milledge because he's a top prospect. They weren't willing to eat much of Manny's monstrous contract. If the new management in Boston thinks along similar lines, Felix Pie is going to be asked for. The Cubs will have to pay just about all of the $57m/3yrs. Corey Patterson is a good defensive centre fielder, and his bat probably isn't at this stage a total lost cause, plus he's younger and cheaper than Cameron. Buy low too. But my guess is, because Corey and Pie aren't worth Cameron and Milledge, and because replacing Manny would be harder now, they'd want Matt Murton back too. It'd be a huge amount to pay.

So you don't think Baker and/or Hendry should get extension's? :D I'm only in favour of extension if they're on a torture rack at the time.

I have a better trade suggestion, though it's loosely based upon Ken Rosenthal's... Jim Hendry, Dusty Baker, Jacque Jones, Juan Pierre and Neifi Perez for the right to pay the money remaining on the Sidney Ponson's contract when it's ruled that the O's terminated it illegally.