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vaball

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Everything posted by vaball

  1. vaball
    AKA faux-wrigleyville. It would have been sweet if they built the new stadium in Soulard. But then downtown might really die. Not to mention no great highway of metrolink access. Still, would have been cool.
  2. vaball
    Well they're building the ball park village, a combo of retail, office, and residential where the old Busch is. There was some talk of throwing an aquarium in it at one point. I think they're also moving the Cards HOF to either a new building or the stadium itself. We'll see how it all turns out.
  3. vaball
    It's a shame because he had such good nickname potential.
  4. vaball
    I think you're right. The Cardinals are trying to level the one advantage the Cubs have over them, revenue. They will have a new stadium, their own radio station, and will be landlords in the ballpark village. Give a superior management even more resources and I would be worried if I were the Cubs. As for Paul Sullivan I don't care what he writes. I'm not very attached to Busch. It's the best of the cookie cutters, that's about all you can say for it. I just hope the new one turns out well.
  5. vaball
    I know, we could use his bat in the lineup.
  6. vaball
    If Marquis keeps up what he's done for the last three games over his remainging starts I say we make him the #3 starter. If he's hot, we should just go with it.
  7. vaball
    I'm gonna repost Rob Neyer's comments on Jones that I posted on page two so they don't get buried. A lot of people on this forum seem to put a lot of stock in his opinions so I want to see what they think about his opinion that Jones is only a "good" defensive center fielder. ROB NEYER I'll say this again (I've been saying it all week) . . . Andruw Jones is no longer a Gold Glove-quality center fielder. He is good, but not great. If he were the same fielder he was five years ago, he'd be my MVP. But then again, if he were the fielder he was in 2000 he probably wouldn't be the hitter he is in 2005.
  8. vaball
    Edmonds has played some bad defense against the Cubs. Both this season and last. I remember thinking it was kind of funny both times because Cubs fans accuse him of so much hot dogging and poor positioning and there he was making very uncharacteristic miscues against the Cubs. By contrast ask some Reds fans what they think of his defense. He has taken so many homeruns away from them the past two years it's absurd.
  9. vaball
    This is what Rob Neyer thinks of Andruw's defense: ROB NEYER I'll say this again (I've been saying it all week) . . . Andruw Jones is no longer a Gold Glove-quality center fielder. He is good, but not great. If he were the same fielder he was five years ago, he'd be my MVP. But then again, if he were the fielder he was in 2000 he probably wouldn't be the hitter he is in 2005.
  10. vaball
    Well this game came down to a Pujols dropped double play ball. Sure, Mulder should have gotten that third out, but if Pujols doesn't drop that throw from Eck we might have been looking at 1-0 Cardinals and a 4-4 record against the Cubs at Busch this season. I think these games mean more to the Cubs now than to the Cardinals and have since before that last series at Wrigley. The Cubs are totally out of the race and are just playing for pride. A series against the Cards is like their postseason. The Cards are just going through the motions waiting for the playoffs to start. Normally I get all pumped up for a game against the Cubs, and would be pissed after losing to them. But right now I couldn't care less. I'm just twiddling my thumbs until October.
  11. vaball
    Ah, the good ol' preemptive strike.
  12. vaball
    Well good luck with that. You'll likely spend the next couple of days lying in bed on pain killers. It'll give you plenty of time to crunch those numbers and report back on the accuracy of pythagorean projections. :wink:
  13. vaball
    So basically the more wins a team has the more potential win shares for any given player. That seems pretty straight forward. Pujols may end up with more total win shares because his team has more wins. Is that right. I don't get Pythagorean projections though. Doesn't that formula only take into account total runs scored? How does it take into account the distribution of a team's runs scored? A team might score 14 runs one day and win, then 1 the next day and lose. It just seems like an overly simplistic formula to me, but then I'm not a statistician. Is there any data on how accurate the pythagorean percentages are? If the formula is good shouldn't the actual percentages conform to the predicted ones more often than not? At what threshold do we say that in fact the formula is inadequate, not that a given team is getting lucky?
  14. vaball
    Constable I'm not disputing your analysis of win shares. I'm not really disputing anything. I'm asking about Pythagorean projections. How do they work? Until I understand them better I'm kind of dubious about them.
  15. vaball
    I think it would be a big mistake for the Cubs to offer Lee a mega money extension like some want them to. Since the all-star break he has hit .286 with a .381 OBP and .573 SLG for a .954 OPS. Still very good, but a far cry from his first half numbers. I would wait and see what he does next season before pulling an Adrian Beltre or Carlos Beltran like the Mariners and Mets did based on basically one season and one post-season respectively. I would only trade Lee if I could get half a team for him like the Brewers did with Sexson.
  16. vaball
    I think he might be if the Cards don't put him on their 40 man roster. They should. What he's done this season in the minors he has pretty much done on raw talent. If he could hit for better average and improve his defense within the next couple of years he could make it to the majors in time to contribute.
  17. vaball
    So if win shares are predicated on pythagorean record, how do we know that the pythagorean projections are correct? I mean no stat is perfect right? There are always some variables at work that any given stat can't take into account. This isn't me just being argumentative, I just wonder sometimes about some of these sabermetrics.
  18. vaball
    Duncan had his suspension reduced to 2 games by the way.
  19. vaball
    So tonight Brenly talked about how Maddux "has been known to" hit guys who are hitting him well. So does everyone have a problem with that? I don't. There's nothing wrong with a pitcher trying to shake up a guy who's getting too comfortable in the box against him. Personally I think fans get a little overly sensitive on this topic. Whenever one of their own gets hit they cry murder, even if it's obviously not intentional. And even if it is intentioanal, big deal, it's part of the game.
  20. vaball
    So Mariotti's advice is basically that the Cubs should acquire all of the most coveted free agents this offseason. Genius.
  21. vaball
    I don't know if they are worse that the Rockies, but they are pretty bad. Well sure, but consider all of baseball. Tampa, KC, Pittsburgh, Colorado are all locks at the bottom, and that takes up 4 of the 5 spots. Throw in the other 6-7 teams that have worse Winning % than the Cubs, and it's pretty apparent that there's bias/bitterness/pettyness at work there. I'm not saying the Cubs are as bad as KC or Tampa, but compare the relative resources and the Cubs have bungled this season pretty damn badly. It also seems to me like accusing people from St. Louis, even so called "journalists," of bias against the Cubs is kind of like Todd Walker complaining that Cards announcers are biased. I guess I have different expectations of the local TV outlet compared to the Sunday edition of a newspaper with the scope of the P-D. To each their own I guess. Yeah, one expects a little more out of print journalism, but when it comes to a rivalry like Cubs-Cardinals it affects everyone. Only disinterested third-parties are capable of unbias.
  22. vaball
    I don't know if they are worse that the Rockies, but they are pretty bad. Well sure, but consider all of baseball. Tampa, KC, Pittsburgh, Colorado are all locks at the bottom, and that takes up 4 of the 5 spots. Throw in the other 6-7 teams that have worse Winning % than the Cubs, and it's pretty apparent that there's bias/bitterness/pettyness at work there. I'm not saying the Cubs are as bad as KC or Tampa, but compare the relative resources and the Cubs have bungled this season pretty damn badly. It also seems to me like accusing people from St. Louis, even so called "journalists," of bias against the Cubs is kind of like Todd Walker complaining that Cards announcers are biased.
  23. vaball
    Because they are. Jones isn't even the MVP of his own team. The numbers on this are obvious to anyone who choses to look. It's not even close, like with Pujols and Lee.
  24. vaball
    Which makes me wonder why anyone would trade for Atlanta's pitchers or their pitching prospects. Other than Jason Schmidt, I'm trying to think of impact pitchers that they let go who then had success after leaving. I still remember people scratching their heads when they let go of Avery, Rocker, Milwood, etc. It will be interesting to see how the two pitchers we picked up from them in the Holla trade work out. I remember other trades we made getting some of their pitching prospects not working out --Michah Bowie, Ruben Quevedo and Andy freakin' Pratt. Marquis has gotten better since leaving Atlanta. Apparently Mazzone wanted him to throw mainly a four seamer and when he got to St. Louis Duncan told him to go with what god gave him and throw the sinker. When Marquis throws the sinker he is very good. It's when he gets it into his head that he's a strikeout pitcher and starts tossing all kinds of breaking stuff that he gets lit up.
  25. vaball
    That's what always made me wonder. How do they know? His quote in the paper makes it seem like they have a t.v. in the dugout or something, like he heard the announcers live, not on tape later in the afternoon. In which case I have no idea why they would want to watch the game on t.v while it is going on in front of their eyes. Maybe they duck into the clubhouse to watch replays. In this case Walker might have gone in to see footage of himself gettting thrown out by a mile, and that's when he heard the Cardinals announcers, for some odd reason, praising the Cardinals.
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