Sarcastic

When I heard them say that, I was afraid they were thinking about moving Dempster to the rotation again.

I heard this too. Has this been reported anywhere else, or was it just an ESPN blooper?

Who gets the lead off PH for the bottom of the 8th?

The Cubs traded garbage for garbage in the Kendall trade. I don't think it will make a big difference.

Did he get a single pitch that wasn't in the dirt that AB?

And yet Hill is still so much worse.

Several full counts that inning. At least they made him work for the outs.

And after all, isn't that what really matters? We don't need to dumb down the board.

A. It's hard to tell if you're serious. B. Don't write in green. Green = sarcasm :lol: Wow, what a great idea.

I think we might be expecting too much from Wood too soon. He is coming off significant downtime, he'll probably be inconsistent even if he is at 100%. Hopefully he can regain some of that consistency with regular work in the pen and become another reliable reliever for close games, but I'm not counting on it.

Probably that trading Pie for Willis is a horrible idea? yes, but it went beyond that -- it was almost deep Was that it? I didn't think it was, but you kind of left it unexplained.

I'm speaking from experience What sort of experience? I had the same surgery Interesting. I still think there are likely to be enough variables to make the recovery time between his rehab and your rehab substantially different, though, whether that means it takes more or less time. I don't claim to know when he'll be back, and I don't think we can really get any better idea than "sometime next year" until someone who actually worked with Prior or has some kind of knowledge of his rehab gives some info. We'll see.

I'm speaking from experience What sort of experience?

But you misunderstand the point they were making. Their point is that Barrett hasn't really made the pitchers worse, as is shown by the fact that his CERA is virtually the same as the back ups'. This is not mutually exclusive with the idea that CERA is worthless. In fact, the reason why Barrett's CERA is pretty much equal to the back ups' over a larger sample size is because CERA is a bogus stat, since catchers' don't have any significant impact on the pitchers they catch. The arguments are again not contradictory, they are one and the same. Barrett had 8 PB, but many, many innings caught. Looking at the career ratios of PB/innings caught for Barrett and Soto shows that Barrett is only barely more likely to have a PB in any particular inning. It adds up to several more over the course of a season, but what I said is true, Barrett is only slightly more likely to allow a PB in any given inning than Soto. If you believe that you completely missed my point. The odds may change significantly on one play, but they would not have if all of the other plays up until that point had not occurred. A walkoff grandslam in one game might be a failed rally in another. Do you not see that a game is the sum of the plays that occur in it? No one play can win a game. Did Soto have anything to do with it? Maybe, but whatever the catcher has to do with the pitcher's performance is remarkably small, as has been shown repeatedly. You can pull out all the quotes you want. They mean nothing if you have no evidence to back them up.

No competitive throwing doesn't mean he won't be able to do any rehabilitation, it just means not pitching in an actual game. And it seems to me that pitchers who have shoulder surgery aren't usually out longer than a year; that's even longer than pitchers recovering from TJS. he'll likely not throw a ball at all for 6-7 months after the surgery, and that will be 20-30 feet and very softly. it will probably take another 3 months beyond that to get up enough strength in his shoulder to throw hard enough to be confused with a baseball player. after that 9-10 months, he's looking at either extended spring training or a tour of the minors, racking up 4-6 rehab starts. 1 year isn't out of the question and almost should be expected the rehab he'll do up to that point is mostly basic range of motion exercises I expect there is a solid chance he won't be back to start the year, but do you have any sources or evidence to back up your numbers, or are we just going with gut feeling here? Lefty, again, you say the evidence suggests Prior is gone, and yet you have yet to present any real evidence. What you have is speculative at best.

No competitive throwing doesn't mean he won't be able to do any rehabilitation, it just means not pitching in an actual game. And it seems to me that pitchers who have shoulder surgery aren't usually out longer than a year; that's even longer than pitchers recovering from TJS. Correct. Lefty, you don't seem to have any actual evidence that Prior is leaving. Those shadowy figures in the closet aren't monsters, if you bothered to look. Is it possible that the Cubs may quibble over an extra million for Prior? I guess, but it seems no more likely than any other doomsday scenario you could come up with. Might the Cubs have won the grievance case? I can't say for sure, but they probably wouldn't have, and by doing so they would have pissed off Prior (a definite sign they didn't care to keep him) and gotten a bad reputation for how they treat their players. As far as why he isn't rehabbing in Chicago, I have no idea what his rehab schedule is, and I'm sure he wouldn't want to make it more public than he had tok, considering what he has gone through.

Weurtz: I'm sure the quote was what Weurt said. My point about baseball knowledge was about the conclusion Muskat drew, that Weurtz's confidence really made a difference in the game. We don't know that, and have no evidence to support such a claim besides the conventional wisdom of baseball. CERA: You say that some both describe it as insignificant and use it to show that it doesn't matter when it evens out. I say that these two things are the same argument. It is insignificant because, when yhou have a large sample size, like Barrett's career as a Cub, and remove the variables of different pitchers, opponents, etc., CERA tends to even out, showing that catchers do not have a significant impact on their pitchers beyond their visible fielding abilities, making it the stat (and the notion that good catchers make pitchers better) insignificant. Catcher's defense: You say that Soto's ability to block the slider saved the game. Let's assume that if Barrett was here, he would have let one of those sliders through, allowing a run to score. In reality, the chances that this would happen would only be slightly higher with Barrett catching than with Soto, but for the sake of the exercise, we'll pretend it was a foregone conclusion. According to your logic, that means that Barrett would have been responsible for the loss. In reality, though, Barrett was responsible for a PB. In most circumstances, a runner wouldn't have scored. So some of the credit for the loss has to go to Eyre and Weurtz, who walked a collective 3 batters that inning, creating the situation that allowed Barrett's PB to bring in the tieing run. So those three are responsible for the loss. But wait. If the Cubs had a bigger lead, they wouldn't have needed Barrett to block the ball and Weurtz and Eyre not to give up 3 BBs. So some of the blame rests with Marquis, who gave up 6 ER in 4 IP, for creating a situation in which the Cubs had only a 1 run lead, desite having scored 7 times. On the other hand, if some of the balls that were hit in play were fielded for outs, he wouldn't have given up those runs, so some of the credit goes to all of the fielders. And if the team hadn't made as many outs per hit while batting, they would have scored more runs too, so some of the credit for creating the situation goes to every batter who made an out. The credit doesn't get dispersed completely evenly, of course. But as you can see, there is no such thing as one play or player winning or losing the game on their own. The notion that a defensive catcher would have saved the game is misplaced. You need to look at the overall value contributed by each player towards the game to see where the credit goes, not just to one particular play in a sequence. That is the kind of thinking that leads you down the road of clutchiness and defensive positions.

That seems unlikely since the Cubs have control of him through next year. Unless he is done for 2+ years or Kaplan thought he was going to be traded, there's no reason to say he has thrown his last pitch as a Cub. Kap is right. Because Prior is making $3.6 million this year, the least the Cubs can offer him in arbitration next year is $2.8 million. And the best case doesn't have him pitching rehab until next June. If the Cubs wanted to keep him, they wouldn't have let him accrue service time this year and leveraged that. By reinstating him to the major league roster's DL, they gave up that possibility. They only control him through '08 now. Prior will be non-tendered this winter and will sign a two-year "sign and hope" with someone else. I just hope it isn't the Cardinals. Let me count the ways this is wrong. 1) His contract is small compared to overall payroll. They have shown willingness to take fliers on injured pitchers in the past. 2) Do you have any source for your "best case scenario"? Or are you just using your medical expertise to predict how long he'll be out? 3) They had no choice but to let him accrue service time, if they had refused he would have won the grievance case easily, since he was clearly injured before being placed on a minor league roster. 4) Again, any source on Prior being non-tendered more reliable than your cristal ball? If the Cubs wanted to release Prior, why not do when it becmae clear he was out for the year, rather than putting him on the DL? Do you really believe that they would give him a year to sit on the DL and cut him as soon as he is ready to pitch? If they were really planning to get rid of him, why wouldn't they have done it at the beginning of the year?

Those are my thoughts as well. The fact that they finally found something wrong and he had surgery makes me feel a little bit better about it. Who knows how affective he'll be though. I doubt that he'll be at all effective during his first year back from major surgery. On the plus side, that would make him easy to re-sign for his comeback.

The wisdom of the crowd is especially less applicable to baseball, since there is more of a depth of knowledge on this sport than on most others. I admit that I have thought about that kind of idea for teams I follow though.

no, you didn't. it's quite clear you were not speaking to results, you were speaking to Wuertz's alleged willingness to throw sliders when Barrett was the catcher. and if you take a very small yet extremely logical leap from the reporting to what I said, I was spot on. And we all know that everything Muskat writes is true. What great baseball knowledge she has. I don't care how much confidence Weurtz has. What matters is the results, and the results show that Weurtz was just fine pitching to Barrett. In fact, as has been repeated ad nauseam on this board, the stats show little to no difference in the performances of the pitchers pitching to Michael Barrett or the backups, this season or for the other three he played for the Cubs. What it really comes down to is whether the slightly higher chance Barrett would have allowed a passed ball, etc., outweighs the significant chance that he would have contributed more offensively. It doesn't.

If you mean the table, it says that based on the Cubs run differential, thier expected record leads the division.

I was looking at BP's adjusted standings, and Arizona has been the luckiest team in baseball this year. They have something like a -30 run differential, and are several games over .500, good for 7 or 8 wins on pure luck.

Exactly.

yeah, we will. the new catchers can't hit and the pitching staff has performed just about the same as it did w/ barrett. so we do know that it's coincidence. But what if some magical supernatural force was preventing the Cubs from winning while Barrett was here? Maybe the mighty Catcher God Thor favors Koyie Hill over Barrett. You can't prove that isn't what happened, so it is just as likely that that is the cause for the Cubs winning as anything else.