Tracer Bullet

I hope he threatens posters early in a thread that if they derail it, they will get taken behind the woodshed. [just kidding, Laura, please don't hurt me]

Congrats TT. Well deserved.

Yeah, I can't blame him for hanging on, making millions to play baseball, and reach an arbitrary, yet apparently important, milestone. But the people of Houston have got to be happy about this.

The implication being that losing Biggio makes them worse?

I guess I look at it the other way. Theriot, Floyd, Jones don't significantly improve our chances, so why not play Cedeno, Murton, and Pie? Those are young guys with upside who have (to varying degrees) shown some ability to be good/great at different levels. It doesn't make sense to me to allow them to continue to play very well at AAA while average or worse players are getting ABs in the bigs.

I'd rather have Vazquez.

Trade for Lofton AND Griffey. =P~ Lofton Lee Ramirez Griffey Soriano DeRosa/Fontenot Theriot Kendall or Lofton Theriot Lee Ramirez Griffey Soriano DeRosa/Fontenot Kendall to play along, it would more likely be: Soriano Lofton Lee Griffey Ramirez DeRosa Theriot Kendall It should be: Lofton Lee KGJr ARam Soriano DeRosa/Fontenot Cedeno/Theriot Kendall

I just want to say this. Ill throw it out there. Both Murton and Cedeno had ample chance to be an everyday starter on this team. Murton was the everyday starter on this team last year and was above average. Then he inexplicably got yanked around and sent to AAA. His slow start didn't justify the demotion after what he's done so far in his career. Ronny was bad last year in his first full year. It was hard to argue with sending him back to AAA, although was it really reasonable to expect Izturis to be any better? Now that Cedeno has again put up great numbers at AAA, it only makes sense to bring him back up. It's not like we're running ARod out there at short everyday. What's the harm in giving Ronny another chance? Of course, I'd make the same argument for Pie. If your only other options are not good, you might as well play the guys tearing up AAA.

Well, he was acquired by Washington to play LF even though he had said he would refuse to move to the OF. Just b/c he's never played in RF doesn't mean he couldn't have been signed to play there.

I'm in first in all 4 of my leagues. 2 Y! public 12-team leagues, 1 H2H, 1 roto. 2 NSBB leagues (both H2H, 10-team). My public leagues are my best teams. I'm up 9 points (98.5 points) in the roto league. I'm 110-45-5 in the H2H league (.703). I have Dan Haren and HRam in each league. Those were 2 great players to have until HRam's injury this weekend. We'll see how that hurts my teams.

Trade him while he's hot...

I'll take the under.

I'm sure I've seen a worse lineup before. I just can't remember when.

I know what you mean. I look at the Transactions forum and I can't even see any other threads b/c of all the Dunn rumor threads. There has to be...at least...one of them.

If he'd been wearing a Brewers hat, that would have probably been a clue...

Really? b/c I'm pretty sure that there's a word for that, but we can't use it b/c it would be a personal attack.

pass

I would argue that they have been our worst starters. Z has been pretty good lately, and you can't ague with 10 wins; Lilly has been better than expected; and Marshall has been solid (minus a start or two). Hill was great early on, but downright terrible lately. Marquis has been up and down, very inconsistent. uh-oh... Here it comes. He has a point. Have you ever tried to argue with a win, let alone 10!?!? It's terribly frustrating. They're so unpredictable.

Yes, obviously the biggest problem isn't which hand our hitters hit with, it's the fact that too many of them are not good. I mean, against LHP, our lineup features Pagan, a bad-hitting C, a P, and Izturis or Theriot. Maybe DeRosa in RF, otherwise, Floyd in there too. You're not going to score a bunch of runs when 4 or 5 of your hitters aren't good.

I agree. Murton, Cedeno, or Soto (in that order).

They realize Murton is sitting in AAA right now, right? But you're not likely to get great numbers from anyone that doesn't get consistent playing time.

B/c Jim Hendry is a moron.

Well, Torii career numbers aren't good, but he's been pretty good (by CF standards) several times and bad several times. He's been really good this year, so it's a great name to throw out there. He's got a .900 OPS! Well, like I said, he's very good his year. But those .309, .306, .312, etc OBP - those years were bad. Here's a good illustration of my point: '01 - .784 OPS (.306/.479). I don't care what position you play, a .306 OBP is bad. And even a .480 SLG doesn't make up for it's badness. It's better than say a .410 SLG, but it's still doesn't mean it was a good that season. There were 14 qualified CF's in 01. Here are several of them: Andruw Jones-.251/.312/.461 Kenny Lofton-.261/.322/.398 Darin Erstad-.258/.331/.360 Johnny Damon-.256/.324/.363 Doug Glanville-.262/.285/.375 Jerry Hairston Jr.-.233/.305/.344 Brady Anderson-.202/.311/.300 If Hunter was bad, then what were these guys, mostly horrible? That's half of the qualified league (and I took out one guy who had 18 points less of OPS overall but 31 points more of OBP). It seems like you are dismissing OPS as a flawed stat and putting in OBP instead. While OBP is the more important part of OPS (and should be adjusted accordingly, I've seen 1.8 as the multiplier on several different sources from Tango to Hardball times to Dan Agonistes) OPS is still the single best indicator of scoring runs (outside some of the complex formulas), and it's not even close. So yes, if I had two players who had similar OPS's, I'd much rather take the guy with the much higher OBP. If the OPS's are not similar (say within 20 points) I'm going to take the guy with the higher OPS. You can still score a lot of runs with a bad OBP (although it is difficult), a bad OPS makes that pretty impossible even with a good OBP. If you look at this graph as well, this source even says that SLG was a better indicator than OBP over a 5 year period. Of course OPS was much better than either of them: http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/ops-for-the-masses/ Well, yes, those are some pretty bad stats. Are you really trying to argue that Brady Anderson's .311/.300 line is good? I don't understand the point. I'm not dismissing OPS. I'm a big proponent of it actually. I just think if you're trying to determine a player's value in the past or predicting his performance in the future, there are other things to consider as well. OBP is just one of those things. A .310 OBP is bad. And when you couple that with a .465 SLG, the resulting OPS is still bad. A .775 OPS isn't necessarily bad, but if includes a .310 OBP, it is. And I've seen you post the runs/OPS correlation study before. I'm not sure how much it proves. Maybe it will prove to be ground breaking and SLG will be the stat that everyone thinks is most important, but right now I don't think that's the case.

Word is the Tigers are looking to deal Monroe. I'm in no way suggesting this would be a good idea, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to see JH turn a young arm into a terrible OF like Monroe. Though if we could pry Marcus Thames out of Detroit, I'd certainly entertain that idea.

This is incredible. I absolutely love it. One of Murton's several flaws, apparently, is that he's right-handed. So we have to send him down so Floyd can play more in part b/c we're a "right-handed heavy lineup." So now we're looking for another RH hitter. This team drives me insane.