seanimal

i think rory will always be a threat to win majors for the time being, but i think it's unlikely he wins more than one this year, if any. he's going to play a lighter schedule, but will also be switching equipment. he's also not tiger, and it seems like the expectations of him are in line with what tiger did early in his career. it would be cool to see him win a couple this year, but hopefully not by 8 boring strokes. how bout some nailbiters? as for tiger, he's back. i don't know if he'll win a major this year, but i am confident he'll win as many tournaments, if not one or two more, than he did last year. i'm tired with the fixation on the rule changes, and am not looking forward to having to hear about it ad nauseum

basically

it's downright flattering when compared with minstrel-icious chief smiley red-in-the-face over there in cleveland

new orleans nutria

how many world series will we win this year?

you're kidding, right?

Nobody in the NL will want him. People know what a butcher he is, moving him to the warning track only covers up so much. Even the Cubs know, that's why he only plays 7 innings. He's also a good bet to be hobbled at some point if he keeps playing the field. By all accounts he's a good guy and he can still knock the ball out of the park, so one would think his value would be to an American League team looking for a DH. Soriano has been above average defensively for a LF for like 3 of the last 4 years. Based on what? If you're going to cite UZR, save yourself first. i think maybe you should defend your position before questioning anyone else's

hahaha you fell for it to? I'm starting to think this is performance art. yeah, he's a real andy kaufman

if your brother is bob nightengale please tell him to p*ss off and then throw him in front of the bus

well that's a kick in the dick

i'm going to not do that

A lot of players who never became established major league players were also non-established major league players. You can't assume that Brown is in the former group at this point. well unfortunately, i don't have any information on the primes of people who never had them, so i guess i'll just have settle for the information i have about those that did and you're right that we can't assume that Brown is going to become an established major league player. we can't make that assumption about any prospect, ever. we only know that they are so when they become so. but if we're going to assert that he's not going to join that group, not having done so by the end of his age 24 season isn't the strongest foundation to stand on. the clock is ticking, sure, but there's still time

so, not this: and since you're introducing evidence into this discussion, i think it's important to distinguish between "peak" and "prime". the former is a point, the latter is a range. for instance, if we're stating that prime begins at age 24, than it would make the most sense (to me) to say that prime then ends at the age at which performance falls below the level where it began. peaks may be moving older or they may be stagnant, depending on your means of calculation. but primes have clearly been expanding deeper into player's careers than when bill james originally published abstract. so, you know, the exact opposite of what you're arguing

they're not, and you have no evidence that they are. it's one thing to argue that peaks may have been inflated in the mid-2000's and have regressed slightly since then. but you're not arguing that. you're arguing that the physical peak window for a major league baseball player has mysteriously shrunk since the 80's, when speed, cocaine, and unprotected sex were the cutting edge of performance enhancement. no it's not. every established major league player was once an non-established major league player. it's absolutely relevant to consider information regarding performance level by age when considering the viability of a potential major league player

That's fine, but the Bill James number was derived in the 1980s. It's hard to get an accurate look at prime right now, because right now is always changing. I happen to believe that there are a couple of factors at work right now (the weeding out of PEDs, the increased emphasis on defense) that are shoving it a little earlier than usual. I mean, the real answer is that a baseball player's value comes from an odd mix of disparate skills that all have different age curves, and every player possesses those in different mixes. And really, none of it matters because as I mentioned earlier, age curves for established MLB players suffer from huge survivor's bias issues and don't necessarily apply to prospects and non-established players. But that's a tangent to a tangent. i'm all for challenging the orthodoxy, but if you're going to try to slay the beast, you better bring it. i mean, with something more then a hubristic maelstrom of keystrokes survivor's bias? hilarious. all you're actually doing is polluting the sample population with irrelevancy. the age curve of a [expletive] prospect doesn't matter, it has nothing to do with anything. if i was trying to figure out the ideal age range to be a kickass president of the united states, i wouldn't include secretaries of state in my sample. likewise, if i'm trying to find the average peak performance age range for a major league baseball player, i wouldn't include non-major league baseball players in my sample. the information wouldn't provide me a meaningful answer. furthermore, you're right that your contention that "disparate skills all have different age curves" doesn't matter, but like most other things, you're wrong in your reasoning. it doesn't matter because it's a useless conceptual framework. let's take this multi-faceted thing we call defense. defensive performance is informed by physical ability (speed, strength, agility), learned physical skill (throwing accuracy, ball handling, footwork, etc.) and, for lack of a better term, IQ (situational awareness, mental acuity, adaptable decision-making, essentially a mix of capacity and learned mental abilities). the latter probably has a positive correlation with increasing age, though, it doesn't have to. learned physical skill can withstand immediate declines in physical ability and even conceivably negate the effect of marginal reductions in physicality. physical ability will peak at a certain age and begin to decline at an increasing rate over time. physical ability will vary amongst different individuals because that's life, and thus the age curve will be steeper for some, shallower for others. either way, it's the most impacted by time. so what's my point? other than you're full of [expletive], it's that you're trying to inject this notion of chaos into a relatively knowable and measurable reality. at the end of the day, we can take any variety of performance measures and compare them with age and the end result is our performance age curve. if our sample is meaningful, then our answer is meaningful. lastly, to argue that reduced use of PED's and an emphasis defensive performance (presumably at the expense offensive performance) has shifted the performance peak younger is kylejrm. my apologies to the uninitiated, but "kylejrm" is shorthand for "intellectually dishonest at best". ped's are a technology, and not a monolithic one at that. the reign of designer PED's is now, and they're better than ever. you know what also is a technology? astroturf. there used to be a lot of it around in the 70's and 80's, and it sped physical declines. training regimens are a technology. and they were essentially nonexistent prior to the late 80's/early 90's. now they're regular practice, and assuredly allow players to maximize their physical peak and marginalize declines. technology is constantly improving our ability to push these limits. and regardless of any perceived emphasis on the value of defense and its impact on this discussion, the DH still exists. in fact, we just added another one for this season. so yeah, there's that.

i'm not sure what this means, thrown in front of the bus

i love going to the races but i have yet to find a breakdown of how everything works in regards to competing for the cup and all that, so that bit of not really understanding the bigger picture has prevented me from truly becoming a fan of the sport. i will be going to the Derby next year though, certainly looking forward to that.

He was the one largely responsible for a lot of that thought. He wasn't just doping himself, but set up a whole system for cheating throughout the sport. So ultimately, he damaged the sport in a much more significant way than just doping himself. that's not really true. one entire team (festina) was caught cheating in 1998 before armstrong even came back to cycling, and a number of other finishers were very likely doping (the top four finishers were either accused of doping or caught doping later in the their careers). armstrong certainly didn't help matters, but it's more accurate to say that he continued and probably expanded on something that was already rampant throughout the sport. yeah, there certainly seems to be some consensus on the idea that he took it to another level or at the very least became the cutting edge of performance enhancement. i think it's just probably time we admit that this is something that probably goes on in any sport where the financial incentives and the culture exist.

i think it's difficult to for me to really feel like lance armstrong is ultimately an illegitimate champion when the playing field was actually pretty level. i mean, yeah, he broke the rules, so i guess that's it, but still. perhaps that's too relativistic, but it worked for einstein so whatevs

it's difficult to decide, really. on one hand, he gets to keep his head for three more years under the new regime, so there must be something he brings to the table. on the other hand, i'm pretty sure i saw him wear a hawaiian shirt once, a wrong that can never be righted.

i couldn't shake this exact thought as i was reading through all of the praise here That, plus the repeated dogging of Soriano. He'd at least praise him from time to time, but seemingly did it begrudgingly and couldn't wait to get back to trashing him. like how he spent such considerable effort praising his improvement in defensive performance, and each time it would sound like his statements were ending with three elipses rather than a period, like he was about to triumph the comic insult dog him. but really, he was just validating his own previous criticisms of Soriano's "effort"

well yeah it's all politics, the real talent never even gets a shot at the job

i couldn't shake this exact thought as i was reading through all of the praise here

drove past the cougars stadium tonight and there was a big cubs logo on the board. next summer is going to be [expletive] sweet

Sailors have a tendency to apply terminology related to ships to other aspects of life. A jib is a small triangular sail before the main sail on large ships and cutters. Many countries used different cuts and displayed their colors on the jib. When "cut of the jib" is applied to men, it means "your stylistic choices" . Treebeard/Tree/Treeman/Treymon has a way of making a point with whit, that cuts right to the heart of the matter. Many people here are crazy excited about "financial flexibility" and high draft picks when neither of those things mean anything if the Cubs are not trying to win at the major league level. I hope that helps. Well you sure took the wind of out his sails. Oh buoy, here come the puns knot again