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haltz

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Everything posted by haltz

  1. haltz
    My argument is that it doesn't help you play baseball, which is a common misconception. That was my point in my first post and it's my point now. I'm not defending anyone's intentions. The moral argument isn't one I'm interested in because it's a blind alley and I understand differing viewpoints.
  2. haltz
    Not for non-deficient baseball players. link So then Ankiel just took it after he got hurt to look ripped. Ok. Whatever lets you think he didn't cheat and is a natural I guess. He took it because he thought it would help him. I said as much in my first post. If someone wants to call that cheating then that's fine (I don't even remember if it was banned or not), it's just not performance enhancing. It's not about what I think anyway. It's the prevailing medical opinion. My fandom has nothing to do with the argument.
  3. haltz
    Not for non-deficient baseball players. link
  4. haltz
    Not really, it's a pet peeve because the MSM has been doing it for years. Long after the non-efficacy of HGH wasn't news anymore.
  5. haltz
    That's not what I said at all. It was talked about forever on Cardinals forums. This is a Cubs forum, and I don't care if people here or anywhere want to pick on players for whatever. But lumping in people that used HGH at one point or another with players that used steroids or actual performance enhancers is a pet peeve, like I said. That's all. Carry on, and mentioning Soto was a poor way to make a point. It (hopefully) obviously had nothing to do with him per se.
  6. haltz
    THG (the clear) is a designer anabolic steroid that's incredibly potent I believe. If Soto was on the Cardinals people here would've accused him of that already anyway. Because people pick on the Cards player that actually did get busted? Because he had an unexpected performance spike and he's on a rival team. Or the fact that he's really good and either hasn't always been or sort of came out of nowhere (happens with Pujols all the time). It's not really a big deal, just par for the course on fan forums. I'm not saying it has anything to do with Ankiel, other than that if he were on the Cubs people would've done their homework on HGH and wouldn't think it was a big deal.
  7. haltz
    THG (the clear) is a designer anabolic steroid that's incredibly potent I believe. If Soto was on the Cardinals people here would've accused him of that already anyway.
  8. haltz
    Of HGH? Yeah, that will help a lot. HGH doesn't really help healthy young adult males. If you're injured or want a billion dollar contract you might try anything, but it's basically snake oil. Screaming about PEDs every time Ankiel's name comes up just looks silly.
  9. haltz
    It's more of an overperformance before April 22nd than anything. With no outs you'd expect to score around 2.4 runs, with one out you'd expect to score about 1.6 runs, and about .8 runs with 2 outs. The first couple breakdowns are a little low according to RE if I've got all of this right, but the 2 out performance makes up for it and then some.
  10. haltz
    I know what you meant. It wasn't directed at you. We have plenty of reasons to think that Lohse/Wellemeyer/Looper/Pineiro won't combine for an above 100 ERA+, and the opponents sporting a collective .250 EqA or whatever is low on the list (and it was last on your list IIRC).
  11. haltz
    The strength of schedule thing is hardly worth mentioning. This isn't college football, it's 20% of a MLB season. Let's say the Cardinals have played opponents that will end up with a .450 winning percentage. That's, what, less than two games under .500 over 33 games? You won't find anyone, on Cards sites, or people here that truly do believe in baseball magic that think the Cardinals are a 103-win juggernaut like their record suggests if you take it literally. The question is whether they can play something like .496 ball from here on out, because being around 87 wins would give them a puncher's chance. That may not even be likely, but it's a possibility, even though a team EqA that's second in baseball and a team ERA+ of 117 continuing probably isn't.
  12. haltz
    Of course all so-so pitchers with good "stuff" are mental midgets. I mean being in the 99.999th percentile of the worlds population at throwing a baseball hard and with accuracy instead of the 99.9999th means that you're a headcase. By put it together do you mean that he figured out how he could have an 80% strand rate? Yep, never give up a homer. It was so simple.
  13. haltz
    The last paragraph from Sheehan sucks. He denounces things based on sample size (he's right here) then uses a POS sample size that encompasses a bunch of games where the Cardinals are the opponents. Not that it would really change much. Those aren't powerhouses, but it's still pretty stupid if he wants to put numbers on it. If you want to feel better about this, note that the Cardinals have never once (since 1956 anyway) played 29 games in April, and only a handful of times (recently) more than 25, so this wins-counting record is dumb. They've had plenty of comparable starts before, and you just need to go back to Aug 6th to Sep 6th of last year to find a better stretch of games. But it happened, and it bodes well for them having an actual shot this year. Something that looked like it wouldn't be the case a month ago. They aren't going to automatically, magically play worse than expected originally because they played well for a month though.
  14. haltz
    Lugo still projects as a league average hitter, which is better than either option the Cubs have in-house. He's probably not that much better than Cedeno so you move either one of them. Eat a third of Lugo's contract and trade him. Doesn't matter. The differences between Drew and Soriano's OBP make them basically the same player on offense, and Drew would be an defensive stud as an NL LFer (like Soriano). He also doesn't have an aversion to playing the other positions. Murton could be useful again as a bench player in a platoon situation with either Pie or Drew because you have three guys that can play CF running around, or you use Pie to get the 1.2b pitcher or whatever that some other thread says the Cubs need. And the money. You can pay both of them and save $40 million right off the top. You also aren't sinking $80 million in four years into a likely so-so player after the championship window is probably closed. No brainer.
  15. haltz
    http://minors.baseball-reference.com/players.cgi?pid=4674
  16. haltz
    If I'm the Cubs I prefer it. It's an easy yes either way though.
  17. haltz
    He's 22 years old. If he gets hit by a truck tomorrow and never plays again he'll be financially secure for the rest of his life. He signed this with essentially no ML experience, so there's the possibility that he busts as well. It's happened before. That's the trade off. He could possibly earn double that (I'd say it would be something like $5M, $10M, $15M tops but who knows), or he could take complete financial security right now. I know what I'd do. Going from $3M to $17M is a much bigger deal than going from $17M to $30M (OK, whatever his take-home actually is from these numbers). The utility of the second $13M isn't worth the risk.
  18. haltz
    It's actually option years, not options. http://espn.go.com/mlb/s/transanctionsprimer.html Murton gets a fourth because of this: http://baseballanalysts.com/archives/2006/08/death_taxes_and_1.php He spent 2003 playing NYP ball.
  19. haltz
    A big part of the problem is when people see it as an extra, when most of the time it's just part of how, say, David Eckstein is able to arrive at a .261 career EqA.
  20. haltz
    The whole premise is him recognizing that. "I have eight minutes to mail in a post pointing out a million scrappy white guy cliches". The longer you've been reading the blog the funnier this particular post is probably going to be. Half the humor is how it's completely and intentionally canned.
  21. haltz
    It is better than guessing, which is what all the math in the black box is for, but it's statistically impossible for it to nail player seasons across the board. If god told you in OPS terms exactly how good Matt Murton is, that doesn't mean he'll hit at exactly that level next year; there's expected variance in a given season. Sample size works both ways. Even on a team level, I can run 100 seasons with ZIPS on Diamond Mind, and the Cardinals might average 77 wins, but they'll also win the division outright 7 times. Does that mean that they are likely to win the division or that to do so is their true talent? No. Is it useless information? I don't think so. Usually people will say something like "well, PECOTA didn't predict the Rockies to be in the World Series" or "the games aren't played on paper LOLOL" but all that means is that something that may have been unlikely happened, and as far as the latter goes, statheads will be paying attention too because they understand that it isn't a crystal ball.
  22. haltz
    No joke, but I didn't question whether a .390 OBP is valuable. The question is if Willits is that guy. In a given season, it may or may not be right, but that depends on if you view it as a crystal ball for the next season (which it is not) or if you view it as a true talent estimator based on the information we have at the time (which it's pretty good at).
  23. haltz
    He's fast and he hit 50% GB last season, but I might not put too much stock in LD rates. As a zero power hitter, if he's not a BABIP superstar, he's not going to have a lot of value as a slap-hitting speedster with a 20% strikeout rate. Even if his true talent is a .360 BABIP, it's not predictable that he posts an IsoD of .100 in the big leagues. That's what he was doing as an old-for-his-levels minor leaguer. Even if that walk-rate is real, a dip to a .330 BABIP makes him a sub-.700 OPS player last year. PECOTA sees a .354/.354 line, which is just going to be a better answer than speculation.
  24. haltz
    I really hope you don't do this. Sliding really does cause wear and tear on your body. You guys are talking about hitting the ground at full speed over and over for a marginal benefit (which I disagree that there is one). Are these highschool kids? Getting the frictionless time right or whatever would take a ton of repetition for that relatively infrequent occurrence that it's a bang-bang play and this actually does really work. It would just be confusing. Sometimes when you have a large group of people telling you that you are wrong it's time to take a step back and consider the possibility. Let them play the game the way they will for their next coach if they move on. It's not like this is the ALCS every day at JFK Township East or whatever the hell.
  25. haltz
    But not as many as you think because he'd hit significantly less, and of course some of his runs just change to RBI because of where he is in the batting order. There's a lot of give and take here, and batting order can be optimized, but it just doesn't mean as much as people think. It should always be about getting the best players at each position, and then optimizing it after that though. That's what people mean when they say that leadoff hitter isn't a position. Of course someone has to hit first. If you get the best players for your resources or whatever at C, SS, 2B, 1B, 3B, CF, LF, RF and then make sure that someone that sucks doesn't get a ton of plate appearances at the top, you'll be much better off than teams that get fixated on things that don't matter - and try and find certain traits on the free agent or trade market instead of finding wins through good value (offense+defense) positional upgrades.
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